God doesn’t always give us an immediate interpretation of our dreams, and this is another reason it is good to keep a journal. As we reread our dreams, sometimes He drops understanding into us months down the road from when we first had the dream. Why? Perhaps events had to unfold in our lives before the dream could become relevant to us. It could be a matter of maturity in our understanding.
Early in my experience with this type of revelation, I had a dream that explained specifics of what my primary function in the Body of Christ was to be. There were many details, and the Lord explained most of them to me immediately. Some details seemed important, but were held from my understanding for another two years. I read through that dream often, and continued to ask about the unexplained details, and eventually the interpretations were given.
Dreams with recurring themes are particularly important to pay attention to, even if they seem a little silly. Over a two month period, I dreamed four times about turtles in various situations. God did not tell me right away what the turtles symbolized, and dream books and people I knew who were familiar with dream interpretation were not able to help me with this one. I like turtles, so for me, turtles are connected with happy things. I pondered the turtle dreams before the Lord many times, asking into them, and eventually understood that they represented blessings and God-promises in my life. The Lord then showed me what He had been speaking about my promises in each of those dreams.
Dreams can be either panoramic, full-blown stories or snapshot pictures of one simple scene. I sometimes doze off while praying, and when I do, I’m likely to have snapshot dreams from the Lord. Even the snapshots can be full of important details. Here is an example:
I had been praying for favor for my husband and myself – God’s favor and also a particular person’s favor. In a snapshot dream, I saw a man in brown uniform running up to our front porch. I just saw him from the back as he got to the porch. I immediately awoke, startled. I understood from the brown uniform that he was a UPS driver, and then had this conversation with the Lord:
“Lord, what was that?”
“He’s bringing you a package.”
“What is it, Lord?”
“Favor.”
“Is it God’s favor or So-and-so’s favor?”
“It’s both.”
“God, You know that first and foremost I want Your favor!”
“I know that, and that’s why you can have the other one, too.”
Some of the details of this dream continued to nag at my mind over the next couple of days, so I asked more questions, and got more revelation:
The UPS man was running to show haste. God said we would get this favor quickly. The package was left at our door – which meant I needed to actively receive it, to take it in.
I asked, “Lord, why was the package left at the front door? They usually leave it at the back door.”
“It is front-door favor, not back-door favor. It will not be done in secret.”
A week after the dream, we were given great favor by the person I had prayed about, and it definitely happened in a public manner. It was also something we could have rejected, but chose to accept.
If you haven’t yet explored hearing from the Lord through dreams, I encourage you to get started now. Ask Him to speak to you through this avenue, and be serious about recording your dreams and asking into their interpretations. Those of you who have difficulty hearing from God in other ways may even find that dreams are the key that unlocks the door of revelation for you. You will want to expand into other ways of hearing from Him, but dreams are a great place to start.
Previous: Hearing from God Through Dreams (Part 2)
New Dream Interpretation Series (2013)
The Dream Book: A Practical Guide to Christian Dream Interpretation,
by Lee Ann Rubsam
Hearing God Through Your Dreams (Workshop, CD set or mp3 )
by Lee Ann Rubsam
Out of the Fire 
I do like your blog.
I think all these areas need to be opened up. Ursula Kuba has started a series on the prophetic and dreams. A few of her posts have been stunning. See link to Open Door on my blog. She has a lot to do with Isi de Gersigny who also moves a lot in this kind of area, as well as gifts of discernment and powerful healings. The link to their Jubilee church is on Life on Wings under Dan’s favorite churches. Isi likes coming to Bethel, Bill Johnson’s Church, because she feels understood there, because Bill shares such a lot on the lines of dreams and creativity.
My purpose in bothering to leave a comment is simply to say I feel the time has come for us to be more vocal about the things that people have thought weird for centuries. I am absolutely clear that spirit is spirit, mind is mind,brain is brain. But it is no accident I feel that in the last 50 years the actual processes of how are brains function are just beginning to be opened up. What a breakthrough for creatives to actually learn in the 90s that there was such a thing as right-brain creativity. It was received in an overly simplistic fashion, when the truth is we think in a much more parallel way than we ever thought. But at least it opened people’s minds to the fact that , yes, artistic people do think differently. And somehow, some more of these hidden recesses of our selves are brought to the fore when we are svaed and baptised in the Spirit. For me, at 13, I discovered for the first time I was a muzo. Songs and often prophetic songs started to pour out. More on this subject is covered in these February posts.
http://080808onnowto.blogspot.com/2009/03/evangelicals-preach-on-itsometimes.html
http://080808onnowto.blogspot.com/2009/03/christines-shampoo-post.html
The question I would ask you is….do you think that dreams come a lot more to the fore for you and Ursula and Isi, because you are “visually” oriented?
Songs, prophetic impressions, senses, come a lot more to me because i seem a lot more “auditory”. Or do you think it is simply a matter for us all to seek to press in to everything?
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Chris,
I have in the past interpreted dreams. Most the time I find it has to do with pizza than God. The way I walk someone through interpretations though is by asking them what each symbol means to them. Most the time a person will have a meaning attached to the symbol already. Yet, sometimes this does not happen and then I ask them to pray that God will reveal it to them or me. If needed I will suggest a meaning that seems to come from God or a bible passage. At that point I may quote a passage and ask them if that bears any meaning on the symbol in their dream.
I caution though to not just go by dreams for one’s life. Being careful to check the dream against the bible is very important. Sometimes dreams may have a meaning, and yet not be God inspired. Some dreams are just our inner workings telling us things be them important or not. In a sense some dreams are just working out our own “yaya’s”.
iggy
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Hi Iggy,
I totally agree about many dreams being our own outworkings of our emotions, thoughts, what we are going through. I know a couple of people who think every dream they have is from the Lord, and when they tell their dreams … well! 🙂 There are usually distinctives about God-dreams that separate them from the common dreams.
As I said in the series, it’s really important to always ask God about our dreams, if we think they are from Him, and let Him explain them, rather than jumping to our own conclusions about the interpretation. And always, always, the infallible Word comes before every other form of revelation.
Lee Ann
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I’m sorry, Chris. I missed seeing the end question of your comment until today. I am very auditory, not very visually oriented at all in my waking hours. But dreams have become a significant way that I hear God, in spite of not being visual.
I am growing in the visual as I press in for it, though. I think we can all cross the lines between auditory and visual to some extent — if we ask the Lord to do it in us.
I think what caused me to begin hearing more from God through dreams was that my pastor, who is also both an apostle and prophet, felt it was important for me to come into the dream realm of revelation. He prayed for me with the laying on of hands multiple times for dream revelation. His care for widening out my revelatory gifts has impacted me greatly.
I guess everybody’s story is unique.
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Hey… this is Power of teams territory!http://080808onnowto.blogspot.com/2009/06/i-stayed-with-my-friend-john-stevens.html
Not that the above post had anything to do with dreams, but it shows the same principle that Paul showed with Timothy in the NT, whereby the Body is able to confer real life-changing elements one to another.
For this reason alone, and it isn’t the only reason, I do not recommend the habit of some of NON-MEETING.
Great reply
Chris
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Marcia references Pratchett. Any connection?http://080808onnowto.blogspot.com/2009/07/lee-ann-rubsam-on-dreams.html
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I don’t think so. I’ve never read or heard of Pratchett. I’m probably showing my ignorance a bit, but I am not well-read in contemporary lit. His turtles and mine cannot have crossed paths.
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I was recently told that the storm was over. I had a dream that I would encounter a storm and this was revealed to me more than once. I also recieved conformation that it was over and I now know and understand about revelation coming with confirmation as well as redeemption…however do you have the revelation of “it’s over”? Because Im understanding that something being over does not always mean what we think it means. For example, with cycles; something no longer useful either changes or dies before something more beneficial can arrive and live.
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Hi Delon,
I would have no way of knowing whether your storm is over or not. And it is true that sometimes when we hear something and think it is about one thing, God means something else. So we must keep on listening, praying for further revelation, and over time see how words line up with each other and how circumstances line up with what we have heard. Hearing God is a journey.
Another thing that we must be aware of is that between the time we hear something and when we see it appear in our circumstances, there is usually a time lapse. Things that are accomplished in the spirit realm do not always appear immediately in the natural realm.
Keep holding onto the Lord, express your confidence in Him, and He will see you through to the place where you come out of that storm.
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I found this blog enlightening because I dream everyday all kinds of dreams. When I am spiritually strong I don’t dream demonic dreams at all. I believe demonic dreams come when we sin and not deal with them. Sometimes I dream things that I have during day time. In one single night I can dream up to 3 dreams, most of the time 2 dreams.
There are times when it seems as if I have not dreamed at all, but I have dreamed. When I wake up in the morning I may have no memory of a dream. When it happens like this what I usually do is, sit down, relax, close my eyes and go to my memories and I start waking those memories and I start to remember all at least 50% of it. However, I usually don’t pay attention to these kinds of dreams because I believe they are for a reason that they are faint and not remaining in my memories. Sometimes the details are unrecoverable after waking up.
I have so many dreams that I can bring forward as an example. When I pray I make sure I have enough time to do a warfare against darkness. Recently I learned how to fight rulers and powers of the kingdom of darkness. Instead of fighting thousand of demons I would take a short cut fighting the one who sends them [kings, rulers and principalities ]. A scriptural example is David vs Goliath. That’s the strategy I follow when in warfare.
[edited here]
Now I pay attention to dreams because most of the dreams I see are very strong in the message they convey and feel more real than in the natural world. When I wake up I remember over 95% of whatever I see or hear in the dreams. I have lots of warfare dreams. I will try to put all my dreams in a well organized book.
I would like to hear your feedback on this. And if you have such a dream like trances. I would love to hear it from you.
Please excuse my English, which doesn’t sound good here.
God bless you all.
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Hi Steven,
Thank you so much for writing. I have edited your comment for brevity and for your privacy. I’ll do my best to shed some light.
I think the key sentences in your comment are, “When I am spiritually strong I don’t dream demonic dreams at all. I believe demonic dreams come when we sin and not deal with them.” My take on it is that when we dream a lot about being attacked by demons or duking it out with evil spirit-beings, there is usually something not healthy in our lives. It may be a door of entrance that has been left open unintentionally. That door could have been opened by sin or some devastating traumatic event in our lives. For example, people who have dabbled in the occult — even a little bit — tend to have doors ajar to the demonic world, even if they no longer have any dealings with the occult — UNLESS they shut those doors by renouncing past occult activity in the name of Jesus.
I have written about this at greater length in my post, What Well Are You Dipping From?. In the last three paragraphs of that post, I mention how to go about renouncing and thereby shutting the door.
This may not apply to you at all, but I’ve given the link and explanation for anyone who it may apply to. We should all want to be free from any openings that would allow the enemy to torment us.
Since you are a strong dreamer and a spiritual warrior, I would like to recommend some teaching materials that may help you grow:
For biblical guidelines for spiritual warfare: Needless Casualties of War, by John Paul Jackson
Concerning Dreams and Prophetic experiences:
The Seer, by James Goll
Dream Language: The Prophetic Power of Dreams, by James and Michal Ann Goll
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Hello my name is Rhonda Hearns and I also had a dream about a big huge turtle and I was talking to it. It seem to understand me. I will continue to try hard to hear from God and ask for understanding. I am a dreamer I dream almost every night or every other night. I’m asking for God favor as well. Thank you.
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Hi Rhonda,
Thank you for reading at my blog. I hope you find it helpful. And thank you for taking the time to comment!
Bless you, Lee Ann
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Hi Lee Ann,
I just wanted to ask you if you have any opinion on a dream i had. I dreamt that i was at the bottom of a high tower, that had bells ringing at the top. Then i saw 3 enormous tortoises flying above my head. They were really huge. I was running around trapped in the tower trying to avoid the tortoises from falling on me. Then the biggest one, just landed on me. It covered me completely. And i woke up.
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Hi Elsa, I will pray into your dream a bit and see if I come up with something.
Blessings, Lee Ann
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Hi again, Elsa,
I have been pondering your dream, and I have a few questions.
1.) The bells ringing — did they sound joyful, or somber/mournful?
2.) When you were running around trying to avoid the tortoises falling on you, were you feeling fear or panic? Something else? Or no particular feelings?
3.) When the biggest one landed on you, did you sense that it hurt you in any way?
4.) What were your feelings upon first awaking from the dream?
I think these details might help. Thank you,
Lee Ann
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