I pray we hear and then are willing to be obedient.

Funny about God using dreams– when you wake up, you have no doubt that God has been speaking to you. His handprints are all over the experience or voice you heard, and they don’t fly away from memory the way that some dreams do. However fearsome, awesome, or clarifying, they do “stick”–part of the transformation process??

I really like Shay’s term “thin places.” I used to resent waking up at night and not being able to get back to sleep. That was back in my frenzied life when I was so sleep deprived. Nowadays, I am happy to report that suddenly finding myself awake in the middle of the night has an expectancy to it…what do you want to show me, Lord? I pray, too, for more!

Thanks for the clarifying remarks. In my post I float back and forth between sleep dreams and visionary dreams without differentiating. I too strongly believe God uses both. We definitely look towards the dreams that we believe we are more cognitively involved in, but God definitely uses our subconscious to communicate real truth to us.

When we truly receive dreams from God, they are awe-inspiring, they draw us into God’s mystery, they strike fear in our hearts, and they transform our souls in ways we can never know.

Along with the Enlightenment fueled reliance on reason, the other major reason I see people not being led by God’s dreams and visions is that we are not allowing silence and proper sleep patterns into our lives. When we stay up late, get up early, and work hard all day we cannot rest properly at night. When we let stress keep us up or wake us up, we too often turn on the TV instead of turning to God. Some of the ‘thin places’ in my life where I connect with God most intimately are at 2 in the morning when I wake up for apparently no reason and I listen for God or when I wake up because God has spoken clearly to me in a dream. I pray these moments will come more often for me and for all.