The Bible
In Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language (1968), by John A. Sanford, he mentions Numbers 12:6, where God clearly announces that he speaks to prophets through visions and dreams. Sanford also addresses the first two chapters of Matthew and says, “We further establish that every decision in this action-packed section is based upon a revelation made by God through a dream.” He continues to say, “Divine authorship of the dream is found from first to last in the Bible! The Book of Genesis is filled with dream material, and the Bible closes with the Book of Revelation, which is itself entirely a vision.” It is mentioned all over the Bible that God came to so-and-so through a dream in the night. “Dreams were regarded as manifestations of divine intention, as one of God’s ways of communicating with me.” Sanford spends nearly three chapters displaying how often dreams appeared in the Bible. He says there are actually hundreds upon hundreds of portions in the Bible that mention or display the role of dreams in the contents of this massive material, which spanned many authors and many time periods. Dreams as messages from God remain a constant. This is his main point.
The very early church regarded dreams as continuing revelations from God. However, this changed greatly as the church went on, laments Sanford. “In this, we differ greatly from the early Church Fathers, most of whom declared the dream to be the Voice of God and the spiritual world. But our objections are rationalizations. The truth is, as the Epistle to the Hebrews says, “‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’ We much prefer the security of our rationality to the awesome experience of dealing with a living voice.” Sanford continues by saying that we have decided man may only find God through rational thinking, “everywhere except in his own soul, which is in fact the fountainhead of religious experience. The result is that we Christians are afraid today of that very soul from which our heritage springs; we want creeds, not religious experiences, and dogma, not inspiration.”
Sanford further mentions his disappointment in the fact that, “It is sometimes supposed today that to have a dream is permissible enough, but to have a vision is a sign of insanity or mental derangement of some kind.” Sometimes I wonder how sane some of the authors of the Bible really were, and if they were having visions of grandeur, if they really had a vision, or if their visions were a product of some sort of religious psychosis. Sanford answers this question by saying, “It is not the vision which is a sign of mental derangement, but the point of view from which the ego regards the vision. In insanity the vision is accepted as literal, external reality… In the normal ego, however, the vision is recognized for its subjective internal nature.”