Everybody dreams, how can Christians treat dreams with a religious and healthy attitude? In the Bible, a dream is also an avenue by which God delivers His message, how can we hear God’s voice in our dreams see the vision of life, and at the same time not be misled by heretical interpretation of dreams? For 20 years Father Grün has conducted courses on dreams and life using the Christianity Spirituality method. This seminar is the essence of his course.
Father Grün said that there were a lot of records about dreams in the Bible, such as Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams, hence affecting Egypt political arena. Joseph said the ability to interpret dreams was from God, not him. The Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament mentioned five incidents relating to dreams including: the angel told Joseph that Mary’s pregnancy was from the Holy Spirit; the wise men were told not to return to King Herod; angels appeared in a dream telling Joseph to flee with his wife and child, and told him again after the death of Herod to go back to Israel and so on.
“From Joseph’s dreams, we can see two meanings in his dreams, first, let him know the truth, and second, he needs to comply with the orders he receives in his dreams.”
In Luke, through dreams Peter had a breakthrough from his narrow mind, thus preaching to the Gentiles and Christianity was spread throughout the world. Paul also had a dream to evangelize in Europe and that started the missionary work in Europe.
Important implications of dreams
Dreams have four most important implications and these four implications are also significant in our spiritual devotion: 1. Dreams will truthfully tell about our current situation. 2. Dreams will tell us what to do and are usually reminders that we should be focused, live a serious and devoted life. 3. Usually dreams could also be promises. 4. Dreams are where to experience God. The important point is that in Christianity the interpretation of dreams must have a common criterion: not to cause fear, not to be moralized. Therefore, the interpretation of dreams should point towards the direction of strengthening our faith and hope with more sacrificial love in life.
However, we should not force ourselves in interpreting dreams, rather follow the devotional way, bringing our dreams to the Lord in prayer.
Father Grün suggested that dreams carried the purpose of reminders, telling us what we should do, for example if we often dreamed of being late, we have to remind ourselves that we may have been living in the past and not really living in the present; the reminders that dreams bring us are not the same as so-called prophecy.
Dreams can bring us promises, allowing us to see the future with hope and direction, such as dreaming of a child, it means that things are cropping up in our mind or we will experience new things. Moreover, dreams have religious implications, dreaming of church, bright light, or religious images may be the result of spiritual enlightenment and spiritual life.
Dreams may also be interpreted from the psychological point of view. Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of dreams is more pessimistic, and by his interpretation each dream is interpreted as related to repressed sexual desire. Carl Gustav Jung uses the spiritual method in interpreting dreams, believing that through dreams we touch our inner source of wisdom. He does not want his theory to cause a fear of dreams, but to encourage people to speak forth their dreams.
Do not rush to interpret dreams
From Jung’s psychology theory, Father Grün gathers how one should deal with dreams, one’s attitude is not to rush in interpreting dreams, but take the dream as a picture, link it with daily life, assimilate it slowly but actively, rather than to find someone else to interpret it.
Interpreting dreams can be divided into objective and subjective dimensions, the objective dimension is that the dream is an affair relating to us, such as when talking to someone in the day time we may dream that the person is sick at night, the dream may be reflecting something that we miss when talking to him in the day time and may be reminding us that we should talk to him or care about him. However if we were to interpret this dream in the subjective dimension, the interpretation will be from our point of view, we may be sick either physically or certain part of our life is unhealthy.
Entrusting in Prayer
In addition there are some repetitive dreams. Jung believes that these constantly recurring dreams require us to respond. These dreams tell us that we have certain mission to complete. “Busyness in life causing us not to be aware of our inner thoughts, God through such dreams reminds us of some phenomena that we usually do not want to see or are numb about.”
decision dreams are helpful. For example when dreaming of a house that represent things in our life; basement of the house represents sub-consciousness; an item that appears often in dream is a car, a car symbolizes oneself, so dreaming of driving a car may be interpreted as one can control his own life. On the other hand if I am a passenger and someone else is driving the car, then I should ask myself, “Am I in control of my life? Or is someone else in control?” Some people dream of being chased which may mean their lives are chased by darkness, they cannot accept something in their body. However Father Grün emphasized that dream should not be viewed as absolute in nature.
Father Grün advised not to force oneself to have a lot of dreams so as to show off one’s spirituality. To understand ourselves or our belief through dreams we need to write down our dreams and correlate them. We do not have to rush to interpret dreams, dreams should be entrusted to God in prayer. For a spiritual companion or someone who wants to help others understanding dreams, the attitude, he suggested should be not to immediately interpret dreams. Ask about their feelings and life then correlate; recognize that dreams cannot be interpreted instantly. By way of conversation, it helps to inspire the other parties to transform dreams into a devotional plan and integrate dreams into life.
Reported by April
Translated by KT Chew