A God of Visions and Dreams
Dreams have captivated the attention of great thinkers throughout the history of the human race. At various points, dreams have been thought to be messages from God or a number of gods, signifiers of memories in our past that we are suppressing, incoherent mashups of images we had seen and thoughts we had pondered the previous day, and any other explanation you could possibly think of. Some people believe their dreams are trying to tell them something. Some people believe dreams may predict their future. Others believe they don’t mean anything at all, and still others don’t even remember their dreams.
Regardless of where dreams come from and why we have them, most people who dream can probably agree on a few common characteristics of dreams. For one, they’re hard to remember. I can’t count how many times I’ve been having a fascinating dream with a story that I want to continue when I wake up. Even as I begin to realize that it was only a dream, the memory begins to fade. The images are lost. The story unravels. What I thought had been so interesting a few moments ago becomes no more than a few disconnected pictures fading into transparency, leaving nothing but waking reality to view.
Dreams also have an interesting relationship with time and space in reality. As much as this conflicts with my previous point, I have some dreams that I can still remember. One particularly interesting one saw me walking in my hometown of Yutan before passing through a familiar tree line by the railroad tracks and suddenly emerging onto an unfamiliar scene. What was another quiet neighborhood in reality had become an open landscape of tall sandy hills beside a clean and fast flowing river. This was odd for many reasons. While I was quite familiar with Yutan and the surroundings there seemed normal to me, I had never been to the setting that I stumbled upon in my dream. It was completely out of place. It really didn’t even make sense where it was geographically or geologically. This space broke basic laws of reality, but my dreaming brain acknowledged it as real and set it beside my home.
I think dreams do similar things to that frequently. They invite our minds to accept the impossible. People from our past come to share time and space with people we currently spend time with. Old wounds are mysteriously healed. We are given knowledge that we haven’t learned that only applies to the world of this particular dream. All of this is to say that dreams are wild and mysterious experiences.
In Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abram. As a sign of this covenant, Abram sacrifices three animals and cuts them in half, laying the severed halves beside each other. While waiting for the LORD to appear, Abram drives off birds of prey as he sits beside these three corpses in the fading light of day. But as the darkness settles, we see something like a dream.
Genesis 15:12 sees Abram fall into a deep sleep. While in his sleep, the LORD speaks to him. Then he has what scholars describe as a visionary experience. Verse 17 describes a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passing through the pieces. Most Bible experts would agree that this indicates that God was the one to pass through the broken animals. According to the most popular interpretation, when an ancient near eastern covenant was made, one party would pass through an animal that was split in two as a way of acknowledging what would happen to them if they broke the covenant. In this case, God is the dominant party, but God nonetheless takes on the responsibility for the breaking of this covenant. If it doesn’t work, God will take the fall.
Of course, many Christian theologians will say that this foreshadows Christ. God accepted this end of the agreement with Abram and followed through by sacrificing Godself to save the world. Even if that is an interpretive stretch, it does say that God is willing to suffer on behalf of God’s people. This is an incredibly powerful message, but I’m also interested in the dream element of this story. This wasn’t communicated to Abram while he was wide awake. What does it mean that Abram didn’t see a divine figure with human shape pass through the sacrificial animals in broad daylight, but rather a smoking fire pot and a torch passing through them in the dead of night when all the world is asleep? What does it mean for Abram to have seen God through the eyes of a dream?
Dreams are fleeting things. Dreams are impossible. Why does God make these promises in a world that we forget and that has only a tangential connection to reality? Then again, why should our world be any more real than the dream in which God makes promises?
God’s Kingdom assumes some things that we would consider impossible as a starting point. God’s promises deal in what we would only believe in dreams: a world in which there is no underclass, no poor, no starvation; a world in which we resolve our problems by trusting God’s righteous judgment rather than with force and violence; a world in which haughtiness and arrogance are lost as everyone knows and loves God and each other. To imagine God’s Kingdom, we must imagine something like a dream.
Perhaps this is what makes it so important that God’s covenant with Abram was ratified in a dream. God is claiming what we consider the impossible as the starting point. To enter into a covenant with God is to move into a new way of seeing the world. We have to let go of what we consider normal as well as the limits of possibility. God invites us into a starting point beyond the reality we see, into something bigger, better, and bolder, a new world where the impossible is ordinary.
Dreams don’t have to be fleeting. When written down or dedicated to memory, a dream and its lessons can last forever. In the written Word, we have a memory of the dream God invited us to. In Church, we come together to share in a common dream. It isn’t impossible. It isn’t flaky. God’s reality is better than ours, and God invites us to share in it, as God makes it our own.
