If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks, slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. – GK Chesterton
Creative individuals allow their subconscious to mull over tremendous amounts of information gathered from successes or failures that were unanticipated or unplanned. This process often occurs while they are engaged in activities totally unrelated to the subject or problem at hand. It happens even when they are sleeping. This accounts for the advice frequently given to a person who is frustrated by what appears to be an unsolvable problem: “Why don’t you sleep on it?” Getting away from a problem and letting the subconscious mind work on it allows creativity to spring forth. Engaging in routine, “mindless” activities such as cutting the grass or just taking a walk often prove to be major sources of creativity.
God works in mysterious ways throughout our life, and what many people may write off as “coincidence,” “fate,” “dumb luck,” “a miracle,” “a revelation,” “an idea,” “a thought,” or even “a dream,” maybe should be taken as a lesson, blessing, warning or even insight given by God.
I would say that most people do not hear from God through their dreams, mainly due to the fact that we have so many dreams that mean nothing. You can easily get confused, even adding information (or deleting) to your dreams that can seem “spiritual,” but in reality may have been nothing but bits and pieces from a rerun of an old TV show (mixed in with what you wish you ate for dinner but didn’t).
But then again, God can speak to us through dreams, but we have to be very careful in our interpretations. First we have to be sure that these are dreams from God and not simply something you are hoping for. How do we know the difference?
That is the million-dollar question, we see through the glass dimly in this life, but I suppose that is the beauty about not having things spelled out too clearly, it can take the adventure out of life. I have had very few dreams in my life that I have a hunch were inspired by God, when reality proved them true in every detail, I have to assume it was not too much pizza 😊
A dream that I remember quite vividly occurred in 1994. I was on tour with SWV a R&B group who had just had a number one hit “Weak.” It was a great tour, the artists were easy to work with, I had a great crew and we were filling arenas. I wasn’t looking for another tour. I woke from a dream on the tour bus that I was going to be working for a new artist playing Gospel music in stadiums throughout the world. I went back to sleep in my cozy little bus bunk and awoke a couple of hours later by a phone call from a manager who said he represented Carman and would like me to consider a stadium tour they had planned for the next couple of years. As soon as I finished the SWV leg of the tour, I flew to Tulsa and met Carman. I toured with him for the next two years filling 80,000 seat stadiums across America and soccer fields in South Africa.
I have had very few dreams like that in my life time, but had one the other day, so will just have to wait and see how that plays out before I label it “God inspired.”
Edgar Allan Poe’s short poem, ‘A Dream Within a Dream,’ was published in 1849. The poem is divided into two stanzas, and the speaker’s tone changes drastically from the first to the second. In the first stanza, the speaker acknowledges that people think he lives in a dream world but also suggests that everybody does. Our perceptions of reality are flawed and all of us have a tenuous grasp on reality. Poe illustrates this belief in the lines, ‘You are not wrong, who deem/That my days have been a dream; All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream.’ The speaker’s tone, or attitude, is one of acceptance, acknowledging that he, but also everyone else lives in dreams, but that dreams can keep one’s hope’s alive.