Most of my dreams are an extension of my daily thoughts, twisted by my subconscious or the martini I had too close to bedtime into a bizarre concoction of disjointed images. When I awaken my first thought is, “That was weird.”
On occasion I will have the coherent dream, which I quickly recognize as an expression of suppressed anxiety about my work. The recurring pop quiz dream for which I am not prepared is an example.
Then, rarely, and usually when I don’t expect it, I have a dream with images that speak not of thoughts explored or fears suppressed but from outside me. The images are not cognitive Frankensteins but apt metaphors, and the narrative is rich in apparent meaning. Almost always I know what the dream means, and I know I have heard from the Lord.
This got me thinking: Why does the God choose to speak to believers through our dreams?
“It will come about after this That I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; And your sons and daughters will prophesy, Your old men will dream dreams, Your young men will see visions.”
Joel 2:28 (NASB)
The Lord speaks to us in dreams what we cannot hear while awake. Look, we all have our own biases and beliefs about the ways things are. Those biases and beliefs make us deaf to certain ideas and instruction from the Lord. Dreams by-pass our biases and wrong beliefs by coming to us when the gatekeeper is not on duty.
The prophet Joel said “your old men will dream dreams.” The older we get the more ensconced our biases and beliefs become. A lifetime of filtering out what doesn’t fit our worldview makes us less open to all the possibilities of reality. The gatekeeper gets stronger as we get older.
Conversely, young people are generally more open-minded to what might be. This is why protests and new social movements are usually led by college students. So, as Joel says, God speaks to them in visions. This doesn’t mean God never speaks to a young person through a dream or an older person through a vision. Joel is speaking generally of what would happen when the Lord poured out His Spirit on believers beginning with Pentecost.
See Acts 2:17:
‘And it shall be in the last days,’ God says,
‘That I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind;
And your sons and your daughters will prophesy,
And your young men will see visions,
And your old men will have dreams;
So, tonight when you go to sleep and give the gatekeeper the night off, pay attention, because God Speaks to Us through Dreams. You never know what the Lord might say to you. GS
