A Christian Key to Understanding Dreams Maria Isabel Pita
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Dreaming with the Lord A Christian Key to Understanding Dreams Maria Isabel Pita © 2018 by Maria Isabel Pita All Rights Reserved Sections of this book may be freely shared as long as all quotes are properly credited. Table of Contents Forward............................................................................................................................................5 1—Dreams and Christianity.............................................................................................................6 2—Body and Soul............................................................................................................................9 3—Lucid Dreaming Naturally........................................................................................................15 4—Reading the Night's Messages..................................................................................................19 5—The Theory of Reincarnation....................................................................................................26 6—Demons on Our Doorstep.........................................................................................................33 7—Angels of God..........................................................................................................................41 8—Meeting in Dreams...................................................................................................................53 9—Dreaming of the Dead and Purgatory.......................................................................................62 10—Dreams of Jesus......................................................................................................................71 11—Time & Revelation.................................................................................................................77 12—Spiritual Warfare....................................................................................................................88 13—God's Business........................................................................................................................95 14—Called to Contemplation.......................................................................................................101 Afterword—"He and I"................................................................................................................107 "Who is such a stranger to human experience as not sometimes to have perceived some truth in dreams?"—Tertulliani Forward From the very first night I began lucid dreaming on a regular basis, I encountered a male dream figure who stood out from all the others. In His presence, I was nearly overwhelmed by the love we felt for each other. There was nothing sexual about it; our love was simply everything. Then one night, I felt his breath in the dream when he told me he loved me, and kissed me. No one in my dreams had ever spoken those words to me, "I love you." That morning when I woke up, I finally dared to ask myself: Could this beloved Guardian Lord of my dreams be Christ—God Himself? Following the clues, I discovered what I least expected, and C.S. Lewis perfectly describes the shock I felt, except I did not draw back, on the contrary: "The shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive’. And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back —I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap —best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion… suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us? So it is a sort of Rubicon. One goes across; or not. But if one does, there is no manner of security against miracles. One may be in for anything.”ii In my autobiographical account, Lucid Dreams & the Holy Spirit, I share how I was led home to Christ through lucid dreaming as a spiritual practice. Dream by dream, my soul was guided along a path in keeping with Christian mystical tradition. But it was only the beginning. 1—Dreams and Christianity Just as the wheel was invented ages ago, and is the same now as it has always been, so too have people been dreaming and interpreting their dreams. Contrary to popular belief, dream interpretation did not begin with Freud. Nor are the spiritual realms of the dream space the special domain of Tibetan Buddhist monks, Australian Aboriginees, Native Americans, the New Age religion, etc. And yet rare in the growing amount of contemporary dream literature is the mention of Christianity. This is not only sad it is also very strange, for in Christianity (and in Judaism, from which it flowered) dreams and visions play a vital role. Morton T. Kelsey wrote in his seminal work, God, Dreams, and Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams: "The early Christian church viewed the dream as one of the most significant and most important ways in which God revealed his will to human beings. Dreams were understood to give people access to a reality that was difficult to contact in any other way. Not only do we find this view in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and in the Church Fathers up to the time of Aquinas, but it is the attitude of nearly every other major religion of the world."iii In the third century of our era, Gregory of Nyssa foreshadowed modern depth psychology. Analysts use different terms these days, but Gregory (one of the Church Fathers who wrote about dreams) believed there is a natural foreknowledge that comes in an unknown way through the non-rational part of the soul (the "unconscious") and that it is through this part of the soul that God communicates directly. He also wrote that dreams can reflect our personality, our physical and emotional condition, and give us clues as to the sickness of our body. "In the fifth century of our era, Synesius of Cyrene anticipated many of Carl Jung's theories. Jung went on to say that the nearest approach to his treatment of patients was the classical Christian direction used in France in the nineteenth century by the 'directors of conscience'... The dream, properly understood, was believed to give religious insight, wisdom, and direction... The gifts of the Spirit mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12... are one of the crowning evidences of the action of spiritual reality in the life of human beings, and the dream is one of these evidences, a common and natural one... something other than physical reality can invade consciousness directly... (and) God still speaks to men and women through this kind of experience."iv In the writings of the early Church, numerous references are made to pagans who became Christians as a result of waking visions as well as dreams of the night. According to the third century theologian Origen of Alexandria, dreams, waking visions, and divine inspiration are all essentially the same thing—a way God reveals himself to us, and gives us a symbolic knowledge of the nature of the spiritual world; of heaven. "In addition to the visions and revelation granted to people directly, the New Testament believes that men and women have seen the reality of the nonphysical world incarnated in Jesus Christ, and so they can look to him as their revelation (Rom. 16:25; Gal. 1:12; 1 Peter 1:13)... He is the disclosure of the ultimate nature of nonphysical reality... there is little suggestion in the New Testament that the revelation of Jesus Christ has put an end to direct revelation in dreams or visions. Rather, the latter is heightened."v I know for a fact that dreams are still a normal way to receive visions from God, because it was through dreams that I fully came to experience, understand and embrace the truth of the Christian faith. The Church calls such dreams a Charisma—any good gift that flows down to us from God's love. “By taking a summary look at the teaching and practice of the Church Fathers... we can discern a well-integrated tradition of dreams and dreamwork and recognize its continuity with that of the Old and New Testament... 'Dreams, more than any other thing, entice us toward hope,’ wrote Synesius of Cyrene, a fifth century bishop of Ptolemais, 'and when our heart spontaneously presents hope to us, as happens in our sleeping state, then we have in the promise of our dreams a pledge from the divinity'... Tertullian, a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa, spoke of dreams as one of the charismata of God, and believed that dreams and visions were promised to people of his own day just as much as they were to the first apostles."vi People would be disturbed to see a cat with its whiskers clipped off. Whiskers are part of a cat’s sensory perceptions, a vital part of how it collects information and makes sense of it. Our dreams are akin to cat’s whiskers, and when we cut ourselves off from the information they provide us, when we