Dreamweaver
By Odilon Redon
“‘In the last days,’ God says,
‘I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and your daughters will prophesy,
And your young men will see visions,
And your old men will dream dreams.’”
Acts 2:17
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Since the very beginning, the faithful have understood that God does not confine His voice to the waking hours. He speaks, sometimes, in the stillness of sleep. The prophet Joel foresaw a day when this kind of communion would be poured out generously: “‘In the last days,’ God says, ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, and your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams.” Dreams, in other words, are not incidental to the life of the Spirit—they are part of its promised inheritance.
Joseph Smith affirmed this same hope plainly, teaching that “we believe that we have a right to revelations, visions, and dreams from God, our Heavenly Father; and light and intelligence, through the gift of the Holy Ghost on all subjects pertaining to our spiritual welfare; if it so be that we keep his commandments, so as to render ourselves worthy in his sight.” Revelation through dreams is not a relic of an ancient age; it is an open invitation extended to all who seek it sincerely.
And why should sleep be such a fitting venue for the divine? The Puritan theologian Matthew Poole offered an answer: “God is pleased sometimes to instruct and admonish men by dreams, opening their ears and minds, which in the day-time are shut by the noise and business of the world.” He knows that the clamor of daily life can so easily crowd out the still, small voice. Parley P. Pratt described the same truth in different terms—when “the outward organs of thought and perception are released from their activity, the nerves unstrung, and the whole of mortal humanity lies hushed in quiet slumbers, it is then that the spiritual organs are at liberty ... susceptible of converse with Deity, or of communion with angels.”
There is a humility in this. Rev. Matthew Henry observed that “in a dream, and in slumberings upon the bed, God has ways of opening the ears of men, and sealing their instruction. God has immediate access to the spirits of men.” Alexander Maclaren pressed the point further. Suggesting that we are often nearer to God when asleep than awake, he wrote that “God’s most gracious approaches are made to us when we are passive… when the will is quiet and we are not drumming in His ears with our petitions, He sometimes gets access to us.” We so often imagine prayer as our speaking; yet the deeper grace may lie in our finally falling silent and being still enough to listen.
Perhaps this is what Richard Rohr meant when he taught that “God comes to us disguised as our life,” and that, through quiet contemplation, we “allow God to work in us beyond what we can control, beyond the thinking mind, in that deep place that is akin to sleep itself.” If we will quiet ourselves — in sleep, in contemplation, in surrender — we may find that God has been speaking to us all along, waiting only for the noise of the world to fade.
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