At night, something remarkable occurs in our human biology: our conscious self moves to an unconscious state. The conscious self is the you that performs cognitive dissonance, that pesky human condition in which we don’t like being confronted with our dualism, believing one thing but doing another thing. The conscious self also performs according to preestablished patterns that may or may not be in your soul and Spirit’s best interest. The conscious self filters out anything that doesn’t match our goals, desires, needs, and wants.
However, at night all of that shuts off. For the entire span of humanity, God used this shut-off switch to tell us things that weren’t aligned with His calling and desire over our life. Imagine how happy the devil was when the Protestant Evangelical church of the West decided that God no longer speaks in dreams. Without listening to our dreams, we can run our own show, build our own ministry, and do what our ego thinks is best. And guess what, that means the Holy Spirit is no longer Lord of our lives.
Job 33 lets us know precisely that the dreaming life is an important life. “God speaks once, twice, though man does not perceive it; in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men.” When we sleep, we enter into the chamber of God’s speech to our souls. It may be the first moment of the day that we have stopped talking over what the Spirit is trying to say.
Catching you Up
We are in a ten-week article arc about the dreams that our psyche needs to mature spiritually. For two weeks, I’ve been confronting the Western model that says dreams are not important. The first week, we looked at the Biblical evidence that dreams are important. Then, last week, we looked at the historical uses of dreams through the early and medieval church. I wanted these articles to awaken you to the places where the Enlightenment culture took over Biblical and historical history. It’s time to reclaim the night.
Now, for the next 8 weeks, we look at the various ways that the dream works to spiritually mature you. If you are part of our paid tier, we do much more in-depth articles about the information, and last week we talked about the Church’s robust history of discerning dreams and the lost art of learning to discern what is God, what is us, and what is the enemy.
Cognitive Dissonance and it’s Perogative
Elihu, in speaking with Job, communicates how the dream is designed to bypass your conscious filters, in that your conscious mind cannot apprehend what God is trying to say to you. “For God speaks in one way, and in two, though man does not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, while they slumber on their beds, then he opens the ears of men and terrifies them with warnings.” Job 33:14-16.
What I want to illuminate in this article is that our “understanding” filters can be blocked when we receive a dream. This is, for some, why many in our Christian society just ignore dreams altogether, but that is not what Scripture tells us to do: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” Proverbs 25:2 ESV. God wants us to search out the meaning of our dream, to become “kings.” In the context of Proverbs, kings were the highest authorities in the land for leadership, governance, and justice. In order for us to be effective (“kings”) in our spheres that God has called us to, we too must search out the meaning of our dreams.
So when our perceiving of the dream is blocked, this is an invitation to become a “king:” someone who carries government, leadership or justice in their heart.
· Do you have a yearning to see justice in the earth but feel blocked by our current government? Perhaps your dreams need to be “perceived.”
· Do you have a yearning to see something solved in your family, or work, or ministry? Perhaps your dreams need to be perceived.
· Do you have a yearning to see the Church come into right order? Perhaps your dreams need to be perceived.
These are practical ways that God is still guiding you, helping you be of service to the world around you.
When we sleep, God opens our ears. The filter goes offline and the ears, which were closed during the waking hours, are finally opened.
What, then, is the filter? It is the managed, or performing, or even defending self. The self that has learned how to survive, how to get ahead, and how to meet its own goals. Some of those characteristics are formed in trauma, some in sin, and some in church culture. You’ve learned what is safe to feel, what is safe to express, what is a safe way to be in the world. And all of those things may be in counter to what God wants to do through you so you are operating in your calling, or what Carl Jung called the individuated self.
I hope it is a relief for you to know that God will send dreams to you so you can find your way out of the self that culture formed, and into the Self that God needs you to be in the world. God is trying to speak to you, to form you, to help you reach the inner cry of your heart: the question is whether we want to listen.
The Dream and How it Changed My Ministry
There was a season of my life where I was building ministry hot and fast. The ideas were flowing, people were responding, and it seemed like everything was on track to go very well. The numbers were growing. The reach was expanding. Everything the visible metrics of ministry success pointed toward was pointing upward.
Then I had The Dream.
I call it The Dream, in capital letters, because it was a dream that immediately made me stop and have to rethink everything. And truthfully, I did not want to rethink everything. I wanted to keep building hot and fast. I wanted the ministry to thrive in the eyes of men. The waking version of me had a plan, and the plan was working, and the filter was doing its job beautifully, keeping out any information that might complicate the plan.
But The Dream pointed at something I did not want to look at. It named the fact that I was building ministry but not producing fruit. And maybe that’s enough for some, but I always wanted to build a ministry of fruit. And The Dream drew a line I had not drawn for myself, and it would not let me blur it: impact is not transformation. Transformation is not fruit. And what I was producing, at the pace I was producing it and for the reasons I was producing it, was impact. Not fruit.
The Dream asked me to stop. All of it. All at once. Right in the middle of the biggest numerical boom my ministry had seen.
I did not want to obey. I went to counselors trying to find a way to wiggle out of what I had heard. I postponed with God. I argued. I reinterpreted. I did everything the defended self does when it has received information it did not request and does not want. Until finally The Dream kept replaying, not just in my sleep, but in my waking hours, in my prayer, in the quiet moments the busy ministry life could not quite fill, and I had to admit what it was actually saying.
I was not building what God wanted me to build. And to be really truthful with you: I was building a ministry at the altar of my ego. Ouch. That is painful to write. It was more painful to see. But praise God that He sent a dream. Because the dream shook open what my ego did not want to see, could not see or had been successfully preventing itself from seeing through all the motion and momentum and apparent success.
That is the compensatory dream at work. The waking life had excluded the information but God sent a dream to supply it.
What God Gives Us in the Gift of Dreams
Psalm 127:2 is translated in two different ways, and both translations are theologically rich. The standard rendering: “He grants sleep to those he loves.” The other rendering, which I believe is closer to the Hebrew: “He gives to his beloved in sleep.” Not just the gift of rest, but that there are gifts in our sleep!
· God is giving you, in your sleep, answers to prayers.
· God is giving you, in your sleep, the ways that you’ve become something He never intended you to be.
· God is giving you, in your sleep, solutions to problems.
· God is giving you, in your sleep, the ways that you have gotten around obeying him.
The contemplative tradition has always known this. The Desert Fathers paid attention to what happened in the night. They brought their dreams to their spiritual elders and practiced a watchfulness that carried through from the waking hours into the sleeping ones, with its own patterns of discernment. And what we receive in the night is often what the daylight hours, with all its noise and management and goals, does not allow.
Jung called this the compensatory function of the dream. The dream does not just replay the day or process sensory input, although it can. Some dreams respond: specifically, and precisely, and often uncomfortably to what the waking attitude has excluded. If the conscious life is too one-sided or too defended or too fixed in a particular direction, the dream will bring a new way of being in the world. If the ego is inflated, the dream will poke holes. If the heart is avoiding something it needs to face, the dream will find a way to awaken it. The dream is responsive, and what it responds to is the exact thing in your life that you have been filtering.
We see these types of dreams in Genesis 20, Daniel 4, and Matthew 27, but I want to pay particular attention to Genesis 37, in which Joseph gets the famous dream that his brothers bow down to him. Often, people will use that dream to show the prophetic nature of Joseph’s calling: what would eventually happen for him. But, if that dream is analyzed through a Jungian compensatory dream analysis, it also shows what Joseph would have to go through to get there. The dream he had held both a prophetic promise and the journey that would deal with his egoic attitude on the way to the throne.
Other Ways the Compensatory Dream Works
Compensatory dreams don’t just deal with your ego in a prideful way. They may also deal with you not perceiving yourself correctly due to trying to hide, being modest, or afraid of attention, or “shining your light.” Compensatory dreams may help you get a picture of yourself that is closer to how God sees you, and not how man sees you. “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’” I Samuel 16:7.
The practice we introduced in week one: the notebook beside the bed, the writing before the phone, the posture of ‘I am paying attention now,’ is the holy and maturating response of making yourself available to a channel of communication that God has been using since the beginning of Scripture and that the defended self has been, perhaps for years, successfully closing.
Our sleeping self is not the lesser self. It is, in some ways, the more honest one: the one that cannot perform or diagnose with its own intelligence. The one that receives as a gift what the performing self may turnaway.
This week inside The Inner Room, I walk through recognizing compensatory dream patterns in your own dream life, and we add a second practice to the journal work we began last week: a pre-sleep examen drawn from the Ignatian tradition that prepares the soul to receive a dream, rather than forgetting it so we can walk out of patterns that aren’t restful, healthy, or uniquely ours..
Pause * Pray * Heal
Pause: Ask yourself honestly: is it possible that God has been trying to help you out of compensatory patterns for years via your dreams? What would your spiritual maturation look like if you considered your dream life?
Pray: A prayer of John of the Cross, who knew the dark night not as God’s absence but as His most intimate speech:
O Lord, you who work in the night what the day cannot hold, open what I have kept closed. Reach what I have kept defended. Say in the darkness what I have been too busy and too defended to hear in the light.
Heal: In your journal tonight write one sentence: the thing I have been most successfully NOT thinking about this season is ___________. Don’t justify it, just name it before God and then sleep. See what the night brings.