In Week 5 of the Listening to God Course, we examine how God speaks through dreams. Here are some dreams from course participants:

I had a dream and when I woke up, though I didn’t remember many details from the dream, I understood I should start taking multivitamins. Even though I had multivitamins at home, I kept postponing taking them. About a week later I developed a sore throat and a few days after that I started coughing. If I had started taking the vitamins the day I had the dream, I don’t think I would have fallen sick.
—Maria

As Maria experienced, God sometimes uses dreams to speak about practical matters in our lives. God used a fragment of one of my own dreams to spur me to action.

In November I woke up with a funny word on my lips, evidently the remnant of a dream. I had no idea what the word meant until I checked my email inbox that morning. The word was the last name of a magazine editor I had written to several days prior. This dream prompted me to sit down and write an article, an article that was published in January.

But sometimes our dreams don’t just deal with events in our own lives.

During one of our classes, Ken shared a dream in which he saw massive destruction caused by flooding. He was a bystander in the dream, not affected by the flooding himself, but simply observing what was going on.

The whole class tried to discover the meaning of this dream, but we just couldn’t figure it out. Three weeks later, Ken had the answer. He was watching TV one day and saw the same images on TV that he had seen in his dream—images of extreme flooding caused by unusual weather. Ken, it seems, had received a dream that predicted a future event. I wonder if God gave him the dream to teach him to pray.

The Bible gives many examples of God speaking though dreams. Here are some examples:

• Abimelech (Genesis 20:3)
• Jacob (Genesis 28:12; 31:10-13)
• Joseph (Genesis 37)
• Pharoah (Genesis 41)
• Gideon (Judges 7:13-15)
• Solomon (1 Kings 3:5-15)
• Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 2)
• Daniel (Daniel 7)

Lest we think God communicating through dreams is only an Old Testament phenomenon, let’s remember what happened at Pentecost. Peter stood up and unequivocally taught that dreams are one of the ways in which the Holy Spirit speaks (Acts 2:17).

God communicates through dreams, but most dreams are symbolic and therefore almost always require interpretation. If you want to learn more about how to understand dreams, you could read chapter 3 of What if Listening to God Was Easy? or sign up for the Listening to God is Easy course.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
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