Recently, three church members, including the pastor, spoke to me about troubling dreams. How concerned should we be about these things, and is there a specifically Christian perspective which can help us deal with them?
‘To sleep! Perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.’ Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Hamlet III, I, 56) saw the inevitable connection between sleep and dreams, and knowing death was also a sleep, was fearful of suffering eternal nightmares once he had departed this life. The Christian, of course, knows that, while his body is ‘asleep’ until the resurrection, his spirit goes to be with the Lord. We need not fear bad dreams while with the Lord, but what about now? There are several reasons why this topic is important.
Firstly, we know that in the Bible God used dreams as a means of communicating his word to various types of people. Second is the practice in some churches of over-emphasising the importance of dreams and looking for messages from God in all of them. We also have the Freudian psychoanalysts’ view of looking for revelations of our repressed emotions and inner selves emerging symbolically in our dreams. Lastly, we spend a lot of our lives dreaming! In fact, it has been estimated that for up to one to two hours per night we are dreaming, and that equates over 73 years to at least 40,000 hours or over four years!
