Dreams and Visions: Understanding God's Directions

This book is about dreams and visions, two related but distinct channels through which God has always spoken and continues to speak today. It is not a continuation of an earlier book, Do You Want to Hear the Voice of God? (available on Amazon), though that book explores the broader subject of hearing God's voice. This one focuses on dreams and visions alone. This book is arranged as a survey rather than a strict argument from beginning to end. Each chapter takes a single account-sometimes a well-known one, sometimes a passage easy to read past without noticing -and asks what it actually shows about how God has used dreams and visions across the whole of Scripture, from the earliest chapters of Genesis to the closing vision of Revelation. Read in sequence, a shape does emerge: dreams and visions running like a continuous thread through every major turn in the biblical story, given to kings and to shepherds, to prophets and to fugitives, to the willing and, on occasion, to the reluctant. Read out of sequence, a chapter at a time, each account should still stand on its own. A note on how to read what follows. Nothing here is offered as a substitute for Scripture itself, or as a formula guaranteeing that a dream will come, or come with a particular meaning. The purpose is narrower and, hopefully, more useful: to build a working familiarity with how dreams and visions actually function across the Bible's own pages, so that if and when God chooses to speak this way to you, the account is not entirely unfamiliar territory.