Ever dream you are flying? I remember the soaring feeling in my dreams as a young child. The freedom…the release…the hope…the sense that I was made for more in this life….
Don’t think you dream at night? Science has proven that we all dream. Early thought was that dreams occur in our rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, but dream states can happen during various stages of sleep. We all dream about 4-5 times a night, but you probably just don’t remember them.
Science is still trying to figure this one out. One theory is our short term memory isn’t functioning. Others suspect if you don’t have an association to recall the dream, it will remain hidden from your conscious mind.
You will spend approximately a third of your dreaming. By the time you are 70 years old, you have will have pend 6 years of your life in dreamland. Tests on sleep deprivation prove that sleep and the accompaniment of dreams is a necessity we cannot live without.
Are Dreams Meaningful?
Personally, I believe we’ve lost the significance of dreams. We don’t remember dreams because we don’t value them – and may not even understand them. The following people, however, have let their dreams have a direct impact on their lives.
Einstein used concepts from his dream world to arrive at his theory of relativity.- James Cameron, director of Titanic, used dreams of flying as the inspiration to create the movie Avatar.
- Another director, Chris Nolan, mined his own dreams to conceive Inception.
- Thomas Edison came up with the idea for the electric lamp in a dream.
God is probably speaking to all of us through our dreams much more than we can imagine. Many people pay absolutely no attention to their dreams and eventually get to the place where they think they don’t dream.
I remember dreaming about scores of music as a child. I took piano lessons for a few years, but the music I was reading in my dreams was more than Chopin or Beethoven could have ever written. The music seems to come alive in my dreams, both shifting into the higher notes and the lower notes as the pages turned effortlessly.
One might look at this dream and think I was going to become a professional piano player. Let me just say, you don’t want to be in ear shot of any piano music I try to play these days! But, with a little spiritual fine tuning, I have come to learn that God sees my life as a beautiful song. It may echo high notes, but it may also reach low points. Nonetheless, whatever song is played from my life, it was mastered by a God who knows how to create a melody that sounds perfect in His ears!
Why You Should Listen To Your Dreams
God has chosen to communicate with us through dreams (with many examples in the Bible, like in Matthew 1 – Joseph was told in a dream to take Mary, though pregnant, as his wife). You can find counsel, stories, actions, ideas, warnings and so much more when you lay your head to the pillow each night!
Our bodies need rest at night, but our mind and spiritual bodies are still at work. God can communicate with you through dreams, while your intellect rests. God by-passes your every day fight to get through the day, accomplish your to-do list, get dinner on the table and master your own fate.
To quote my favorite author, Madeleine L’Engle:
“In our dreams we are able to fly…a remembering of how we are meant to be.”
A dream that is not understood is simply a mere occurrence, but when understood a dream can become a life-changing experience.
The reason you are reading this is because somehow I survived. Young and dumb, I once ventured out on a boogie board on the north shore of the island of Oahu, near the famous and frightening Banzai Pipeline surf reef. Did I mention I am from Kansas?
In general, we all find disease frustrating and can easily empathize with those afflicted and affected. However, diseases that effect children stir up a whole different set of emotions ranging from anger to zeal – anger in terms of how could this be happening and zeal to conquer.
Like the concert virtuoso who sets the tension on a violin string with precision, the Grand Maestro of the Universe determined a specific blood pressure, which would be essential to healthy human life. In the Garden of Eden, God looked at the living bodies he meticulously fashioned and said, “It is good.” In other words: even down to the diminutive details we all take for granted or never slow down to notice, all things both micro and macro, internal and external, are now perfectly set for healthy life to flourish and thrive.
The Bible says a lot about the heart, and even about the importance of having a healthy heart. Something as simple as joy directly affects blood flow. “A merry heart is like good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.” (Proverbs 17:22) Aside from the astonishing fact that this verse was written a couple millennia before modern medicine discovered the role of the bones in making blood for the heart, there is this now documentable reality that these seemingly non-biological factors directly affect us physically. This monthly column on the Spiritual Dimensions of Wellness is devoted to what was obvious even to healing practitioners in the ancient world – that a wide range of intangible dynamics, especially emotional factors and spiritual forces, directly impact our bodies for good and for bad.
