Are you listening? (Part 2) Dreams.

I wrote previously about listening for God's voice where ever it might be. The most spectacular, and perhaps the most disturbing is in dreams. For as long as I can remember, I have had vivid dreams, some pleasant, some horrific, and some quite puzzling. Many are recurring and many I can easily recall, even many years since I last had one.

God has spoken to many people through dreams over the centuries. He showed Jacob the Stairway to Heaven. Joseph, Daniel, Ezekiel, Peter, John ... The list goes on and on in the Bible, and later of God giving a message to His people in dreams. But the Enemy also speaks in dreams. I am wary of mine, since so many of them have dark overtones. THe nightmares are not the ones that bother me the most. It's the ones where I am behaving in a way that I would not, in real life. It's actually equally disturbing when I behave more badly in a dream than I actually do or when I behave much more nobly than I do. I guess I don't like seeing the Ideal Me, even if such a person were possible this side of heaven.

The thing is, I also know that not every dream is a message from some spirit. The brain and body do a lot of restoration during sleep, and I am willing to bet that most of my dreams are just that: glimpses of the sorting, shuffling and housekeeping my brain is doing on behalf of my memory. I also know that many times I have awakened with a solution to a programming problem that seemed intractable the day before. I hesitate to say that God gave me a direct message with the solution to my problem. It's more likely that He gave me an answer indirectly, through the mechanisms He built into my mind.

I wish I could nail down an exact message I got in a dream, that I can say was definitively from God. I can't. I also can't point to a specific message from the Enemy. The mood of the dream, the afterglow, as it were, is usually slanted one way or the other, but I don't have visions or hear things that tell me "This is what you need to know, or do."

Robert Silverberg, in his series of books based on the planet Majipoor deals with the importance of dreams in shpaing the life of the people. There are mighty powers in the world who guide the people throught sendings and dreams. Some are for good, and some are for ill. It's worth a read. There are 2 series. The first deals with Valentine and introduces us to the planet Majipoor, its races and its majestic geography. There is another series, which I have not read, yet, which expands on the themes introduced in the first series. Throughout, dreams are the key.

What happens with others? How does your dream life work? Can you say for certain you know a message from God came through a dream?