How to Know If a Dream Is From God

You woke with a dream still on you, and a question you could not shake: was that God, or was that only me? It is the right question, and an old one. Not every voice in the night is His. Scripture never asks you to take a dream at face value; it asks you to test it. What follows is how that testing is done.

First, settle what a dream from God actually is

A dream from God is not a crystal ball, and reading one is not fortune telling. To interpret a dream is not to predict the future. It is to hear what God is saying to you. Sometimes what He says concerns the future; more often it concerns a danger, a decision, the heart of a person near you, or the state of your own soul. A dream is a message, and a message calls for a reader, not a psychic.

So the question is never "what does this symbol mean" in the abstract. No dictionary of symbols can tell you, because God writes to each of His children in a different hand. He speaks to you in your own images: your kitchen, your trade, your family, the things your eyes have seen. The meaning is personal because the Sender is.

Three questions that test any dream

A reader of messages needs answers to exactly three questions. Hold them like keys on one ring.

• Whose voice is this? The question of the source, because not every dream is from God.
• What is it saying? The question of the language He has used with you.
• What am I to do about it? The question of response, because a message from God is never sent for your information only.

This article stays with the first question, because it is the one that keeps people awake: how do you tell His voice from your own, or from the enemy's?

Signs a dream carries the weight of God

1. It tells you something you could not have authored

Memory replays what it has stored. Imagination rearranges what memory hands it. But when a dream delivers a fact, a sentence, a knowledge you did not possess and could not have assembled from anything you knew, pay attention. I once dreamed a woman confessing something about herself I had no way of knowing, and when it proved true, I understood I had not invented it. I had received it. Unfamiliarity alone is not proof of a dream's source, but a dream that hands you what you could not have made yourself is worth weighing on your knees.

2. It bears the character of God, not only strong emotion

Your resentment can dress itself in a dream and put accusations in someone's mouth. So can your fear. Test the fruit. God corrects to restore, never to crush; He warns to protect, never merely to frighten. What He reveals, He reveals to help, never to expose. A dream that leaves you with contempt for another person, or with despair about yourself, should be held at arm's length. A dream that leaves you with sober gratitude, with a clear thing to do, with love that costs you something, carries His fingerprints.

3. It survives the morning, and it survives Scripture

A dream from God does not evaporate by breakfast; it stays, and it will not let you go. And it never contradicts the Book. Nothing God says in the night will undo what He has already said in His Word. If a dream urges you toward something Scripture forbids, the matter is settled, whatever the dream felt like. Test every dream against the Bible, and you are encouraged to.

4. It often comes to those who are not even seeking it

Here is a thing that surprises people. God speaks in dreams especially to those who will not hear Him any other way. Pharaoh received one. So did Nebuchadnezzar, at war with Him. So did Pilate's wife, a pagan woman who rose from her sleep to call Christ righteous, warned in a dream when those around her were not. If God crosses enemy lines to warn His enemies in their sleep, He will not stay silent toward His own child who falls asleep wanting to hear Him. Receiving a dream certifies nothing about you. It certifies everything about the Giver.

Write it down before you judge it

One practice decides more than any rule: write your dreams down. Write while the dew is still on it, the date, the scenes, the words spoken, the weight it left on you, even when none of it makes sense yet. Sense is not your assignment at six in the morning. Custody is. The morning I understood my own first dream, understanding came hours behind the pen, and the dream was there to meet it because I had written it while my verdict on it was still wrong. A dream unwritten is gone by breakfast.

Then seek the meaning, and expect to receive it

The dream comes from God, and the understanding comes from God too, and it comes to those who seek it. Mark the order: the dream, then the seeking, then the understanding. You are not begging at the door of a reluctant God. You are learning the language of a Father who has been speaking all along. The question Elihu put to us long ago is the only one left: God speaks in one way, and in two, though man does not perceive it. Will you perceive it?