I dreamed a dream

The Bible has quite a bit to say about dreams, including God sometimes ‘speaking’ to people through their dreams.

People such as Jacob (Genesis 28), Solomon (1 Kings 3), Daniel (Daniel 7) and Jesus’ father Joseph (Matthew 1) received divine messages in dreams, and in Numbers 12:6 God told Aaron and Miriam that he spoke to prophets in dreams.

Does God still use dreams to get messages through to us? Some theologians would say no, but then how can we restrict God? If he wants to get a message to us in a dream, he will!

The issue has more to do with discernment: was that God trying to tell me something, or was it just the questionable mozzarella I had on my pizza for dinner?

I had a dream once that I thought may have been from God. I was gently floating down a river in a canoe and came to a long tunnel where I could just see the other end. As I entered the tunnel, I felt the canoe get faster, and I realised the water flow was really picking up speed.

I started feeling a little giddy, saw strange colours, and thought I might pass out, but then I heard laughter.

As I emerged from the tunnel, I looked at the banks of the river, and kookaburras were laughing at me from the trees. Then I saw at ground level there were kangaroos, wombats, and possums, and they also seemed to be laughing at me. And it got so loud that I laid back in the canoe for a moment, closed my eyes and floated.

And that’s when I had my dream. As I drifted off to sleep in the rocking canoe, God said to me, “You’re just floating. Sit up and steer. Do you want to drown?”

I took it as symbolic. He wasn’t talking about the canoe; he was instructing me to take more control of my life before I felt overcome with matters and ‘drowned’ in responsibilities. I had to stop saying ‘yes’ to everything and sit up and pay more attention to where my life was heading.

So, again, was that God speaking to me or just some bad cheese? Or should I not have watched Titanic before going to bed?

The hard bit with dreams, or rather, with God speaking to us through dreams, is knowing which ones are from God and which ones aren’t.

For example, in the dream where I’m constantly being pursued by an unseen presence that I can sense but can’t see, clearly God is telling me something about guilt or that he is seeking me or that I am trying to avoid God.

But what about the dream where the chair talks to me and then becomes a rabbit with a watermelon for a head, and he’s singing ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’ in the voice of a Japanese Elvis Presley impersonator? What is God saying to me there?

Yes, I know, he’s saying I need counselling.

– Major Mal Davies and his wife Major Tracey are the Corps Officers at Adelaide City Salvos