The Dream and The Dreamer: A Brief History of Significance
by Ever wonder if that dream you had last night maybe meant something more? Dreams, from Jesus Christ to John Lennon, have changed the world and maybe yours will too.
The weight dreams carry in our lives is largely a factor of culture and upbringing, the events and ideas which affected and shaped our thought patterns and our perceptions with respect to dreams and their interpretive value. These same ideas, though seemingly insignificant, have actively influenced mankind’s history as well as its future since the dawn of dreams. When dreams are repressed, most creative endeavors go out the window with them, as was the case during the “Dark Ages” and Nazi Germany. When the dreamer is free to dream without reservation, the arts and sciences flourish, as they did during the Renaissance for example. So the question begs to be asked: what comes first, the dream or the reality? When does a dream become self-fulfilling prophecy for a believer and does it matter? What dreams across history shaped our world and what can we learn from these experiences?
Most Biblical dreams serve as either prophecy or instruction. Dreams played an integral role in the decisions people made, which explains why a good interpreter was a highly valued commodity. Joseph, the man who was sold into Egyptian slavery by his jealous brothers, was sold because he dreamed he and his brothers were in a field binding sheaves when his sheaf stood upright and his brothers’ sheaves gathered around him and bowed down. His brothers, not liking this dream too much, and thinking Joseph was getting to big for his britches, sold him into Egyptian slavery. But the story doesn’t end here; Joseph subsequently wisely interprets the Pharaoh’s dream, saving Egypt from the destitution of an impending seven-year famine. His interpretation was so salient, it gave him favor in the eyes of the Pharaoh who subsequently made him a ruler. The story swings full circle when his brothers come to Egypt to seek refuge from the famine and encounter their young brother, now a ruler of Egypt, and in fulfillment of the original dream, bow at his feet.
Moses, the champion of the Israeli cause to free itself from the clutches of Egyptian tyranny, is moved to action by his vision of God speaking to him through a burning bush. He is instructed to confront the Pharaoh with an ultimatum from God to “let His people go” and in so doing changes the destiny of a whole nation of people.
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The most important icon of the Christian faith had his young life saved three times by dreams, a ripple effect so far-reaching, its significance cannot be measured. First Joseph, engaged to a pregnant Mary and seeking to quietly put her away for her promiscuity, is met in a dream by an angel who tells him that the baby inside Mary is the Son of God and that he is to marry her and raise Jesus, as he is to be called, as his own son. Then at his birth or shortly thereafter, Jesus is saved by another instructional dream given to the Magi who come to worship him from the East. The dream warns that the King of Judea has less than honorable intentions toward the young Jesus and they therefore must return home on an alternate route. Then Jesus is saved a third time when his father Joseph once again has a dream, this time to flee with his family from Judea. They escape in the night to Egypt, and Herod subsequently massacres every male less than two years of age residing in Judea at the time.
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