I discovered how similar dreams are to the parables in the Bible, in that, when we are sincere in our hunger to know His perfect will for us, the Holy Spirit will give even a set of dreams all pertaining to the same issue of guidance and correction. Yet each dream either approaches the same issue using different symbols (as in the Kingdom parables of Matthew 13) – or progresses. The dreams of a night, indeed often of many nights tend to the same end. That, in itself helps us as we dialogue in the mornings with the Holy Spirit about the dream, so that we can understand what we are being told.
We can relate to the Holy Spirit like we would respond to a patient and loving teacher who wants us to get it right,
We need to remember that people in dreams are generally not the actual person seen or named. They are usually symbolic of either their name or role. For example a person named Basil may well be Jesus because the name means King. A president or prime minister of your country, likewise is not speaking of politics, but of the kingship of Jesus. He is the number one (prime) minister to you. Jesus spoke of the Father as a “king” in parables. He also used analogies like, “farmer” (vinedresser) etc.
Often there are two other people with you in the dream, making three altogether. This is very common. One is the spirit, one the soul and one the body. Usually two of the three dialogue together and can often be opposed to one another in values. The spirit, if the person knows Christ will be the correct and perfect one, ie., Christ like. The soul (mind , will and emotions) is being led to line up with the inner newly created Christ-like one. That is the purpose of such dreams. Sometimes, one of the old people will be wrinkled – this indicates one’s old Adam nature. The Bride /Wife of Christ is “without wrinkes”. Ephesians 5:27). When we were born from above, our spirit is newly created in line with God’s perfect righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:17-21), but our emotions and mind are still in the old fallen nature, however much we think of ourselves as a good person. The soul must line up with the new spirit within which happens when we are transformed by the renewal of our mind through hearing and doing God’s word. This we are told in 12:2. Without this alignment, we can feel the dissociation and discomfort until we repent of the particular thing the Lord is bringing to our notice. Thus, “line upon line, we grow”, if we have ears to hear (Isaiah 28:11 and 12).
Most dreams are correctional; a few are directional; some are for a later time, preparing us, as in Joseph’s dreams.
Sometimes, in dreams, I lived Bible passages that people would consider obscure. For example, one night, I had a perplexing dream. This was a few years into the dream ministry, having worked through several thousand dreams and having begun to help others, I had a dream in which I was flying in a “scroll” flying high in the air. I had to hold cords to manage its descent to earth, rather like a hang-glider, except it was a wide rectangular scroll. I sat on it and had to carry the children who sat with me on the “scroll” and my job was to get them safely landed. I kept speaking to the kids, telling them I’d get them home.[1]
Later, I realised that the “children” we carry can be the other parts of our being. The spirit should carry, spiritually the soul (mind, will and emotions) which also carry the body. We should not let the emotions, or our old carnal nature lead us because we want to grow up into Christ. When our lives become Christ-like, we can be a blessing also, then to our families etc. All are children of God.
But back to the dream:
We landed at the front of my childhood church to find it broken down except for the original back part. There I met a beautiful golden haired being who stood at the front of the church and asked to see my credentials. All I had in my hand was an empty bread bag with the label on it. The messenger said my ministry to proceed was approved because of the bread I had eaten. In the dream this did not seem at all silly. The bread, I realised when I awoke, was Jesus who claims, metaphorically to be the “Bread (sustenance) of Life”. I had eaten of Him, metaphorically.[2] This was just an assurance of salvation and nothing special. But to the dreamer, these kind of assurances are very real and comforting. It was very comforting to me at the time because I was still under the mistaken impression that God burns people in hell; so I was walking in a measure of fear that humans are not designed for.
However, the flying scroll in the dream puzzled me exceedingly and for twenty-four hours my mind kept returning to the flight. It had been exhilarating – in the dream I was always aware of someone who was not on the “scroll” but flying next to me and telling me to be gentle on the cords or we could crash land.[3)
Flying, especially without the aid of an aircraft in a dream simply means the times we are to be what the Bible calls, “in the Spirit”.
I did enjoy the flying, and had experienced quite a few dreams in which I flew high in the sky – sometimes without aircraft. It is a most exhilarating experience and indicates that one can “fly” in the spiritual realm. It isn’t necessarily an approval of what one is up to in waking life, but an assurance that this is possible – to live 24/7 in Holy Spirit power in our ordinary lives
And I know that I was not fully living in the spirit at that time!
But I knew with this “scroll” dream that it was pointing to something I was to do in the Lord, to get the children to “land” safely. But what this meant in practical terms was totally beyond my comprehension at that time. Still, I knew by this time, that if we trust the Lord and commit our way to Him, He will explain before we are due to do whatever the interpretation is. I had “jumped the gun” too many times before and missed the mark in the very early days of the dream ministry, so now I was learning to wait for Him.
The next night I still had no interpretation for the dream, I knew Who the Bread was that had justified me, but the scroll and the guy flying parallel to help was a mystery. It began to concern me and I couldn’t sleep. So, during the night I got out of bed and crept downstairs to sit in a lounge chair and pray. My Bible was on the coffee table and I picked it up. It fell open – and I have never been one to just open the Bible to any old page and think that is Bible study – but this night the lamp light caught the print and I saw the words, “Vision of the Flying Scroll”. I am ashamed to admit that, at that time Zechariah was not a book I had engaged with other than zipping through its seemingly bizarre accounts to get to something more “reasonable”; so it was in the distant forgotten compartment of my seminary memories. But there, in answer to my prayer, was the flying scroll in the open Bible in my lap!
Zechariah (5:1-5) wrote of his vision, “Then I raised my eyes again and looked, and behold, there was a flying scroll. And he said to me, “What do you see?” And I said, “I see a flying scroll; its length is twenty cubits, and its width ten cubits.” Then he said to me, “This is the curse that is going forth over the face of the entire land; everyone who steals certainly will be purged away according to the writing on one side, and everyone who swears falsely will be purged away according to the writing on the other side. I will make it go forth,” declares the Lord of armies, “and it will enter the house of the thief and the house of the one who swears falsely by My name; and it will spend the night within that house and destroy it with its timber and stones.”
What was amazing about the dream, was that many other dreams had been about myself being a church cleaner and scrubbing the timber and stones on the floors, even cleaning up horse dung[3] from church floors – these dreams now began to make sense. I initially thought it was about others, but that is rarely the case with biblical dreams. It was my own life that had lies in it. It was my own life that the devil had interfered with, stealing my peace and health.
I needed to clean up my ideas of what His beloved ecclesia actually is – and in particular who I am in Christ. I knew the facts. I knew the New Testament and could quote and teach it. But there were some old messages given by relatives, maybe well meant as “correction” that had impacted how I thought of myself; and it wasn’t holy. Obviously what I had inherited in terms of understanding God’s message was good for others, but my imaginings had a gospel with a floor (foundational teaching) covered in horse dung. Later I learnt that the false teaching was about eternal conscious torment (ECT) which error is explained in my audio book on this site.
When people have dreams that include excrement (poo), they usually thing that this cannot be a bible dream of any help. But God uses this imagery in the Bible often enough to know that this picture is one intended to bring us out of trouble. In my case the lies and stealing in Zechariah’s scroll were about the fear and loss of love I was teaching associated with ECT.
And so in my dream about cleaning up horse poo we see biblically that horses speak of power – commonly but not always of humanism. The poo probably speaks for itself for you – but if not, there are scriptures (speaking of the accurate language renderings) which are about excrement, filth etc that show us it is an extreme of our fallenness. One instance is in Ezekiel 4:12 “And you shall eat the food as you would a barley cake, after you bake it over dried human excrement in the sight of the people.” So, you see God uses language and things in prophecy that even Ezekiel turned up his nose at. He had to do this – but God made a concession to the prophet’s nicety by allowing it to be cow poo – but yes, God uses poo in lots of different ways in dreams to help get us out of the mire – never to condemn us. I’ll put other examples in the dream dictionary eventually.
The wonderful thing about being a “dreamer” of Joel and Acts 2 gifts, is that one is driven into the Word of God again and again at meaningful and deeper levels to discover the God Who is calling and empowering one to live in His love like never before.
Every human being given life has this one great calling: to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves.
To have this love, to live in it, is the most exhilarating feeling of joy and liberty. No depression can dwell there. The God-given exhilarating emotion of love for others in waking life when we begin to see the simplicity of His Gospel is symbolised by the exhilaration of moving / flying in the Spirit in the dreams.
Yet, still, despite the manifold healing I was experiencing spiritually and physically, when I picked up the Bible to read I could sometimes, but not always, feel condemned. It was as if there was still a big block in my life. I even dreamed of trying to climb a flight of stairs into a light filled attic only to find someone shoving a big wooden block painfully into my knees.[4]
Later, I was taken to dining table where a beautiful woman told me not to fear about the stumbling block – it wasn’t my fault. (Matthew 18:7; 23:13; Revelation 2:14) The dining table symbolises eating truth – God’s word as spiritual food. through dreams, the Lord is moving many people out of the religious model which is just like the fallen world, and into the divine relationship if His intention through Jesus Christ.
In time, and after many, many biblical dreams and helping others with dreams, I knew if I prayed for more answers, I would receive more liberty in Christ. It was becoming an exciting journey of expecting God to move in my life in a great big personal house clean up. And there were plenty of dreams with that symbol. Shifting house; moving house; new house; painting the house – and always my constant Companion alongside. He would sometimes appear as my Husband and clean my sink or move my furniture out of the former “house”. [5]
The flying scroll dream wasn’t making me “special”; it is about the ministry and calling of all believers to come out of mere humanism and back to Jesus Christ alone as King of the family of God. We proclaim liberty to the captives.
[1]“Home” in dreams refers to that intimate relationship that each follower of Jesus has whereby the Holy Spirit actually dwells inside the person. It is the John 14:23 I was searching for. What the Bible calls “tabernacling”.
[2] I found this interesting, as I knew it was a symbol because of the nature of the dream, and yet I still held to the false doctrine of transubstantiation that came into belief starting in the 12th and 13th centuries and was formalised at the Council of Trent of 1545–63. It would take more biblically referenced dreams for the Lord to get through to renew my mind in the apostle’s teaching on the bread and wine. The word “sacrament” isn’t a biblical word.
[3] Horses in the Bible symbolise strength, both human and Divine. Most commonly they depict human strength and the excrement symbolizes all that is wickedness to be got rid of – it stinks! So says the Bible. So the two together = “horse dung” symbolizes the wickedness of those in power in the church.
[4] The block is what the New Testament calls “skandalon” in Greek, which is where we get our word, scandal from. It can be seen used in Matthew 18:7 “Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to the person through whom the stumbling block comes!” That the block was shoved at my knees meant I couldn’t bend / bow in worship. Knees symbolise both worship and children on your lap (Genesis 50:23 “Joseph saw the third generation of Ephraim’s sons; also, the sons of Machir, the son of Manasseh, were born on Joseph’s knees.”) I was trying to find my way to the light from above and being blocked by an entity. At the time I understood the interpretation, but not who was doing the blocking. That would come in many later dreams as I continued to ask questions of my Teacher, the precious Holy Spirit.
[5] Matthew 23:38 “See, your house is left to you desolate!” These were the words of Jesus to the Religious traditionalists. Yet the wonderful words of His which follow promise that even though they would walk into their own curse of 70AD, they would see Him again in a different light when they would bless the Lord Jesus Christ (verse 39).
