The same sign may reappear all the time, and it could even be in your waking hours, maybe even 11:11 repeating on your clock or seeing the same name on a street sign that you’ve seen two other places that week. Often, we experience recurring signs in our waking or dreaming hours, and they are not just there to freak you out, nor are they “angel numbers.” They are patterns of communication that God is trying to establish with you. And He is patiently waiting to see if you will say yes to his conversation.
Where We Are in the Journey
We are in week six of the Dreams article arc, and in the first two weeks, we took deliberate, careful steps through the Bible and Church history to show that dreams have always been part of orthodox Christian life. It was only during the era of Rationalism and the Enlightenment that we let the world's culture talk us out of the pattern of communication that God established in the Bible and in the first 1800 years of church history.
Over the last 4 weeks, we have carefully begun constructing pathways of understanding in the realm of dreams, signs, and symbols. We looked at how the church has interpreted them, discerned them, and developed maturity in the way Jesus speaks to our souls.
This week, we will look at repeating patterns:
· Not just in your dream life, but also in your waking life
· We will look at how Jesus is patient in His love and attempts to communicate with us
· Then, we will see how receiving a repeating sign or pattern is actually the soul telling us that it needs our help
If you are interested in receiving each article we create in this article arc (we are now on week 6 of 10, so you can go back to read them all) subscribe for free at the button below.
The Dream That Leaves Real Anxiety
I am in school. Sitting at a desk, taking an exam I never studied for. Worse, this is an exam I know nothing about. I struggle through the answers: equations that look like a different language than I even understand. I slump up to the front of class and turn it in, knowing I probably got less than an F. I wake up in a sweat, with real anxiety pumping through my body. It takes me real effort to get back to sleep, even a kind of laugh to myself that I’m dreaming about being in school again.
Listen, you probably know exactly what I mean when you hear this dream. You may not relate to the school part, but maybe you relate to dreams that give you real-life anxiety. What’s with that? Today, we tackle these repeating patterns and what they mean.
It is difficult when dreams give us a real somatic (bodily) response: we wake up in anxiety and remember we haven’t been in school for 25 years, or we sit straight up in bed because we think we are late to an appointment we don’t even have. These kinds of dreams are perhaps frustrating and easy to dismiss.
But we really shouldn’t because these dreams are an alarm clock from our soul.
Often these dreams are our soul telling us that we are neglecting our soul life in some way.
· A repeating school dream with an exam could mean that you are compensating for your intellect, but the exam of the soul (your feelings, your calling from God, your unique purposes and strengths) is being neglected
· A repeating number that you see in your waking life could refer to a Bible verse that you need to seek out and apply
· A Dream of being late to an appointment you don’t even have could mean that your soul is asking you to consider aspects of your soul that need to be considered, rather than forgotten
The reason these dreams produce a real bodily response (anxiety, frustration, fear) is that your soul is asking you to take those bodily feelings seriously, and not to neglect what your soul needs, just like you wouldn’t neglect what your body needs.
The Research: School Dreams Are the Most Common Dream
The exam dream is one of the most frequent recurring dreams in human experience. Research across cultures consistently finds that a remarkably high percentage of adults report dreaming about being back in school, unprepared for an exam, and unable to pass or remember the lines for a school performance. Often, the research shows this is happening for people who haven’t been in school for decades. And it happens for those who love school and those who hate school. So the actual dream isn’t speaking to an old-school experience; it’s speaking about what your soul needs to develop in order to “pass the test” and move on to the next stage of your psyche’s maturity.
Can you imagine how your soul feels that it is not being considered in your maturation? So it sends a dream that signals it is time to mature into the next phase of your life. Jesus is so patient with us as we develop, but sometimes we could all use a wake-up call!
These dreams recur so often across so many people’s lives that we need to understand they are pivotal moments of transformation for us.
Why the Nervous Breakdown Could Be Avoided
Carl Jung observed that the recurring dream is the psyche’s way of creating bodily sensations so that it is no longer ignored. He routinely evaluated people who:
· Were on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and their dreams were telling them why
· Were about to have an affair, or make a drastic life decision, because they did not know how to understand the dream life and the soul
· Had a personality that would doggedly persist in a direction that their dreams were trying to wake them up from
Jung often did not start by asking people, “What do you want to work on today?” But he would instead say, “Tell me your most recent dream.” The dream was his way of understanding the psyche and its needs, even before most people could understand their own psyche at all. The dream isn’t recurring to be stubborn or to start your day in panic. The dream is recurring because your real life could be severely affected if your soul is ignored.
We have no problem going to the hospital for a severe knife wound from a cooking accident. The hospital is the place where we fix our bodies. But the dream is the only way the soul knows how to fix itself: the hospital of your soul is the dream you keep having.
In Daniel 2, we see this play out in real time. We all know the story of King Nebuchadnezzar and how he was turned into a beast for 7 years. The dream he had troubled him because he was experiencing psychic inflation, a feeling of untouchable hubris and the dream was warning him that he needed to repent or his actual body would reflect the psychic imbalance. With somebody with extreme feelings of grandiosity, it may be easy to say, “Oh yes, his soul was deeply troubled.” But we often don’t pay attention to the dreams that warn us of our own burnout, compensation through intelligence or our physical bodies, or dreams that remind us that our soul needs rest, creativity, childlike play, or invigoration.
Praise God that He created us with the capacity to repent after our dreams tell us what our souls actually need. That repentance isn’t a turning from sin; it is repentance for not acknowledging that our souls need to love the Lord our God, too, not just our intelligence! Jesus is the patient shepherd leading us to streams of Living Water, so our souls can be refreshed.
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The Recurring Dream: Next Steps
Psalm 77:6 in the Message Bible says this, “I go over the days one by one, I ponder the years gone by. I strum my lute all through the night, wondering how to get my life together.” The night is really the place where we ask the tough questions, wonder about our lives, and pray our most desperate prayers. Maybe, all along, Jesus was trying to shepherd your soul into His rest by sending you a dream.
Pause: This is a time to turn inward and ask if your somatic dreams are there to help you find your way to the rest that God promises in Psalms 23. Sit with the feeling of your dream for a second and ask the Lord to guide your hand toward understanding what your soul may need.
Pray: From St. Columba (a Celtic saint, 521–597).
Be thou a bright flame before me,
Be thou a guiding star above me,
Be thou a smooth path below me,
Be thou a kindly shepherd behind me,
Today, tonight, and forever.
Heal: Write down the emotion you feel as you wake this week. Ask God to guide you in understanding His shepherding toward your soul.
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