33 Ways: How to Unlock the Mystery of Your Dreams

By Judith Doctor

Among the many ways God communicates with us, He still uses dreams to give us His divine guidance, instruction, and direction. 33 Ways: How to Unlock the Mystery of Your Dreams offers ideas on how to work with dreams and discover their hidden meaning.
Simple strategies and interpretation approaches help readers understand their dreams and benefit from the wise counsel embedded in them. This book covers basic skills, dream processing methods, meditative & imaginative strategies, and symbolic amplification and association techniques.
The dream work tools and ideas described are drawn from many sources—the Bible, Church Fathers, Christian practices, dream research, dream experts, and the author’s wealth of experience. In addition to stories from dreamers through the centuries, the author shares her own (and her husband’s) dreams to illustrate the various methods for approaching dreams.
Dreams have greatly influenced Christianity throughout the centuries. Because they contain divine energy, dreams can affect us deeply in every dimension of our lives—empowering, healing, and transforming us. This book simplifies dream work for people who want to understand their dreams, and also provides a resource for healthcare professionals to help others benefit from their dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Judith Doctor
• Release date: Jan 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780983791799

Judith Doctor

Author, speaker, and mentor, Judith A. Doctor, MSW, RN, is a spiritual adventurer whose life is marked by numerous transformative encounters with the living God. Co-founder of Kairos Ministries, Inc., she conducts groups, retreats, and individual sessions for spiritual growth and healing in both the USA and Europe.Judith knows firsthand a loving God who brought resurrection life through the crises of her life—death of a child from leukemia, battle-worn marriage, family addictions, her own troubled soul. Changed by the grace of God, she carries a confident authority to help others on their spiritual journey.She authored two books about unlocking the mystery of dreams from a Judeo-Christian perspective. Recognizing that we are missing a vital part of our heritage, she has contributed to the on-going restoration of this neglected aspect of Christian experience today.Recently she wrote a how-to book on forgiveness, where she describes the biblical process of forgiving from the heart, emphasizing that forgiveness does not mean reconciliation.Since 1980 Judith has addressed parish nurses, social workers, recovery groups, German psychosomatic clinics, Romanian nurses, and numerous Christian groups, both Catholic and Protestant. She can be heard on her live Radio Horeb program in Europe.Judith enjoys chats with friends, evening rides, art exhibits, international mysteries, spiritual-political discourse, and morning coffee with her husband, Gerald. Married in 1959, they have two sons and daughters-in-law and four grandchildren.She writes about the spiritual journey on social media and her blog posts (https://judithdoctor.com/)

Book preview

Preface

In the Talmud, Rabbi Hisda said: An uninterpreted dream is like an unread letter. I like to think of our dreams as letters from God containing guidance, counsel, and instruction for our lives. My goal is to help God’s people listen to their dreams and benefit from the divine treasure they contain.

Throughout the centuries, dreams have had tremendous influence on Christianity. They were part of orthodoxy from the earliest centuries of the Christian church. The Apostolic Fathers, early Apologists, and Doctors of the Church all valued dreams and visions, recognizing them as vehicles for God to communicate to His people. These leaders embraced a spiritual worldview that affirms the importance of dreams.

This was an accepted view down through the centuries, until the advent of rational Christianity that denied the value of this divine gift. Relegating dreams to the occult, superstition, or simply too much pizza, we have lost touch with dreams. Hearing from God through dreams has become a sadly neglected aspect of our Christian experience.

Christians today are dreaming powerful dreams, but few recognize their divine origin or know how to benefit from their hidden treasure. Unaware of the scriptural basis of dreams and the teaching of the Church Fathers on dreams, people simply ignore this wonderful gift from God.

How do dreams help us?

Dreams are powerful. They have motivational, inspirational, creative, curative, and transformative power, capable of charging us with great energy. Dreamers like Dr. A. J. Gordon [American Baptist who founded Gordon College and Seminary] and Mother Teresa were empowered to do great things in their lives.

Contemporary research shows the extraordinary significance of dreaming to human life. Recent studies validate the positive effects of dreaming on every dimension of our lives, including our outer life and inner world. Dreaming is essential to mental and physical health and our entire well-being. Most Christians are unaware that science has chronicled the numerous benefits of dreaming and dream work.[ref_1]

Baptist minister Herman Riffel found that dreams help us realize every part of our potential and bring us into harmony with God, others and ourselves. In unlocking the mystery of his dreams, he uncovered treasure buried in the vast ocean of our inner world, hidden from our natural mind.

Anglican priest, Terrence McGillicuddy, discovered that dreams have the power to move someone out of darkness and fear into light and hope. Dream work offers an opportunity to find inner healing, psychological transformation, and spiritual aliveness. Dreams are a source of spiritual insight into our lives, leading us to an authentic and profound experience with God.

Since the 1970s, sleep labs and dream research have established that dreaming is a universal phenomenon. Everyone dreams one to two hours every night. That’s five years of dreaming in a typical lifetime. As believers in Jesus Christ, we must challenge ourselves: How did we get this ability to dream? Was it given to us by our Creator? Why did He give it to us? Do we need to be afraid of any capacity God has given to us?

You can understand your dreams

My own story is a testimony to the power of working with our dreams. I became alert to dreams in the late 1970s, shortly after I became aware of the Holy Spirit. As I awoke in the morning, fragments of dreams floated into my mind. These dramatic narratives felt important, but I didn’t know how to make sense of them.

At this critical juncture in my spiritual journey, God provided me with wise mentors who were consciously embracing dreams in their own Christian experience. They brought dreams from the mystical realm down to the practical earthly level where we lived.

Although God speaks in many ways, He often has communicated with me using dreams—to guide and counsel me, answer my prayers, heal and transform me, reveal my gifts and anointing, direct my ministry, give me spiritual revelation, and bring me into a more intimate relationship with Him. Decades of personal study and practical experience with my dreams (and counseling others with theirs) strengthen my conviction that dreams offer access to a wealth of hidden treasure for our lives.

Earlier I wrote Dream Treasure: Learning the Language of Heaven to pass on my discoveries about this neglected gift from God. I wanted to provide the Christian community with a comprehensive resource manual on the Christian use of dreams. In that book, I establish the basis for dreams, grounding them in biblical Christianity and the teachings of the early Church Fathers. Dream Treasure provides a thoroughly Christian framework within which to safely approach dreams and discover their divine purpose.

Because working with the picture language of dreams can be difficult, I saw the need for a practical handbook to help make sense of your dreams. 33 Ways: How to Unlock the Mystery of Your Dreams describes specific skills, strategies, and techniques to help you relate to your dreams.

Dream interpretation tools

33 Ways offers you ideas on how to approach dreams, interact with their symbolic imagery, and make felt connections to their meanings [i.e., the response in our spirit, the witness of the Holy Spirit, the "Aha!"]. The tools for working with dreams are drawn from many sources—the Bible, Church Fathers, Christian practices, dream research, dream authors, and my own wealth of experiences.

I emphasize that there is no single correct method or school of thought that we can apply methodically to every dream. Since there are many different types of dreams, you will need a variety of approaches to help you interact with them. Just become familiar with an array of skills, strategies and techniques, then use the ones you are drawn toward.

Similarly, 33 Ways does not offer a canned approach to interpreting dream symbols. Every symbolic image has many possible meanings and associations. I believe it’s misleading to say this always means that. Instead I give you the tools to discover what your dream symbols mean to you in your own inner world.

I also highlight the importance of our spiritual senses, intuitive perception, and the role of the Holy Spirit as we work with our dreams. Knowing that we can learn much about understanding dreams from the experiences of others, I have enriched the book with many dreams—from the Bible, Church Fathers, dreamers through the centuries, and, naturally, my own.

When people become aware that God is speaking to them through dreams, they often have many questions. Do all dreams come from God? How can I know if a dream is divine or just a dream? Are all dreams equally important? How can I understand those bizarre images?

What about dreams of dying or dreams of sexual encounters? Can Satan give us dreams? What about nightmares? What should I do with dreams about other people? How can I know if my dream is for the whole body of Christ or only for me? How will I know if my dream is prophetic? Can the Lord use dreams to speak to people who don’t have a close relationship with Him? This book answers questions like these, and many more.

How to use this handbook

You don’t have to read hundreds of books to understand your dreams. I’ve collected and organized a wide variety of tools that make it easy to work with dreams. At the heart of this book are the bulleted lists of practical steps for working with dreams.

The material is organized into six parts to facilitate learning how to unlock the mystery of our dreams. I begin with basic skills and strategies, progress through ways that dreams relate to our daily life, and advance towards working with dream symbols that connect to our inner dynamics.

Note: The first time I quote or reference someone, I provide additional information about them in a footnote.

Part One: Fundamental Skills starts with the premise that listening to our dreams is based upon a spiritual worldview, acknowledging that dreams have a divine author. It introduces the fundamental skills and practices essential in beginning dream work.

Part Two: Nighttime Dramas presents fundamental concepts and principles that provide a Christian basis for valuing dreams. It describes the biblical purposes of dreams and the differing types of dreams likely to appear. This part also provides an understanding of symbolic language, the language that most dreams use.

Part Three: Dream Processing shows how to draw out the information already visible in a dream and relate it to events in everyday life. Using processing techniques, we can find connections between our heart and our outer life choices.

Part Four: Non-Interpretive Strategies begins by acknowledging that many dreams cannot be opened up intellectually or rationally. Meditative, intuitive, and imaginative strategies offer other ways to engage our dreams and discover more insights into them. This part explains how to bring our troubling dreams to God.

Part Five: Symbolic Techniques helps us explore a dream symbol and connect to its inner meaning using five steps. This is the heart of dream work: unlocking the meaning of a symbol in a dream. Also this part introduces some symbolic figures likely to appear in dreams, explains principles of testing an interpretation, and discusses the importance of responding to dreams.

Part Six: Dream Work for Healthcare Practitioners provides people working in holistic health care with guidance on how to use dream work to help others benefit from their dreams.

On a lighter note, I hope you enjoy the imaginative encounters between God and biblical dreamers written by my husband, Gerald. Perhaps they will help you think in a new way about dreams and inspire you to interact with your own letters from God.

Introduction To Christian Dream Work

My friend, the late Rev. Herman Riffel, said, The dream is the voice of God speaking to us in the night while our conscious mind is stilled [not a literal, audible voice, but being aware in our spiritual senses that God is communicating with us]. As our intellect sleeps, our Creator speaks to us in another part of us, to our heart. Because of this, dreams can bring us into contact with the living God in a way we might not otherwise experience.

A dream is like a living word from God, alive and active—not a static, encrypted message. Since dreams contain divine energy, they can impact us deeply in every dimension of our lives. Dreams are able to penetrate our heart and impart life to us—inspiring, empowering, motivating, healing, or transforming us in some way.

In the Christian approach to dreams, we start with the belief that God wants to communicate with us. This is the cornerstone of why we value our dreams and work with them. Far more than just handing us advice or prophetic revelations, the dream helps us develop more awareness of the immediacy of our Lord, the very Source of our lives.

As a spiritual practice, working with dreams can take on a sacredness, facilitating a closer relationship with our God.

The voice of God in dreams

The Bible relates many stories of people who experienced God personally. Often we read that the Word of the Lord came to so-and-so [In the Bible, picture-based visions are described as God’s Word (Isa 2:1; Jer 1:11; Mic 1:1; Ezek 1:1-3; Zech 1:7-8; Amos 7:1)]. How did this living Word come? The late Dr. Morton Kelsey, Episcopalian priest and counselor, said he knows, no better way to achieve this experience … than through the dream.[ref_2] Many men and women in the Bible, and throughout history, have been approached by God through dreams.

In Genesis 15:1-21, the Lord God appeared to Abraham in a vision/ dream, conversing with him about his future. The Lord also conversed with Solomon in a dream, asking him what he wished God would give him (1 Kgs 3:5-15). In another interesting incident, God spoke directly to Abimelech (a heathen) in a dream about Abraham’s wife Sarah (Gen 20:1-8).

Although these stories concern God speaking directly with His people, most dreams are indirect communication from our Creator, using word pictures. Hearing from God about his destiny, Joseph dreamed that his sheaf stood erect while his brothers’ sheaves bowed to his (Gen 37:5-8). A Midianite soldier (another unbeliever) dreamed of a bread loaf tumbling into camp. A fellow soldier immediately understood its message: God has given the camp of Midian into the hand of Gideon (Judg 7:13-15).

Dream language

Most dreams convey their messages indirectly using pictures and images in a figurative and imaginative way—through word pictures. This is the language Jesus employed to convey His spiritual truths. By using symbolic language, Jesus showed us that effective communication often requires skirting around the conscious mind to engage the heart directly.

We must learn how to open up our symbolic dream communications for their meaning to be revealed to us. This requires some effort on our part. The Hebrew words for interpretation suggest that a dream must be cracked open to understand its obscure message (Judg 7:15, Gen 40:8).

What Is Christian Dream Work?

I choose to use the term dream work, rather than dream interpretation in my seminars and books. The idea of dream work allows us to move away from reliance upon professional interpreters to tell us what our dream means. Christian dream work empowers us to relate to our own dream and, with reliance upon the Holy Spirit, understand its message.

Although God can use spiritually-attuned men and women to help us draw out the meaning of a dream, the Holy Spirit is central in our approach to unlocking the mystery of our dreams.

An emphasis on dream work, rather than dream interpretation, offers more ways to approach our dreams, including meditative and imaginative strategies. It puts us in touch with resources other than our ego. Going beyond merely analytical exploration, dream work facilitates our relationship with God. When we work with a dream, it is important to be aware that we may be encountering the living God.

According to David Benner, dreams invite us to engage them; they are not just passive communications that simply present information.[ref_3] In dream work we focus on a particular dream, giving it an intentional response. Selecting from a variety of approaches, we relate to the dream, interact with its symbolic images, and make felt connections to its basic point or purpose.

It’s art, not science

I prefer to think of Christian dream work as more an art, not a science. Since most dreams can’t be opened up rationally, we must engage them by using our intuition and imagination. That’s likely to be more productive than using reason and logic to try to understand a symbolic dream intellectually.

With this approach we enter into a kind of dialogue with God that allows the images spontaneously to spring alive with meaning for our lives. As our heart is touched, an "Aha!" may bring a sudden quickening, a knowing, that releases an emotional overflow—we cry, laugh, or feel bodily tension release.

Stay flexible

I recommend not relying on any single philosophical or theoretical perspective. There is no single strategy or technique