Dream Interpretation for You & Others

This is a vast topic but start with learning to interpret and understand your own dreams.

God uses a personalised symbol set with you.

With me, God started with dreams that were simple to interpret, or used the little knowledge I had of some symbolic objects, numbers and colours to give me interpretations which revealed His communication to me. See the section on some common dreams to help get you started. There are also sections on some Miscellaneous Symbols, Numbers and Colours. Most of these symbols are taken from the Bible.

When I asked Holy Spirit ‘what does that mean?’ because it wasn’t a symbol I was familiar with or was a modern symbol or something personal in my life, He asked me ‘what does that mean to you?’ I found that very helpful when interpreting my own dreams. Somehow He brings out the interpretation as I decipher symbols, context, and feelings during the dream. This background preparation greatly helps in forming the interpretation and then application.

There are various creative ways that can be used to help you interpret a dream. I use a template which includes the following:

Date: when I had the dream. As this is generally overnight, it doesn’t matter whether I had it had 11pm or 4am the next morning I will put this down as the date the next morning, ie as though I had dreamt it at 4am. It’s up to you how precise you want to be. If you wake up at a certain time after just receiving a dream it may be useful to write down the time. I am amazed how often I see repetitive numbers such as 4:44 or 5:55 etc. And although these numbers can be obviously significant, so can any number if the Lord is linking it to something like a Bible verse.

Title: give the dream a succinct title which summarises the main point of it.

Main Focus: who is the main focus in the dream. If you are participating in it that most likely it is about you. If not, it can still be about you, or an intercessory dream giving you a situation or person to pray about.

Subfocuses: what are other main things you think are important in the dream. Also lookout for the unusual, eg. being in your house and it suddenly rising up, or having a special or unique coin in your purse.

Location: where are you in the dream initially. Does the scene change during the dream eg. outside in a park and then inside a hotel or in a car park and then in an underground station.

Recurring: Have you had this dream or a similar one before, maybe on the same night!

Colour: is the dream in full or part colour, do you remember any colours in it, or was it without any colour, maybe more sepia.

Dream: write down as much detail as possible about the dream.

Feelings: these I find very important! Go through the dream again and pull out how you felt at each stage, eg. peace then surprise, or fear then peace.

Meanings: write down each symbol in the dream and what this could mean in the context of this dream. I found that when I was starting out with God He used the few symbols and colours I had on a card I bought from John Paul Jackson’s Streams Ministries so He started very gently and basic!

Tip: I use a name book to lookup names of people I have in my dreams. Often they are people I know, but sometimes they are people I don’t know but I know their name in the dream. This is often a giveaway that the name is important, especially if it matches the context or feelings in the dream.

Life situation: what is currently going on in your life that this dream could relate to. This is not always obvious to see at first glance and it may not relate at all as the dream could be for a future situation, especially if it is a warning dream. It could even be about to occur that day.

Interpretation: by the time you have been through the above you may well have an idea what this dream is about. Go through the dream again, looking at the feelings and meanings, expecting Holy Spirit to show you what it means. Ask Him to reveal the interpretation to you and pray in tongues if you can.

Application: Go through the interpretation and ask Holy Spirit to show you how to apply this dream to your life. Maybe it’s to pray about something or for someone, or to be aware of something, or to repent of a wrong attitude, or an encouragement, etc.

Streams Ministries International have a Dream Lab and this is a great example of how to work through the interpretation process.