When I was in high school, I dreamt a ton. So much so that I kept a dream journal. It’s interesting to go back and read it every now and then. I dreamt about Sean Bean a lot. Jokes aside, I do believe dreams have significance and have something to tell us. Most often, they really are just a rearranging of thoughts: your brain rehashing the events of the day and filing things away in the proper folders. That’s why I can usually point to elements of my dreams and say “yes, that’s there because I ate that or saw a TV show about that or talked about that person.” But sometimes, dreams have more significance.
If I dream something I can’t explain away with “I saw that the day before, etc.” I pay more attention to it. It’s those dreams that I think are trying to tell me something. I believe you can sometimes use your dreams to psychoanalyze yourself, so to speak. I don’t think everything is Freudian, but sometimes you can study your dream and realize that it’s about a latent fear or desire you haven’t addressed in your waking consciousness. That can be helpful in forcing you to address feelings that you had hitherto tried to suppress. I had one of those this past week. It wasn’t a desire that I would call subconscious; I definitely had an awareness of it. But the dream heightened my awareness of it, and I’m hoping that the dream ends up being prophetic too. At the time, it gave me a sense of calm, anyway.
If I dream about a person who I have no idea how they came to be in my dream (I haven’t spoken to them recently or even thought of them), I take it as a sign that I should pray for them. I don’t know why. I just get an impression that I should pray for that person.
It’s not fashionable to pay attention to dreams anymore. It’s mostly associated with pop psychology or New Age mysticism. But biblically, God does use dreams to speak to us. Do I think He does that with great frequency these days? No. But I’m not willing to say He never does it. Sure, sometimes dreams are merely a result of the spicy chicken sandwich you had right before bed. But sometimes they’re not. Rather than follow the extreme of dismissing all dreams as meaningless or following the other extreme of trying to find meaning in every dream, I think it’s important to develop a sense of discernment when it comes to our dreams and find a wise middle ground.