Dreams with meaning

Voice by voice dropped out of the babble of conversation until Sarah was the only person speaking. Coffee cups were set down on the carpet as all attention focused on her story. She'd had a dream. It wasn't an ordinary dream, but a cascade of fantastic images - wreaths made out of cream cakes are the one that remains strongest in my memory. They were ridiculous concepts that seemed strangely meaningful. Meaningful especially to me; for by some mind process that I could never explain her dream was taking shape in my brain - just as if I had dreamed it myself. I was seeing the same actions and images that Sarah had seen the night before, but in my version each frame had subtitles. No. I couldn't literally see the text, but the impression of meaning was so powerful that I read it out to the silent room, relating each stage of the dream and explaining its relevance.

"Yes, Derrick, that's just like my dream", said Sarah naively.

"Shush, Sarah, he's giving the interpretation" cautioned a lady who was visiting from another part of the country and was more accustomed to such oddities.

I don't have miracle powers that I can call up on demand, but that experience was real and it became typical in that small Kentish fellowship for a short, but exciting period. Though our Bible Study meetings did not always end so dramatically, we experienced many dreams during the ensuing months and heard reports of others in the years that followed. Those were the early days of the Charismatic Movement back in the 1970's and, while others prophesied or spoke in tongues, our young men and women saw visions or woke up remembering peculiar dreams. People would write their dreams down and bring them to me for interpretation. Sometimes I would dream myself, and would either spot the meaning myself or would send them to a friend in Canterbury who seemed to have a similar gift. On one occasion I had a dream that enabled me to interpret someone else's nigh vision.

I was at work one morning, looking through some files, when the memory of the previous night's dream resurfaced in my consciousness. I had dreamed of a walk along a towpath, where I peered into the canal and noticed a large fish swimming slowly along the edge. I bent low, reached out a hand, caught the fish by the tail and lifted him out of the water. This brief scene ended with me striding along the path swinging the fish beside me. "That's too short to have any special meaning." I told myself. The came the second thought - "Take it by the tail!" I reach into my inside pocket and pulled out the envelope containing the account my friend had given me of their strange and complex dream. I turned to the back page and began reading the closing sentence. It was the key to the whole dream, which then unlocked easily, revealing truths that my friend found intriguing and valuable.

You would be justified in asking what point there was to all this. Why should an untrained amateur succeed in a task that challenges qualified analysts and professional psychiatrists? Are we to believe that God plays silly games with dream-enclosed messages? In answer to such challenges I can only affirm that it happened. For people with knowledge of the Bible it ought not to be surprising that it happens, since many examples of significant dreams litter both Old and New Testaments. What is more, the prophecy that Peter recalled before the multinational crowd on the first Whitsun made strong reference to dreams as one of the means by which God would choose to speak to his people in "the last days". Our God is not a dumb idol and I make no conditions about which ways he is allowed to speak when he chooses to communicate with me.

Dreams have a special quality that has fascinated prophets, psychics and psychologists over the ages, whether in a religious or secular context. That quality lies in their uncensored nature. By "uncensored" I do not mean "erotic" and would instantly discount that kind of dream from being in any way seen as a message from God. Our bodies affect our minds at least as much as our minds affect our bodies, so physical desires and hungers are as likely as anything to crop up in our dreams from time to time. No, the point is that our logical, analytical, conscious minds do not interfere with the imagery or the subject matter that features in our dreams. They are messages that well up from our subconscious minds and often reveal matters that we have not been willing to consider or admit when we were trying to be rational.

//Continued