Warning Dreams Are Good Dreams

The night before last I had a strange dream in which I was talking to a woman who was showing me her garden. In this garden there was a lot of poison ivy growing, as well as some other plants—one of which she said sometimes is poison ivy in disguise. I don’t recall more details of the dream, but it struck me as strange that poison ivy would disguise itself as some other kind of plant that looks nothing like it. On waking, I had to go bury a dead goat before church as one of my stepdaughter’s goats died from a copper deficiency and they were unable to get more of the supplement in time to save it. We had prayed for its resurrection the two days prior and with no results, we decided it was time to bury it, which became my job.

I loaded the goat up in a wagon and pulled it toward the back of our property which is forested and we don’t currently use for anything (other than burying goats), and was getting ready to turn into this one clearing-area when I stopped—because I realized I was about to walk through a patch of poison ivy. Now, poison ivy by itself is really annoying because the oils on the plant create an immune cascade in the body that causes an inflammatory response (the rash and itching) long after you have already washed the oils off your skin. In my case though, the inflammatory response likes to compete inside my body for the title of “Longest Ongoing Ivy Inflammatory Response” so even a week after I was exposed my body will still be creating new rashes—even after it has covered a large portion of my body already. In other words, I get poison ivy really badly and learned decades ago to rapidly identify and avoid it. I just haven’t lived right by woods for a number of years and got out of the habit.

Well, this is where the dream comes in. While I am sure there is more to the dream message than I currently understand (such as paying attention to what we cultivate in the garden of our heart), if I hadn’t had that dream about poison ivy I don’t think I would have been quite as mentally keen on noticing the plant in real life, and probably would have identified it while standing in the middle of it (For those who don’t know, all dreams have messages—you have to learn to interpret them to gain the understanding and subsequent benefit of the dream). If I had to classify this dream, it would fall into the category of warning dreams—ones that have a message warning you about something, whether a current internal/emotional condition, an unsafe personal relationship, or some other potential calamity. Warning dreams don’t sound like good dreams at first glance, but that is a perspective issue. In truth, warning dreams are very good dreams because they make you aware of something so you can fix it. I recently had a warning dream where I was on a battlefield and my gun kept jamming. The warning in that dream was that if I don’t fix what is causing the gun to jam, I won’t be able to stop enemy attacks because my weapons will be ineffective. Again, the dream doesn’t sound good, but the message it carried is very good because it helped me identify something in my life that I need to change in order to prevent the outcome the dream tells me is possible.

Dreams can be messages from God, messages from our subconscious, or messages from the enemy. We can travel in the spirit at night and upon waking we think we had a dream but in actuality our spirit was somewhere else in the night (I talk more about this in my book The Beginner’s Guide to Traveling in the Spirit), and often God will give people spiritual encounters with angels, Jesus, and other saints while they are asleep. Ultimately, all dreams can be considered good dreams with the right internal perspective, but warning dreams in particular are extremely useful to help us make course corrections and keep us moving steadily forward on our life journey. And in this case, my warning dream helped me avoid weeks of health problems as well. And I thank God for that!!