Category Archives: Dreams and Spiritual Warfare

Dear Andrea,

I had the following dream in June. I am a middle-aged empty nester with six grandchildren. I bought a new business in July and took on a significant volunteer leadership role this year in an organization. This dream came about a week before both of these events occurred.

I was teaching a group of college kids at a high school camp. After our lesson, we toured the camp and were walking around looking at different buildings, etc., and I was explaining some of the purposes of them to the students. Across the way, here came three rams running right at us. I did not notice the colors of them. We all froze and were unable to move because the charge of the rams was so great. One of the rams butted one of the young male students. All three rams then ran off.

A few things are unclear. The students are probably those you are responsible for leading, and your actions a metaphor for what you’re doing with them in real life. The meaning of the college students at a high school camp will depend on whether by teaching you mean they were campers, or if you were training them to be counselors to the high school campers. If the former, this could be invoking 1 Cor 3:1-3, that they are at an age where they should have moved onto “higher learning” but aren’t. High school normally shares the higher learning meaning, but in your case, it may again reference immature behavior, as in, “acting like a high schooler.”

A ram is a male sheep, but it’s also, per dictionary.com, “any of various devices for battering, crushing, driving, or forcing something, esp. a battering ram.” Considering the behavior the rams exhibit, I strongly suspect the symbol is a play on words here. I suspect the word “charge” is also a play on words.
The number three–it’s possible it could mean literally three trials or accusations will hit your organization like a battering ram, disrupting your work and leaving you paralyzed, and one will hit it’s target. That number, however, also has the symbolic meaning of conformity, which with the invocation of high school would mean negative, overwhelming peer pressure rather than being conformed to Christ.

It’s also possible the number three in this instance is doing double duty and carrying both meanings.

Running away–I believe this was meant to reassure you and encourage you to stand firm, as it seems to invoke James 4:7, “Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.”

This is all I have received of the Lord. Give it some prayer. The Lord will show you whether I have discerned rightly or if any of my insights are on the mark.

We got this one in our comments section from Sara Rodriguez on January 5, 2007

Hi Andrea,
For the past 2-3 years i’ve been having a recurrent dream(at least 3-4 times). I dream that my husband and I are trying to be intimate and there’s always someone who interrupts us. The setting of the dream is always different and so are the people involved, but the situation is the same. Sometimes is our children coming into the bedroom,sometimes is family members or friends. It’s always someone wanting me to do something. The last one I had about 2months ago, this time it was a little girl that looked like a southamerican(Peruvian) indian. All of a sudden i noticed her in our bedroom and I was afraid that she would tell her mother about what she’d seen.
The feeling in the dream is one of frustration. I’m not aware of colors in the dream, except in one particular one. We were in this big bedroom and everything was white including the bedding.
We have been married for 37 years and have 4 grown children that are very close to us. We are also close to our families of origin, and have a church family. What do you think?

Hi Sara,

The first thing that comes to my mind is from Isaiah 54:5, “thy Maker is thine husband.” The color white reinforces this impression. Among other things, white is associated with God’s majesty and glory.

There are other possibilities, some aspect of yourself, your actual husband, for instance, if that doesn’t strike a chord. But who your husband represents will be key to the interpretation. Once you have that pinned down, the rest of the imagery seems fairly straight forward. The act in your dream probably has little to do with actual sexual desire, and more represents the desire for a more intimate relationship with the person represented by your husband, but other relationships and people, such as your children, or a preoccupation with foreign missions (my association with Peruvian Indian, you may have a different one) are getting in the way.

Whoever it is, you may need to take a prayerful look at your priorities, and not let anything, no matter how good, keep you from having a more intimate relationship with our Lord–or with your husband for that matter. Balance will be key. Jesus had much to do in his earthly ministry, and many people to help, but he often separated himself from the hungry, needy crowds, to go alone up into a mountain to commune with the Father. It’s an example more of us need to follow.

Pray about it. The dreams should stop when you’ve resolved the problem. My prayers are with you.

In Christ’s Love,
Andrea Graham

p.s. I’d suggest you read Isaiah 54 sometime. It may be a comfort to you.

Gentle readers, I imagine some are either confused or disturbed that this column occasionally fields questions about dreams. Part of the reason for this is our dreams often are us attempting to sort through our waking difficulties, the kind someone might, say, write a stranger with a blog for advice about. In addition, while nearly lost, in the bible, God spoke to his people in dreams, from Joseph, son of Jacob, to Joseph, step-father of Jesus, and still does today. Even human-inspired dreams are helpful to discerning the heart. As well, a certain segment of the population is going to be curious, and I’d rather, if they’re going to seek this kind of advice, they seek godly counsel from a brother or sister in Christ, and that is what I seek to offer. For more information, see Principles of Christian Dream Interpretation

Andrea, my husband and I are separated. I had the following dream:

I was in the house and heard him, very clearly, talking on the phone to his sister. I never saw him. But when I woke up it was as if he was here.

Second portion of this dream. There was a square table and I knew that it belonged to him. On the top of the desk their was a square section that was shiny and bright. From the right hand corner to the left corner at the top of the desk there was a very distinct line of dust. On the left hand side from the top to the bottom there was also a line of dust. It was as if something had been on the table for a long time and then removed.

Third portion: I looked out the window and a friend of mine was sitting in my driveway in her van. There was also a white van backed up to my door and people were loading my belongings into it.

Blessings,

Pats

His sister may represent you, or some aspect of yourself (or a third party) held in common with her, probably the trait that most stands out to you about her. You husband, likewise, may not be your husband. If you’re a believer, he could represent your old life, before Christ, or some aspect of yourself you feel separated from. If you were recently separated, the dream could be just your unconscious’s way of expressing the pain of having your “other half” suddenly gone from your life. Has anything else gone missing from your life or have you suffered any physical losses?

For that matter, houses generally represent ourselves in reference to the physical body that houses the soul. Are you suffering any physical ailments? A broken heart, I suspect. Could that be what was missing from the table? You gave him your heart once, so it could be seen as his possession. The moving could represent a fear or threat of death, perhaps figuratively, but it could also be a reference to people pressuring you to “move on with your life.” The emotions you felt as you watched all this will be important indicators. I’m detecting sadness and regret.

If I’m correctly discerning, and the other possibilities mentioned don’t ring a bell, barring abuse or possibly adultery being involved, or a situation where he left and the risks of him just stomping on your heart some more are too great, I’d seriously pray about asking your husband to attend marriage counseling together to see if you can work things out. Otherwise, I’d suggest you talk with your pastor or a counselor, someone who will help you through this without placing undo pressure on you. Even if adultery wasn’t involved, if he left you and is unwilling to reconcile, unless your conscience says otherwise, you are probably free to “move on” if you chose. If it was you that actually left him, and no adultery is involved, you must, biblically, either remain alone or be reconciled to your husband. Either way, the tone of the dream, as far as I can tell, is indicating you’re still mourning the absence of your husband while others are trying to help you move on with your life. Has anyone tried to introduce you to a gentleman friend recently? If so, that could have been what prompted the dream.

I should add a square table can mean an altar, which could signal you’ve taken back something you had given to God and may be reinforcing your husband as an image of your relationship with the world/the flesh and be reminiscent of the command to give ourselves to god as a living sacrifice. If that’s the case, pray and get what’s missing back on the table.

In Christ’s Service,
Andrea Graham

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Hello, Andrea

I would like assistance in interpreting this dream.
I dreamed that my recently deceased father was walking thru a yard of pretty colorful flowers (purple and white) and he was wearing a white suit. There were no frightening feelings in this dream. What do you think this means.

–alg

Dear Alg,

Unless the colors have personal associations for you, Purple is symbolic of royalty, and subsequently riches. White is predominantly purity, the white suit, my association with that is the white robes worn by the saints in John’s revelation. If your father was a believer, the dream is possibly just a reassurance that your father is with the Lord now. In general, he could also represent your Heavenly Father, or some aspect of yourself, in which case it would matter what your father’s dominant characteristics were or other associations you may have. If that’s a possiblity, what’s the first thing to come to mind when you’re asked what your father was like?

In Christ,
Andrea Graham

 

Found this dream on Adam’s blog:

 

“I had a dream that a massive swarm of grasshoppers or locusts had been spotted, and that people were warned to take refuge in their houses. I did so, and somehow developed the idea that I urgently needed to turn off the HVAC system to keep them from entering that way. At that point I woke up.”

 

Locusts were a plague of egypt, and can be a symbol of God’s judgment, or merely an indicator of trouble, possibly in your business, as a carryover from times when most of us were farmers, or, it could also mean trouble in any religious endeavors where locusts would destroy the “crops” you’re trying to ”harvest.” 

House is typically a symbol of your own body or person, but here it may mean a house of worship, or other place you would go in real life to take refuge from trouble.

The air conditioner most likely represents an opening in your personal life that is letting in the plague, which can also mean hypocrisy according to one dictionary. To give an exact interpretation, I would need to know what’s going on in this person’s daily or spiritual life, what they associate air conditioning with, if it has any corrrelaries to bodily systems in their minds (in which case it could warn of a physical ailment that needs urgent attention rather than spiritual)

In short, though, the dream is saying the climate control system of either your physical body, or the place (literal or symbolically) you’ve taken refuge in your waking life (very possibly yourself), will let in the plague, which could be a respiratory virus, or similar threat to your work or spiritual life.

As the air system of a building usually corresponds to the respiratory system, and since turning off your respiratory system would kill you, the dream may be saying the only way to survive the plague (which would represent sin in this interpretation) is to die to yourself, which means placing God in charge of your life, a key step in accepting His saving grace. As in the dream, the world often tells us to take refuge in ourselves, but as the dream indicates, only dying to ourselves and taking refuge in God can save us.

For help interpreting your dreams, see Dream a Dream