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

After my dream life was healed from paralyzing nightmares (see previous 2 posts), I realized that God wants to use my dreams for good: not only to help me but also to help others. I realized that the Powers of Darkness want to have 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 of his family. In the first dream, I was at high school, a period of 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/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 hill in a dim light and feeling 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.

As for helping others, there are several occasions. In one dream, I received a warning for a friend who was about to make a mistake, and the scene that I shared helped prevent the potential break-up of a wonderful relationship that the friend was involved in. 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. But 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, 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 go 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 still it was so powerfully emotional and personal that I thought I just could not say anything to them. Then for about a month I didn't see them, but when I did, I privately approached the woman, who was clearly impacted by what the dream showed, and called her husband over. As he walked up, she said, "Tell him! Tell him what you just told me." He was speechless.

Later that day 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 thought maybe it just needed more time. One night I had a powerful dream full of symbolic images that confirmed what was wrong and the regrets that would come. I saw that I was letting my former self 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. Now, certainly, that may have simply been my subconscious mind speaking in order to push me to do the right thing; however, the blessing is that it was able to do that instead of being blocked by some horrible nightmare.

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 is that the "Powers of Darkness" want to have you, whatever your life experience may be. But the "LIGHT has overcome the Darkness" and always will when given the opportunity. And that LIGHT has a name: JESUS.