To grow in this avenue of hearing God’s voice, it’s helpful to keep a dream journal around. This is a good idea for several reasons, the first being pretty obvious: If you don’t write it down, you might forget it—or at least you may not remember the details well enough and you need as many details as possible to come to an accurate interpretation. That’s just how dreams work. There have been several times where I’ve opened my notes app on my phone to find I wrote a dream down a few nights before that I hardly remember writing and would have totally forgot had I not.
Secondly, interpretation takes a fair amount of mental work. Sometimes a dream will be so energizing that you’ll wake up and be ready to jump on it, but other times you’ll just want to write down the details and deal with the interpretation in the morning.
Another important reason to keep a dream journal is to make sure you’re faithful to the dream you were given. In general, humans change the way they tell stories over the course of time. Certain details become cemented and the rest of the story begins to play around those details. Things get added in and other things get taken out.
Since dreams are already fleeting, it becomes very easy to turn them into something they never were. We’re not usually trying to be deceptive when we alter the way we tell stories or dreams, it’s just a part of the way our minds work. That’s why a dream journal will help keep you accountable to the word you were given.
Want to continue the conversation? Take the long journey with my book/audiobook, The Rush and the Rest, or take a shorter path with my condensed version, Fantasy IRL.
Jamin Bradley 