Failing that you have to still your senses, or place them into a condition of suspension so that you are ignoring them. Only then can the influences from deep within your spirit begin to pour out and come up into your mind.

This is all that dreams and visions are. Dreams are the influences that come up out of your spirit while you are asleep. While you are asleep your body is out of action and your senses are inactive.

Therefore what is in your spirit can begin to pour out into your mind. So during dream time, your spirit is able to start communicating things outwardly. As it does this, it communicates information in the same way that it is fed inwards.

How is information fed inwards into the mind from outside? It can only be fed in from the body via the five senses ? seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting and touching. Those are the only elements that your mind can understand. It cannot think in anything else because those are the influences that come in.

So if influences are going to come up out of your spirit into your soul and into your mind in order to flow outwards, they will be communicated in the same way. They have to be communicated in a form like the five senses.

Receiving Through Dreams

When you dream, what you have received from your spirit in your dreams has to come via the senses. And so in your dreams you see things, hear things, taste things, smell things and touch things.

All of those senses come out in your dreams. There is no other way that your spirit can communicate outwards through your mind except through the senses. So as you dream, you need to identify what is being communicated to you via those five senses.

What did you see in your dream? What did you hear? Did you taste something? Did you smell something? Did you feel something? All of these things come out and they are coming out to communicate a message to you.

Your spirit cannot speak to your mind in words. It cannot speak outwards in an audible voice. It has to speak via the senses, and the most common sense is always the sense of sight. This means that most of your dreams will be taken up with pictures and things that you are going to see. And what comes up out of your spirit in dreams will take various forms.

Internal Dreams

There are two main forms that dreams take. Actually there are three, but only two of these can be used to identify a message from your spirit. The third one is of a slightly different kind.

The first form is what I call the internal dream. In an internal dream everything that comes out is symbolic and generally refers to the dreamer alone. That means that everything that you see in your dream is not really as it appears to be. When this happens you need to understand what is being pictured.

Dream Symbolism

The Bible is full of symbols, and life is full of symbols. We tend to remember and identify things in life by association. We associate certain objects with certain things in our lives.

In the Scriptures there are also objects that are used. For example the Holy Spirit is often typified by oil or by water. We have the picture of the Lamb of God, speaking of His gentleness and His humility. We have a picture of the lion of the tribe of Judah, symbolizing strength and power.

There are a lot of symbols in the Scriptures. So when your spirit begins to communicate outwards to you through dreams, it communicates to you through pictures.

This is where a lot of people miss it in their dreams. Your dreams will be filled very often with characters and places that you know in real life. After all, these are the things that you have been feeding in during your life.

These are the pictures that your mind has fed downwards into your soul. And now as your spirit begins to come out it looks for materials. What your spirit is doing is putting on a little play for you. So it looks for props, it looks for characters and it looks for actors and actresses.

It looks for everything that is needed in a play. It builds the stage, the props, and it pulls out the stars that it is going to use. It decides who will play the leading role in this little play, and who will just play the extras.

All that takes place is this beautiful little play is put on for you, and most of the time you are the star of it. You are right in the middle of it. When you are the star and you participate in the play and take part in it, then usually it is an internal dream.

That means that the dream is about you, not about somebody else. Then the characters that you see in your dream are not actually the people that you see. They are simply characters that have been picked to symbolize an aspect of your life.

And so your dream is your life being portrayed in a play. You did not know you were a playwright did you? You did not know you could write plays, but your spirit is very good at it. Your spirit creates a beautiful little play that it puts on for you, and it brings all these characters out.

And so when you begin to look at your dream, if you are to understand what it means as an internal dream, you need to realize that you must look at the whole picture. You need to look at the stage. You need to look at the background and the scene that is being portrayed. You need to sometimes even look at the colors that are involved.

You will need to look at the characters that are involved. Are they people close to you or are they distant from you? Are they total strangers that you have never seen before?

What objects appear in your dream? Do you have vehicles appearing in your dream? Do you see the sun, the moon or the stars, or trees ? objects that are a regular part of life?

Each of these things is a symbol or picture of you; of your life, your ministry and your circumstances, and your spirit is trying to give you a message. It is trying to paint a picture for you to let you know what is going on in your life.

Internal dreams are usually not prophetic in nature. They are not a prediction, and they are not something that you need to share with the world.

Internal dreams are not something you stand up in church and proclaim to everybody. You don't go and say,

"God gave me this dream and this is what it means."

This is because the dream is not about the church or about other people. The dream is about you.

People are so often confused here. They seem to assume that because they had a dream and it was a very clear one, it was quite obvious that God was speaking to them in it. Then they assume that this must be a prophetic dream.

They assume that it is for the church, the Body of Christ, for Israel or somebody else. Then they begin to pour out an interpretation of that dream that is based on others, when all that God is trying to do is gain their attention. He is trying to say something to them personally.

The internal dream is when your spirit is trying to communicate that thing to you and is trying to give you a direction. It may be trying to give you a warning, a promise, an upliftment or a hope. Whatever the dream is trying to accomplish, it is for you, not for somebody else.

If you are to be able to interpret that dream, then you will have to learn to interpret the symbols. But you must remember that the symbols in the dream are going to relate to you and you alone.

There are a lot of symbols that tend to recur. In other words, many of the symbols received by certain people in their dream might mean the same thing, but they do not necessarily mean the same thing to you. You need to assess your relationship with the character in your dream.

The Father Image

You may be dreaming about your father. If you dream this, then the character in your dream represents a part of you that typifies your relationship with your father.

Do you have a good relationship with your father? Do you look to him and respect him? Is he your covering and protection and somebody that you admire? If so then your father could be a picture of the Lord in your dream. Or it could be the Spirit of the Lord, but usually it is the Lord.

If you have a bad relationship with your father, he could picture something very different. So I am not going to give you symbols here and say this is what it means in your dream. You must examine it yourself.

Spouses

If you are dreaming about your spouse, it will depend on what kind of relationship you have with your spouse. Perhaps you have a good relationship with your spouse. If they are a good influence in your life, and if there is a harmony and a closeness, your spouse could be a picture of your recreated spirit or of the Holy Spirit. He is there to assist you, to guide you and help you, and to be with you along the way.

Perhaps your spouse is trying to stop you serving the Lord. They are blocking you and standing in the way of your spiritual progress all the time. If this is the case it might be a picture of the flesh; an obstacle or something that gets in the way. You need to examine the pictures.

Family Members

If the characters in your dream are some of your personal family members like brothers and sisters, what it is that is being pictured will depend on what kind of relationship you have with them.

If you are dreaming of your own children, then they are likely a picture of those things which you have given birth to. They may be a picture of spiritual ministry, or they may be a picture of spiritual fruit in your life.

Whenever I have dreamed of my three daughters, the Lord showed me that they represented faith, hope and love - the triad of the spiritual forces that we have taught about. In dream after dream it was confirmed that that is exactly what they were ? faith, hope and love.

So if one of them appeared in my dream, I knew what God was speaking about. If the faith one appeared, my dream was telling me about my faith. And depending on what that daughter did in the dream, it would tell me something about my faith.

First Love

Whenever I have dreamed about the first person I ever fell in love with, I have known that God was speaking about my first love and my relationship with Him. There are so many different characters that can come into your dream. You need to understand what they mean to you.

You do not necessarily need to go and ask some prophet somewhere to interpret your dream for you, because he does not know about your life. Unless God gives him a word of wisdom or knowledge, he is not able to understand or to know what your dream is saying to you. It is an internal dream. It is a personal little play for you.

Vehicles and Movement

If in your dreams you are running away from monsters, and being chased and backed into a corner, it is a picture of conflict in your spiritual life. It is a picture of the condition that you are in right now.

And if in your dream you are dreaming of vehicles, again it depends on what you see in vehicles and what they mean to you. Usually a vehicle is a picture of movement; of going forward. It is therefore often a picture of ministry, of involvement and activity in life.

So for me, when I see a vehicle, it is a picture of my ministry. Maybe it will be different for you. Usually you see the vehicle you like the most.

My wife Daphne loves airplanes, so 99 times out of 100 she sees airplanes. She dreams about planes all the time, and when she dreams about them she knows that God is speaking to her about ministry. He is speaking about progress, about activity in the spiritual realm and doing things for the Lord.

Male and Female Characters

Your dreams can indicate to you that there is a negative influence in your life. Perhaps in your dreams a male or a female character appears that you seem to be familiar with, but cannot recognize or identify. This often speaks about the masculine or the feminine qualities in you.

This is what the psychologists have called the animus and the anima. So the female character in you may refer to those feminine creative qualities. And the masculine character may refer to the logical thinking intellectual qualities.

Your dream may be telling you that you are perhaps out of balance in one of them, or that you are being influenced too strongly by one of them. Or it may be saying that you are ignoring it. Whatever it may be, your dream is trying to tell you something. It is trying to get a message across to you personally.

That is an internal dream and everything is symbolic. Over a period of time if you would just analyze your dreams and start to interpret them in this way, you will begin to realize that over and over again certain symbols will occur in your dreams all the time.

Eventually you will find that you can very easily identify what your spirit is trying to say to you from within, as it comes into your mind during dream time.

External Dreams

External dreams are those that are a little bit more prophetic. External dreams are when the characters in your dreams are the real characters that they represent.

But here is the difficulty. It is sometimes difficult to know when you are having an internal dream or an external one. This causes problems, because in your dream you may dream that somebody died. Very often a person will wake up in fear because they dreamed that their spouse died and they say,

"Oh, the Lord must be warning me that my husband is going to die. (Or my wife is going to die.)"

No, it could be that your dream is saying to you that the things that you are married to are going to die. The things that you have committed yourself to that are standing in the way of your spiritual progress are going to die. God is going to take them out of your life, and it might actually be a very good dream.

Sometimes you might have one of those nasty dreams where there is a dead body in a coffin and you keep pulling it out, or you keep digging up the grave. Have you ever had horrible dreams like that? They are vile. You wake up feeling unclean. Your spirit is trying to say,

"Leave the flesh in the grave. Stop digging it up! Stop going back to your sinful past."

Every single dream has a symbol. But you see when it comes to the external dream, the external indicates that you are actually dreaming about a certain person, but it may still be symbolic. There are still symbols all the way through.

Dark Sayings and Figurative Speech

There are what the Scripture calls dark sayings or figurative speech. God speaks in figurative speech all the time, but now the characters in your dream start to become real characters.

Perhaps the places that you see in your dreams are real places. They are not symbolic anymore. Now you have to start understanding and interpreting.

Difference Between Internal and External

How do you tell the difference between an internal and an external dream?

The first thing to look at is whether you are the star of this play or whether you are watching it from without? Are you watching it as though you are looking at it on TV; as though you are standing as a bystander? You are not actually involved in it, but you are looking at it.

Usually that is an indication that your dream is external, but not always. If you are not actively involved in the dream or one of the key players, then it could be that your dream is starting to move more into the external.

Then you are likely looking at something that is a little bit more prophetic. The characters in your dream are possibly the real characters that they depict.

Perhaps what the characters do in your dream could be God revealing to you things about that person. Or it could be God revealing to you things that have to do with your relationship with that person.

As you begin to practice and get experience, you will find that the external dream is actually a vision given during sleep. It is what the Scripture calls a night vision. It is basically the same as a vision which we will come to shortly. It is a vision given while you are asleep.

You must remember though, that 90 percent of the dreams of most people are not external dreams. They are internal dreams.

Everybody dreams, but when you start to move more into the prophetic realm, only then do you start receiving night visions. Only then do you start to receive external dreams, where your dream has an external emphasis and meaning. And just sometimes it is possible that your dream can be both internal and external.

Dreams That are Both

If you look at some of the interpretations that Daniel gave to the king concerning the dreams that he had, they could have been given two interpretations. The first time he interpreted the king's dream he interpreted it as external one, but actually it had an internal meaning as well.

The king saw this great big image, where a stone came and shattered it and it broke and went away. It was God already warning King Nebuchadnezzar that He was going to break him down, humble him and deal with him. Daniel perhaps did not have the courage to tell the king the real meaning, so he gave him an external meaning.

The external meaning was that each part of the image, like the head and the breastplate, etc., was all different kingdoms that would go down. It had a prophetic orientation pointing towards the future.

Later on the king had another dream, where an angel came down from Heaven and cut down the tree and put a band around it to keep the tree. And a voice spoke about this person with dew over his head for seven years, etc.

Now Daniel gave the interpretation. He said,

"The tree is you, O King. God is going to cut you down. You will be driven from men and will eat grass like oxen for seven years, but your kingdom will be held for you. And when you rise up and look to the Lord, you will be brought back and you will be restored to your throne."

You see it becomes more of a personal internal dream that God is speaking to the person now. In this case it is an internal prophetic dream. So when you come to interpreting dreams you need to learn how to distinguish the two, otherwise you could be led astray.

Healing and Purging Dreams

Finally there is another kind of dream that is neither internal nor external. It is not prophetic, it is not a message and it is not a one act play.

It is a load of garbage! You think maybe it was caused by what you had for dinner before you went to bed. You dream absolute rubbish. You dream things that a Christian should not dream. You feel unclean in the morning when you wake up. You think,

"Satan must have attacked me during the night."

That is possible and it does happen. But I am speaking about a different kind of dream here. Sometimes in your dream you feel pain and emotion and joy. Sometimes you dream you are fighting somebody.

Perhaps you are not the kind of a person who fights much. You are a bit of a pacifist. You are not one to hit back and attack people. But in your dream you are fighting and you are punching the guy's nose in. You are giving him a black eye and knocking his teeth out.

In your dreams you may be suffering severe temptation and giving in to lust. I want to tell you what is happening. All that is happening is all the garbage that you have picked up in your travels and experiences in the world are simply being purged out.

You see everything that you receive while you are awake that is fed inwards via the five senses, is fed inwards to a storage area. It is sitting deep within, and your heart is taking that storage of information in order to regulate your life.

But when you have the Spirit of God within you, He begins to purge it out. As you begin to fill yourself with the Word, I can tell you that the more you delve into the Word, the more you meditate on it, and the more time you have spent filling yourself with the Word, the worse your dreams will become.

You will become confused and you will say,

"I don't understand this. I have just been meditating on the Scriptures. I have been praying in the Spirit and speaking in tongues. I have been filling myself with the Lord and spending time in His presence, and yet I have been having the vilest of dreams you can imagine. It must be Satan attacking me."

No it is not. What is actually happening is that the Word is starting to go into your heart, and when this happens it has to make space. It has to start throwing the junk out so it has space to get in.

It is like the bottom of a lake. If you go and look at the bottom of a lake that has been standing still for a while, you may see that the water is crystal clear and beautiful.

When you look down to the bottom of the lake everything looks fine. All the junk and the garbage that has been thrown in that lake over a period of time, has been covered over with a fine layer of sand. As you look at the bottom of the lake it looks smooth. It looks great.

Now go to the edge of a lake where the water is shallow. Take yourself a stick. Put it in and start to churn around and mix the bottom of the lake, and see what comes out.

The filth that is lying down there is churned up. The sea does this all the time. We often take a walk down the beach because we live by the sea. And we see all the flotsam and jetsam and garbage that has been thrown out by the sea, because it is moving all the time.

When you have a healing dream, all that is happening is your spirit is churning things up a bit and saying,

"Okay, now make way for the Word. Make way for the new stuff that has just come in. What are we going to throw out here? We can throw out this old tin can and this piece of log. We'll throw out this piece of junk that's been rotting there for a while. Let's toss it out. We don't need it."

So where is it going to throw it out to? It is going to throw it into your mind, and out it comes as garbage and horrible dreams. But they are actually healing dreams.

Perhaps you have had dreams of events that took place a long time ago in your life. You might in your dreams begin to relive painful and hurtful experiences.

All that is happening is your spirit is purging out all those bad events of the past, in order that the Word can come back in its place and it can be filled with something good.

So you need to learn to discern what is coming from your dreams. Learn to detect what is being spoken out. Learn to hear the pure voice of God when it comes up.

Is it giving you instruction or warning, or is it giving you a prophetic word that is for somebody else? According to what your dreams reveal, you are given a course of action to take.

Your Dream Projects For This Week

Keep writing materials close to your bed for the next week. Every time you wake up, see if you can remember what you dreamed and write down what you can remember from your dream.

You will be amazed how much you can remember. But you MUST write it down the moment you wake up, or you will soon forget it.

Make a note of dreams that really stood out clearly and were short, sharp and to the point. These are more likely to be the dreams that contain a message for you. Dreams that are more like watching a movie or reading a book, in which a lot of things took place, are more likely to be just healing or purging dreams.

Separate Spiritual Dreams From Normal Dreams

The first thing you want to do with the dreams that you record, is to identify which ones are just regular dreams, and which ones seem to stand out and affect you emotionally. Once you have identified which dreams are different and stand out, then set aside only those dreams for interpretation.

The next step is then to try to identify each object and person in the dreams. Make a list of these using the words:

Who? What? Where?

List each significant object, each person and each place in your dreams. Now before you try to interpret what the dream means, see if you can identify what each of these things, people and places mean to you.

Do Not Do This!

Do not give in to the temptation to see people in your dreams as being the real person you know. Most of the time these things are pictures of yourself. And even if your dream is external, most items in a dream are symbolic. It is very seldom that an object in your dream is literal.

If you follow this simple rule, you will seldom be led astray in your dream interpretation.

Now, using the principles you learned in the lesson above, take a fresh look at your dream. See if you can understand what happened in your dream and the message it is giving you.

Do not be tempted to think that your dream shows something that will happen in the future. If what you dreamed really does happen as you saw it, then you are more likely operating in a spirit of divination than a prophetic anointing.

Even when God gives dreams concerning the future, most of them will still be symbolic. They will be in 'dark sayings' that you will need to interpret symbolically.

So if you dream someone dies, never assume that you were being told that the person is going to die. If anything, that person is likely a picture of some part of yourself that the Lord is bringing to spiritual death. This could actually be a good picture, not a fearful one.

These are the most common mistakes that most people make in their interpretation of dreams.

Once you have worked with some of your dreams for a while, you will learn that certain symbols will keep coming up. Make a note of these and watch out for them in future dreams.

You will soon come to a place where you will be able to understand your dream the moment you wake up. You will know exactly what message was being given to you, and you will be able to act on it right away.

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