Dreams from God are awesome! The way He reveals things in dreams often involves code. Often, the dream produces intense feelings and thoughts.
However, dreams are often very simple in their messages, and the tendency to complicate them by making the details “walk on all fours” can put God dreams out of reach. Most of them are not life directions, “drop everything and go” instructions, or even directional in any way. The idea that “God spoke to me” shouldn’t be cause for a “Wow, this must be big” assumption when God may be revealing something of your heart, a simple message about your concerns, a revelation of your own struggles with a piece of the puzzle that solves the equation, or a warning that the dream empowers you to gain strategy for a future victory.
The dream may be about something very simple, have a simple conclusion or main message, and be rather easily understood because the main message and final outcome are the actual emphasis of the greater context. Avoid jumping to conclusions. Beware the tendency to fit the dream that stands alone into a greater context when God is not speaking about the greater landscape of your life.
People sometimes make major life decisions based upon this syndrome with regards to dreams, and when I hear their conclusions I recognize, to my horror, that they have quit a job, broken a relationship, left a ministry, spent a lot of money, or made a life decision based upon their mishandling of a very simple dream message. I am alarmed at how often this occurs.
Think Simple Message
Don’t ever make a major life decision based solely upon a dream without receiving some good counsel and a separate revelation of God’s strategy – how to and when to – about the decision even when the dream is timely and you asked God for revelation.
Think simple. Consider that God wishes to speak to you often, as a Father, and uses the time when you are most vulnerable and open to influence very intimate aspects of your mind and heart. Don’t jump to the conclusion that God is so busy that He wouldn’t bother with a dream unless it was something major league. He just likes to talk to His children.
If you can’t get the dream down to one sentence, you may miss the theme of the revelation altogether or turn a simple message into a complicated and soulish whirlpool, that is going to happen a lot if you are already in a whirlpool of drama! God is trying to get you out of the whirlpool, not have you drag His dream into the whirlpool with you. God doesn’t get into drama whirlwinds; He pulls people out of them.
Details in the dream should make sense to you. God is speaking to you, after all. Ask yourself who or what the person represents, for example, and avoid jumping to the conclusion that the person in the dream represents the actual person. Do a “what does this person mean to me or represent to me in a subconscious or message-sending way?
Dream Training Pitfalls
While I love dream training and the availability of people to assist in dream interpretation, the caution I feel is needed is the same caution I have about other types of ministry training: avoid people who are creating the need for themselves instead of teaching you to function and mature on your own. That is, avoid the kind of prophetic, deliverance, dream interpretation training that makes you feel that you need a PhD in the vast universal expertise of international and galactic spiritualization of reality. The training should help you learn how to hear what God is saying to you personally in a valid and maturing way, creating a sense of personal security with the process. It shouldn’t leave you feeling like you need to go back to the same person over and over again as if God has set you up to depend upon that person – this is especially true if there is little relationship involved between you and the expert, or if there’s a money angle.
Of course, there are complex dreams we could talk about! Of course, dream interpretation and prophetic language training is powerful and wonderful. I do it! It is good. I’m speaking to the effort of some people to create the need for themselves, to feel valued because they are needed or even to find power in controlling people’s lives through super spiritual revelatory experiences. That is inconsistent with God’s simple dream process.
Some people will tell you that your dreams are revelations for the Prime Minister of Israel, need to be shared with the pope, and have you feeling that you are speaking into the ears of the Senate Majority leader. In this way, they steal the simple, intimate messages God wishes to whisper into your heart while you are asleep, using their sense of drama to make you feel really important “cause God speaks to you.” If you need that kind of “I’m heroically special” affirmations, I can assure you that God hasn’t set things up to give it to you through your dream life and this kind of dream interpreter!
When the dream interpreter starts telling you what the dream means to them instead of getting some insight into what this dream represents to you, you are probably going to discover at some point that the dream interpreter wishes you to see your dreams as complex because you continue to need them to make sense of them, in other words. If they allow you to see your dreams as simple, they become much less needed.
So, don’t let needy people steal God’s simple messages to your heart!
Take the Simple Seriously
Just because God isn’t showing the secrets that are whispered in the palace or making you as important as Daniel doesn’t mean that you should devalue the simple and intimate whispers of God to your heart! Value the simple and take it seriously!
The greatest breakthroughs come in just one word.
I have had many dreams in which the scene was singular, the word was singular, the message could be written in less than ten words, and some of these messages were so pregnant that I’m still have revelation babies from them after ten years.
