Why Dreams Still Disturb Us
Even the Bible treats dreams with more caution than most people realise
Welcome to today’s reflection.
Every day at Sacred & Secular, I explore the strange places where ordinary life, faith, doubt, mystery, and human experience overlap. Paid subscribers receive these reflections daily in their inbox.
I have always been someone who dreams a lot.
Some dreams are easy to explain. They are the classic stress dreams where you wake up, realising your brain simply recycled whatever you were thinking about before bed.
Other dreams are completely bizarre. Familiar people appear in impossible places. Conversations make no sense. Entire situations unfold like a movie, with the kind of strange logic that only seems believable while you are asleep.
When I was younger, I had a recurring nightmare about some kind of monster under the bed. I cannot even remember exactly what it looked like now, but it was very real, and I was terrified. I would lie awake staring into the darkness, convinced something was there waiting for me. It lasted for years.
Then one day it simply stopped.
No explanation.
No dramatic moment of closure.
The dream just vanished from my life as suddenly as it had arrived.
Dreams are strange like that. Even as adults, long after we stop believing in monsters under the bed, dreams still have the ability to affect us. Sometimes they linger in the mind or heart for hours after waking. Occasionally for days. We know they are not “real” in the ordinary sense, and yet they still affect us emotionally as if they were.
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Human beings have always been fascinated by dreams.
Ancient cultures often treated them as messages from the gods. Modern psychology usually approaches them as expressions of the subconscious mind. Most of us are somewhere in between, wondering if dreams mean anything at all.
The Bible has a surprisingly interesting answer to that question.
Not because scripture dismisses dreams, but because it treats them very differently from the way modern people often do.
One of the first things you notice when reading the Bible carefully is that dreams almost always appear at moments when something larger is changing.
Joseph dreams before the future of his family changes forever. Pharaoh dreams before famine transforms Egypt. Nebuchadnezzar dreams before empires rise and fall.
Even Joseph, the husband of Mary, receives dreams at the moment the story of Jesus enters the world.
Dreams in scripture are rarely about private self-discovery. They are usually connected to history, direction, warning, or change.
That feels very different from the way we talk about dreams now. Today, we often see dreams as windows into ourselves. The biblical writers tend to see them as windows into the wider story unfolding around us.
Yet what fascinates me most is that the Bible is also deeply cautious about dreams.
That surprised me when I first began noticing it.
