View source for Help in Re-Scripting Dreams

When pondering the symbolism of dreams, few of us stop to consider that what terrifies us in a dream might represent something good. It is tragically common for people to live miserable, impoverished or shallow lives because they fear change or fear failure or even fear success. We can fear witnessing, fear a doctrine that is actually liberating, or reject a call of God on our lives because of fear of public speaking. Some people fear dentists or medical examinations when caving into that fear could greatly increase their suffering. Fear of exams can give students bad grades. Lovers can miss lifelong happiness because of fear of commitment or fear of rejection. A fear of job interviews can damn someone to wasting his life in a low-paid, unfulfilling job. I could go on but hopefully this is enough to prove that in some area of our lives most of us are probably running in fear from something that if embraced would be a great blessing.

So if something terrorizes us in a dream, let’s not be too hasty to send it fleeing. Certainly, turn on it and take control. Command it to freeze. But lest you be turning away a blessing, ask God to reveal its identity before deciding whether to chase it off or embrace it.

If it is an enemy, we must affirm our full authority. Think twice, however, before getting brutal. Most of us are far too conditioned by worldly rage. Consider whether it would be better for your long-term serenity, self-control and Christlikeness to choose a non-violent means of banishing your foe.
 
===Controlling Your Dream While Still Asleep===
A friend of mine has mastered what I used to think was impossible: the ability to abort unwanted sexual dreams by rebuking spiritual attack while still asleep. He reached this point only through much time and effort and by refusing to give up despite many failures. For him, the key elements were prayer, purity and practicing the presence of God. He persisted in daily specific prayer against unwanted dreams. He kept resisting lust during his waking hours. He did his utmost to maintain uninterrupted fellowship with God throughout the day and kept impressing upon his mind the intensity of God’s love for him and the power that the Christ resident within him has over any evil he might encounter. For relevant Scriptures, see Our Power Over Demons.

Prayer was obviously significant, but my friend’s disciplined efforts while awake were also critical, because our habitual thought life ends up influencing both our dreams and our immediate, unthinking reaction to crises. For a little more detail about his experience, see How I Learnt to Resist Sin and Evil in My Dreams.

Lucid dreaming is simply dreaming while you are aware that it is merely a dream. In occult practice this can be exploited to take the dream into ungodly realms but as Christians we can use it to rebuke evil and “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5) even while we sleep.

Speaking, walking, toilet training, and so very many other abilities that as adults we take for granted, originally took us enormous effort to master. The same is true for spiritual things such as faith, self-control and practicing God’s presence. As my friend discovered, gaining control of one’s dreams while asleep is no exception. We want everything to be as easy as a lazy prayer but reality is such that almost everything in the Christian life takes much effort and persistence despite many failures before we get good at it. This is our opportunity to express our love for God. Yes, occasionally God gives us an instant, miraculous breakthrough, but that will always be the exception. If it wasn’t easy for Jesus in Gethsemane sweating over doing God’s will, it won’t be easy for us who must take up our cross and follow him.

We have noted that recording dreams as soon as possible after waking (even in the middle of the night) is of immense value to anyone taking seriously the Bible fact that God can sometimes speak to us through dreams that could easily be dismissed as being natural. Fortuitously, keeping a dream journal is also considered by many advocates of lucid dreaming to be a significant first step towards exerting conscious control over one’s dreams.

They also suggest that as one is drifting off to sleep to focus on a determined resolve to recognize when one is dreaming.

“Pinch me to see if I’m awake,” is a common saying. Occasionally, pinching oneself when asleep can feel normal, but there are forms of reality testing that can help people recognize that they are actually in a dream. For one’s own safety, it is not recommended that one use something potentially dangerous to test reality, such as stepping in font of a speeding car! For reality testing to become habitual during sleep, it is believed best to get into the habit of doing it regularly when awake. A common method is to regularly check your watch to see if time is progressing normally. Some people read a line or so from a book, look away and then re-examine the book to see if the text has changed. What works best will differ from person to person, and praying about it is sure to help.

If you discover you can defy gravity, move through solid objects, or breathe through your nose when you’ve pinched it closed with your fingers, it’s pretty safe to assume you are dreaming. Likewise, if a movie star starts flirting to you.

A possibility to be alert to is thinking that you have awakened when you have merely dreamt that you have woken up. This could lead, for example, to someone supposing they are in seeing a demon in real life when they are merely dreaming they are seeing one. On the other hand, one might have awoken and unable to move and think this is the influence of a demon when it is just a natural phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. When dreaming, a part of the brain prevents the body from responding to signals from the brain. This is necessary to prevent actual bodily moments corresponding to what you are doing in your dream. Sometimes this mechanism can be triggered when a person is awake – especially if one has just woken – thus causing bodily paralysis as if the person were dreaming. Since sleep paralysis most affects the major muscles, it is suggested helpful in breaking the paralysis to start by moving minor muscles such as swallowing or wriggling one’s toes.
 
===Treasuring “Unwanted” Dreams===
In the hands of the indescribably good Lord who always leads us in triumph, could bad dreams turn out to be a precious blessing for which we will be forever grateful?

Disgusting dreams are no exception to the astounding fact that God is so good and powerful that he works all things – even the most vicious satanic plots against him and us – together for the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28). A careful reading of Scripture reveals that trials achieve so much in us and for us that we should not merely rejoice in spite of trials but rejoice because of trials (Scriptures). The fearsomely powerful Lord is so able to outwit evil that, when handled God’s way, even such ugly spiritual attacks as severe temptation end up proving surprisingly beneficial to us (for more, see The Unique Value of Trials and Temptation).

A friend of mine who, while asleep, has suffered a vast number of demonic attacks– and has also had victories over them – says that he always claims protection over himself through the blood of Christ before he sleeps. He adds, however, that he thinks God sometimes allows us to experience demonic attacks so that we can know how important our service to him is to the spirit world.

Christians have always had the Bible and always had a supernatural God who reveals himself and his secrets, and yet the great tragedy is that most Christians follow the non-Christian world so closely that we tend to fall into whatever blindness and prejudices afflict the rest of society. Valuable knowledge has at times been attained and then lost again to most of humanity. For example, the ancient Greeks knew that the world was round and even calculated earth’s circumference but this knowledge was largely lost for centuries. Something similar applies to understanding dreams. Not only the Bible’s faith heroes, but even their pagan contemporaries, such as idol-worshipping foreign kings, recognized dreams as a most valuable source of wisdom. Many centuries later the value of dreams became underrated when secular society foolishly began to limit itself almost exclusively to what could be examined by the physical sciences. Gradually, the number of non-Christians discovering the value of dreams is again increasing, but it at first seems unbelievable that praying, Bible-reading Christians should have ever missed it.

Further thought reveals the obvious reason. Consider the massive chunk of our lives devoted to secular education and secular entertainment, and the much smaller portion devoted to time with God and his Word. Even the Christian teaching we receive (including my teaching) is from people who have likewise been profoundly influenced by worldly views.

An upsetting dream is like an open wound that makes us tender and vulnerable. How we treat it will inflame it or soothe it; infect it or speed its healing. To focus too much on merely eliminating unpleasant dreams, however, is to be like someone who would rather pop pain pills than do anything to check if his appendix is about to burst.

An alarming dream is literally an alarm. Alarms are designed to be annoyingly unpleasant simply to get our attention and impress upon us that things are not as okay as we suppose and that if we do not attend to something or seek help, things will get seriously worse.

Alarms are never pleasant or convenient but if you heed them they could spare you enormous problems, perhaps even save your life. So when you have a disturbing dream, courageously seek God, not just so that you get a pleasant sleep but so that the cause can be fully dealt with and your entire life can be taken to a new level.

We began this series of webpages by noting that almost all dreams recorded in Scripture had an unpleasant side to them. So rather than pray that we never have unpleasant dreams, it would seem wiser to pray that Christ rule in our sleep as well as when we are awake, and that he cause us to receive maximum revelation and benefit from our dreams. By regularly praying this way we are refusing to leave to chance or evil spirits what enters into our dreams. We are using spiritual weapons to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).
 
If you have any experience or insight of possible relevance to people suffering unpleasant dreams, I’d love to hear from you. Nothing will be published without careful consultation with you to ensure you are happy with the degree of anonymity provided. My e-mail address is dream@net-burst.net
 

© Copyright 2008, Grantley Morris. May be freely copied in whole or in part provided: it is not altered; this entire paragraph is included; readers are not charged and it is not used in a webpage. Many more compassionate, inspiring, sometimes hilarious writings available free online at www.net-burst.net  Freely you have received, freely give. For use outside these limits, consult the author.