DDAI 001 – INTRODUCTION

A young woman, had a dream when her husband who was a soldier serving in northern Nigeria, returned home naked and looking unhappy. She discussed it with me and I knew all was not well with the man. Few days after she was told that her husband had died in the battle field. One night my wife woke up shouting “in the name of Jesus.” She had a dream where a large structure of a building that was covering her fell backwards and collapsed completely. There was a chain linking her to the building and she was struggling to free her hand when she woke up. We prayed and cancelled the dream and its meaning; we declared that the meaning of that dream must not find fulfillment in the real life. Later that day I had an accident and only God kept me alive. The dream spoke and we acted and neutralized its meaning.

Years back I attended a prayer vigil in a friend’s church. They are the sleepy kind of church and so their prayer vigils were often cold because the few people that came slept through the meeting. On this particular night all eyes remained open and alert till daybreak because the subject of discussion was Dreams and Their Interpretations. In Deliverance School Online and School for Deliverance and Spiritual Warfare, even students you wonder if they were dumb would ask many questions when we discussed Dreams and Interpretations as a course. Dream as a subject catches the attention of most people because everyone wants to know the meaning of his dream. It is very rare to find a man or woman who is not rejoicing over or lamenting over what he did or did not do after a dream.

We have bible instances that corroborates what we have said here.

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” Matt 2:13NIV

While Pilate was sitting on the judge’s seat, his wife sent him this message: “Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him.” Matt 27:19NIV

In these two passages of the bible the reactions of the dreamers will determine the outcome of the narrative. If Joseph forgot or ignored that dream, his son would have died in a few days’ time. That does not in any way mean that there was something wrong with his son’s destiny or that God changed His plan concerning the son but it would have been the result of the failure of his parents. I fear to say that there are many people suffering today because of such failures.

In the second case, Pilate would have drawn blood guilt on his entire generations if Pilate’s wife overlooked her dream that faithful day or if Pilate himself refused to listen to his wife. Generational curses remain a serious problem in every part of the world and as serious as the associated problems are, most people don’t know the root of their problem. Perhaps if they had a dreamer mother and a listening father, their life would not be in the mess it is today

Not all dreams are straight forward messages like the two above, hence they need interpretation. I have witnessed when wrong interpretation of a dream created more problems than it came to solve. Yet, there are dreams that are simply torture and have no message except that it came to make the dreamer’s life miserable. A week hardly passes by when somebody has not called me to narrate this kind of torture dreams. It is hard to convince such persons not to worry about the meaning of the dream. Here devil is an expert because he will send such dreams repeatedly and I can tell you as a deliverance minister, the dreamer will never know peace until he or she develops the heart attitude of overlooking such dreams. The challenge however is how to know to differentiate such dreams from important dreams that appear like nightmares. Yes, there are many such dreams in the bible one would have been tempted to regard them as nightmares but they carry important messages that if ignored, could have serious consequences.

This is the focus of this course; Dreams and Their Interpretations

We will not be discussing as some popular dream experts who claim to know the meaning of every dream and have a catalog of all of them. In fact, it is safe for anyone to assume such status.

Someone sent me the following –

Hallelujah to Jesus Christ of Nazareth!! Pastor, God bless you.

Like you put it, there are non-Christians who claim to have the gift of dream interpretation. I remember one of them in the YouTube claiming to interpret, here are some of their interpretations: That snake means wisdom and opportunity whenever it’s pursuing you in the dream. When I heard their interpretation, I immediately deleted and blocked their channels. Those ones were Indians in some Asian races. Thank you, Pastor

Our intention in this course is to clear air on these and similar issues

You are advised to follow prayerfully while listening to the Holy Spirit to teach you in the language you can understand.

Is it possible to show too much concern over our dreams?

We will like to state that concern for our dreams is very natural and should be encouraged. You begin to appreciate this when you come face to face with a situation that resulted because the dreamer or those, he shared it with did not do enough about a dream.

Let us take a look at the following scripture.

In the top basket were all kinds of baked goods for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating them out of the basket on my head.”  Gen 40:17NIV

The above text is a man’s account of what he had as part of his dream while he slept. It is even sadder to observe that at the time he was telling this dream, he had been demoted and was languishing in prison. The said dream was not the beginning of the dealings of his enemies but the next phase which turned out to be the last phase. I wish that you observe the tenses in that account – the birds were eating them out of the basket on my head. The birds did not pick one of the loaves of bread and fly away but turned his head into witchcraft dining table. This man’s head or soul or if you like, whole life became a feasting place for witches and demons but we are not told how long it had been.

Let us see the interpretation of this dream

“This is what it means,” Joseph said. “The three baskets are three days. Within three days Pharaoh will lift off your head and hang you on a tree. And the birds will eat away your flesh.” Now the third day was Pharaoh’s birthday, and he gave a feast for all his officials. He lifted up the heads of the chief cupbearer and the chief baker in the presence of his officials: He restored the chief cupbearer to his position, so that he once again put the cup into Pharaoh’s hand, but he hanged the chief baker, just as Joseph had said to them in his interpretation Gen 40:18-22NIV

So, at the point he was narrating the dream, the matter was over; what he saw in that dream was a final verdict; he was finished in the spirit and so was finished in real life. Can anybody at this point say that whoever is showing too much concern for his dreams is out of his mind? Even though the bible did not say so, I strongly believe that this baker has had several dreams as the enemy’s activities progressed in his life but he never showed concern neither did he see it necessary to pause and consider the direction of his life. From one dream that looked like nightmare to another one that he could not understand until he found himself in the prison. Until he found an interpreter there seemed to be no connection between the dream and its meaning. Birds eating bread in the basket on one’s head does not seem like death threat to me but that was what it meant. In this we see the very important need to have interpretation to every dream, even if it is senseless, let it be cleared as that.

The Lord Jesus Christ gave a similar account in the gospels –

Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.  “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’  “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. “The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’  “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. Matt 13:24-30NIV

The dangerous contamination was done while all men slept and at the time the servant realized something had been done, the roots of the weeds were already entangled with those of the good seed. Jesus Christ believed that any rescue operation at that time will do more harm than good. So he advised that the owner of the field which had been contaminated must have to bear the error throughout his life time. It is a gory image but that is what it is. That is why spiritual carelessness is dangerous. Yes, for those of us who argue about spiritual things and do nothing to disinfect their lives through warfare prayers this maybe the next level of their whole being. We will see as we carry on in this study that this kind of activities is obviously reported in the dream window as Status Dream but either that the dream window was not working or that it was blocked through diabolic means, resulting that the victim did not catch the message. Status Dreams mean that the dream is talking about the present state of things with the dreamer.

I want to believe that if the baker is a spirit-minded person, he could have started acting on the processes of recovery before he got to the point of no return. This a lesson we can learn from Pharaoh when he had what some preachers today still call nightmare.

Two years after the baker had his last dream and was killed, the Pharaoh also had his own dreams.

When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream: He was standing by the Nile, when out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile and stood beside those on the riverbank. And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows. Then Pharaoh woke up. He fell asleep again and had a second dream: Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk. After them, seven other heads of grain sprouted — thin and scorched by the east wind. The thin heads of grain swallowed up the seven healthy, full heads. Then Pharaoh woke up; it had been a dream. In the morning his mind was troubled, so he sent for all the magicians and wise men of Egypt. Pharaoh told them his dreams, but no one could interpret them for him Gen 41:1-8NIV

The point you just read, “His mind was troubled” is what some describe as too much concern over the meaning of a dream. If you follow that bible account you see how he violated protocol and brought a prisoner from the prison house just to hear the interpretation of the dream. Well, if he was the arrogant kind that thought it a dishonor for his majesty to talk with a prisoner, he would have wastefully enjoyed the first seven years of abundance and would have had to bury thousands of his subjects during the following seven years of harsh famine. This would have happened not because it was God’s will but because the dreamer did nothing about his revelation.

A Nigerian soldier and pilot had a dream that told him that if he travelled with his boss he will die on that trip. He shared the dream with his wife but still made the trip and as expected he died in a plane crash with his boss.

There is every indication that the kings of old understood the importance and implications of dreams. This explains why many of them showed “too much concern” over the meaning of their dreams. Radical Nebuchadnezzar had spent years to train some young men he had taken captive from many nations of the world that were under his kingdom. He spent money, time and manpower to raise them but because they failed to interpret a dream, he decided to kill all of them off. It was his persistence and insistence that compelled Daniel and his friends to declare a fast and vigil that opened heaven to release the meaning of the dream. That turned out to be a revelation from God to him on what the future held. (Daniel Chapter 2)

It is better one shows much concern about the meaning of a dream than he is negligent and suffers immensely. Having said that, we will not fail to acknowledge that some have suffered harm because of too much concern over nothing. We will take a look at that as we go on in this meditation.