Randal Rauser recently had a poll on twitter asking if people had ever had dreams they considered to be supernatural in origin. I answered “no,” despite previously believing that certain dreams I had in the past were indeed of supernatural origin – messages from God. Without much further comment I wanted to present several examples of past dreams I had. I know that in sharing this some people will think these are amazing and wonder how I ever came to abandon my belief in their supernatural origin, while others will read these examples and perhaps laugh at how stupid I was ever to believe them. Make of them what you will. I will probably write an article in the near future about dreams generally and why I no longer believe they are of supernatural origin.
Dream 1
During the first semester of my first year at university I was struggling to fit in all my revision work for my end of semester exams. I left myself with only 2 days to prepare for a Church History exam, in which I would have to write 4 essays in 3 hours. There would be about 10-12 questions on the exam paper, I needed to answer 4. What topics should I cover in the short space of time I had? I prayed asking for help, and that night I had a dream:
I was approaching a river and at the bank of the river stood a female friend of mine. She was about to be baptized by Saint Patrick but there was a large crowd of people approaching who sought to prevent her baptism and do her harm. For some reason, I don’t know why, I knew that in the dream this friend of mine was a montanist.
When I awoke I decided on 4 topics for revision – Saint Patrick (which I knew would be on the paper anyway because the Presbyterian ministerial students had to answer the question on Saint Patrick that appeared every year) – baptism in the early church – montanism – and persecutions of the early church. When I went to do my exam there was a question on each of these topics.
Dream 2
This was a similar situation, but occurred during the 2nd semester of my 1st year. This time it was Introduction to the New Testament and the paper was made more difficult by the fact that you couldn’t just answer any 4 questions, but rather you had to answer 1 question from each of 4 sections. This meant you couldn’t answer 3 questions on, say, the gospel of Mark. Your knowledge had to be so much broader and this meant you had to revise many more topics to be guaranteed to be able to answer at least one from each section. I prayed to God to let me know if there was anything else I needed to study. I had a dream:
In the dream I was sitting at a table with a single piece of paper. At the top of the paper it said “Authorship of John’s Gospel.” That was it.
I revised the topic of the authorship of John’s gospel, and lo and behold this was the only topic I was able to answer in that section of my exam paper.
Dream 3
This was a different kind of dream. I was pondering whether or not to marry my then girlfriend and was advised to pray about it to get God’s opinion on the matter. I had a dream:
I was entering a large hall, and at the middle of the hall sat a figure whose face was obscured – blank, like the features had been smudged off. I sat in a chair opposite this figure and the chair began to tilt back so that I was staring at the ceiling. On the ceiling I could read words of instruction that were scrolling in front of my eyes like credits at the end of a movie. When I awoke there was only one line of this message I could remember: “You are to marry Zena”
I’ve been married to Zena for 14 years.
Dream 4
I had been attending a Word of Faith church and was becoming increasing uneasy with much of the teaching and practices of that church and its leaders. I prayed that God would give me insight into the heart of that church. The church was at that time called “Living Rivers.” I had a dream.
I was standing at the bank of a mighty rushing river that was flowing down a hillside and into a forest. The waters swept everything along that got in the way. Suddenly, however, the river stopped flowing and dried up. Puzzled by this I began walking upstream to see what was the problem. At the source of the river was a large tap that had been turned off.
Since a Christian friend who also attended that church had made an appearance in this dream I told him about it. His interpretation was that this river was running purely on manpower (symbolized by the tap) – it wasn’t natural/God created. He said he felt the same about the church. All the pretense of spiritual power was just manufactured.
I ended up leaving this church, though not because of this dream.
So there we have it – several dreams I once thought were supernatural in origin. I’m going to resist the temptation at present to comment further on them.
Stephen J. Graham
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