catapult magazine

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How does God use dreams to communicate to his people in the Bible? Does God still communicate through dreams?

I was looking at Revelation a few weeks ago and was amazed at how movie-like it is. God sits John down and says, “Watch this and then write down what you see”. It’s a dream, a vision, but it’s also a movie! God speaks to John with images, using language that we’re used to seeing in film or in dreams. There’s no doubt God still speaks to us in dreams, as long as there is a good interpreter present.

Yeah, but it is really that much of the Bible is written in the language of dreams — and much of modern cinema has borrowed from that dream language. So it is more that movies are dreamlike, not the other way around.

I’d like to think that movies are based on the dream-like quality of Scripture. Maybe so. I know that Protestant Christianity tends to focus on the theological, the written word way of communicating, and doesn’t do very well with Revelation and the prophets. And, so far, Protestants haven’t responded very well to films (with all the boycotting and such) either. After generations of theology, Christians may not be able to handle the dreams in the Bible without some help. Unfortunately, Freud does a better job opening up the messages of the dreams in Scripture than many Christians.