GOD SPEAKS IN DREAMS, GIVING WARNINGS, ENCOURAGEMENT, AND SOMETIMES SIMPLE LOVE.

After my dream life was healed from paralyzing nightmares (see previous post Forty Years of Traumatizing Nightmares...), I realized that God wants to use my dreams for good: not only to help me but also to help others. I learned that the Powers of Darkness want to have me, use me and destroy me, but if I fix my eyes on the Power Who is the Light, JESUS, the Darkness cannot have its way.

Two wonderful dreams I had after I was free involved my father. I had no memory of ever hearing him say he loved me, although I believe he loved all his family. Sadly, his generation mostly did not know that children benefit so much by hearing the affirmation, that an insecure, sensitive child especially needs to hear those words. But our Heavenly does know this.

In the first dream, I was at high school, a time when I felt especially abandoned emotionally by Dad, partly because I was a quietly rebellious teenager, and partly because he just couldn't give what I needed in that way. I dreamt that I opened my school locker and found a fluffy pink feather with a note taped to the inside of the locker door. It said, "I love you." It was from Dad. There was that sweet sense of the presence and love of God in the dream again, similar to that which I experienced in the special dream I had the night following my healing and deliverance. It was again a feeling that I wished I could capture and enjoy continually forever. A second dream had me meeting Dad on a hilltop in a dim evening light where I received his loving embrace. Both dreams became treasures that I hold in my heart, and I think it was a way for my "Heavenly Father" to provide the love I had longed for from my earthly father.

Later, on several occasions, there was a dream for someone else. In one, I received a warning for a friend who was about to make a big mistake, and the scene that I shared with her helped prevent the potential break-up of a wonderful relationship with the man she would later marry. In another case, I dreamt about a woman in the church whom I looked at as somewhat elderly. In the dream, I saw a number of men pursuing her but just to use her sexually. I hardly knew her and thought this was too embarrassing for both of us, and highly unlikely to have anything to do with reality. I couldn't shake the dream and so finally after quite a while, I told her. She said she wished I had told her sooner, because that is exactly what was happening. Then she added that if I ever felt God was showing me something for her again, to please tell. More recently, just a year or so ago, I dreamt about a family that I also did not know well, and on the surface they all looked fine, but in the dream, I saw them together in the church, and they were all terribly upset. The wife/mother was insisting that she was going to walk up front and reveal a very painful conflict that was going on behind closed doors. The husband was trying to stop her, and their kids of various ages were crying and saying, "No, Mom, no!" She got up from her seat and was heading for the front of the church, and I woke up. The dream didn't show what the issue was, but was so powerfully emotional and personal that I thought I just did not qualify to say anything to them. Then for about a month I didn't see them, but when I did, the dream was still so vivid in my mind that I privately approached the woman. She was so strongly impacted by what the dream showed that she immediately called her husband over. As he walked up, she said, "Tell him! Tell him what you just told me." He was speechless.

About an hour later, I sensed a kind of message whispered in my mind to say that God wanted her to know he sees her, in the sense that she was not alone in her trouble. When I spoke to her, she immediately started weeping and I knew that the Holy Spirit was comforting her. These may seem like little things to us, but from experience I know that when God sends a person to reveal that he sees right into your heart, and he cares enough to let you know that he's watching and listening, it's huge!

One more example of my dream world being transformed from traumatic to helpful came a few years ago. I was in a relationship with a man, and I did not have peace about it. Too many things were wrong, but I hoped that maybe it just needed more time. I struggled to decide what the best thing was to do. I had a couple of stressful, telling dreams about "us", and used them to illustrate to my boyfriend how lost I was feeling. And then one night, I had a powerful dream full of symbolic images that confirmed what was wrong and the regrets that would come. I was the passenger in a big old car, an old man was driving, and we were on a narrow road in the dark where a steady stream of traffic was coming from the opposite direction. Suddenly, the lane we were in was narrowed by about a meter of stone wall. We were unable to turn around or back up or open the door and climb up the wall that was on the passenger side. Oncoming traffic would have crashed into the door on the driver's side. We were stuck, completely blocked from going anywhere or escaping the situation. After waking, I saw that I was letting my former self, "the old man", have control of the situation, that it was time to admit that I was unhappy, and that I should stop wasting time for both the other person and me. Furthermore, a vehicle often can represent one's ministry in the "Kingdom." The dream showed that whatever ministry I could have had would be halted, powerless.

Now, certainly, someone may suggest it was simply my subconscious mind speaking in order to push me to do the right thing; however, the blessing is that the dream helped motivate me to make the right decision instead of the truth being blocked by some horrible nightmare, and a hindering state of fear. I believe the Spirit of God was speaking to me in a way that I could understand about how serious the situation was. Life is short. There is no time to waste.

One thing I am sure of when I look at my brother's deliverance and healing from schizophrenia, my sister's miraculous healing from a lifetime of suicidal depression, and my own release from 4 decades of terrorizing nightmares (in addition to many other interventions and rescues from God) is that the "Powers of Darkness" want to have you, whatever your life experience may be -- good or bad. But the "LIGHT has overcome the Darkness" and always will when given the opportunity. And that LIGHT has a name: JESUS.