It’s often difficult to know which is which.
Sometimes you know that a dream is just your way of working out the stresses of the day. One night I dreamed that I was working with numbers all night — but that’s what I had been doing earlier that day, working with excel spreadsheets.
Sometimes a dream is all of your fears, all mixed up in a horrible chase scene. They’re often ridiculous — such as when I was pregnant I dreamed I was having a litter of puppies. Or frightening. The native Americans may call them fretful dreams as opposed to visions. I love that old movie, Thunderheart, where the FBI agent, half Sioux, has a revelatory dream that guides him to his future.
Sometimes dreams are connected to your spouse. And even these can be silly. My sister dreamed she was making mashed potatoes-and her husband woke up in the morning to announce, “how funny, last night I dreamed I was eating mashed potatoes all night.” I dreamed that somehow I had gotten all of these tattoos covering my entire body. I was horrified — how did that happen? In the morning when I was relating this to my husband he told me he had seen a tv show the night before of a woman with tattoos covering her body. We weren’t even in the same city — he was traveling on business.
Dreams may have a message. Or may foretell future events.
I remember hearing Hugh Nibley say that he had a lot of 4 A.M.-ers — early morning dreams of future events. One time, he dreamed he was swimming in the ocean around a huge ship, which he later identified as Pearl Harbor and World War II, of which he played a part.
My daughter just recently received a phone call from one of our friends — a onetime neighbor of 10 years. The neighbor called my daughter to relate a poignant dream she had — that in the dream my daughter had told her to connect with two old friends. Our neighbor felt that the message was important and coming through my daughter from God. The next morning, the neighbor got a text message from one of those friends. She knew what to do.
I once dreamed there was a snake in my mom’s yard and she put a can on top of it to trap it. I drew a picture of it in my journal. Years later, she was bit by a baby rattler in her front yard. When I asked her what happened to the snake she said she put a pot on it, to kill it. So strange. I guess that falls into the category of a precognitive dream.
Sometimes in my dream I talk with people who have passed into the next sphere — like my dad. My husband saw our first child in a dream, and we knew she was a girl.
The hard part is to figure out what has meaning and what is just you sifting through your troubles. God communicates with us through this medium. But not everything we dream is communication.
