Opinion by: James Gatdet Dak
The majority of our South Sudanese people nowadays would not expect anyone on social media to write about anything less than a political opinion. Their appetite is geared towards political debates and speculations and hence gives less attention to some other life-soothing ingredients and revelations.
Let me indulge myself in one of these ingredients here called ‘dreams’ in case we all also dream during our sleep.
Dreams can give hope as well as hopelessness. There are political dreams too, right?
I know science has tried its level best to explain why we dream in our sleep. It has also tried to explain why we dream what we dream.
Science or dreams experts would say, oh, dreams come from our sub-conscience. They would argue that our subconscious minds would try to process the emotions, stimuli, memories, and information gathered from the things we saw or heard, or thought about in real life during the day, or at the time we were awake.
The dreams experts in the scientific community would say, when you thought about or experienced bad things in real life, you may experience bad dreams or nightmares in your sleep as your sub-conscience mind replays those bad memories. I too agree.
Or they would say, if you had good thoughts and experiences in the day, you would likely end up with good dreams, and even about your future. Well, I do partially agree.
In trying to answer as to why some dreams are fulfilled or come to pass in real life, dreams experts would say, well, it is simply a coincidence. They would say that dreams influence your real-life decisions.
In other words, if you dream, for instance, to become rich, then it is the dream itself that becomes a motivator that encourages you to pursue wealth by working hard to become rich. Or they would say the dream gives you the desire to become rich and coincidentally becomes a wish fulfilled. If it is a bad dream fulfilled, they would say it is your bad memories that haunt you to the point of fulfilling the bad dream.
The question is, what practically fulfills a good wish or a bad memory in real life as exactly seen in the dreams with all its details? A wish can simply be a wish, and a bad memory can simply be a bad memory, right? Who or what is the implementer?
To me, science has attempted to tackle only one source of dreams, the sub-conscience mind.
I believe that dreams have three different sources: God, Satan, and the sub-conscience mind. The tricky thing is, how do you differentiate the three.
God communicates with people through dreams and visions. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or whether you believe in Judaism, or you are an atheist or animalist, etc. Whether you are on the wrong side is a different thing, with its own judgment.
God loves you, because he created you through procreation, whether you acknowledge it or not. God communicates to you in dreams whether you like it or not. He wants to tell you something about your life or about others, either about the past, present or future that you don’t know.
I repeat, God loves you whether you believe in him or not. It is like when you have a child or children. It doesn’t matter whether one or some of them try to deny you, or hate you, or even run away from home. They may do those things, but the fact that you are their biological parent will always be there. No one can take it away from you.
And you have the right to continue to call them your children and to show that you still love them despite their going astray, and to continue communicating with them and to try to bless them and to warn and show them where a danger that can harm their lies and to try to reform them and win them back to your family. After all, you would not want to give birth to them in vain.
This is exactly what God does, whether you rebel against him or not. He will continue to play his fatherly role to you by trying to warn you to purge and reform you and bless you.
God knows that nobody is perfect. Not even a single person on earth is righteous or sinless. All of us are sinners. Only that we have different degrees or levels of sins. Some are serious like murdering a person or adulterously running away with somebody’s wife, while others are minor like stealing a soap. Likewise, God punishes sins according to their levels. Humans have copied from God how they sentence people based on the levels of their crimes. The difference is that human judges can fake some accusations and charges, but God will justly accuse and charge you according to your sins. He doesn’t fake it.
Back to dreams, Satan will also try to harass you with bad dreams, or might have seen something bad about your future and will rush to deliver to you the bad news. Satan loves to bring you bad news in order to torture your mind and make you feel hopeless. Satan is not interested to bring you good news about your future which God planted in your life.
In contrast, God through dreams will either bring you good news about your future that will come to pass no matter how long it takes or will warn you through a bad dream and give you a chance to repent and change course. Failure to change, then the bad dream will get fulfilled in time.
There are things to take note of when you dream. If your dream involves people, try to remember who the person is and what is his or her role in real life. Dreams are symbolic, they are not literal. For instance, if you dream that your father is talking to you, that may not mean your earthly father. He may be God himself, your Heavenly Father, symbolizing your earthly father. It means it is God himself directly speaking to you.
Also, dreams involving animals, birds, insects, fish, snakes, colors, skies, rains, rivers, oceans, grass, farms, etc., have their different meanings and interpretations. For instance, if you dream about seeing yourself planting seeds or harvesting in a farm, or seeing green grass, God is telling you about a prosperous future in your life.
Well, I am not a dream interpreter. It is God’s spirit that can help you interpret dreams.
Science could not explain the sources of abrupt dreams. You dream of something you never saw or heard or thought about and it just also gets fulfilled.
I personally have had such dreams in my life. They come from nowhere and some get fulfilled.
One of these dreams is when I was arrested in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2016. Two weeks before it happened I dreamt about it with so many details, including the people and the number of cars that were used in the operation. Two weeks later, it turned out exactly as I saw it in the dream. Now how can science explain that?
I did not wish it to happen and it didn’t happen because I had bad memories about it. Actually, I ignored it and thought it was a meaningless dream. How did its details come true? I did not plan the operation. So, the dream planned it? And who designed that dream?
The funny thing is, I forgot that dream until I was locked in a cell. It then came back to my mind suddenly. I said to myself, wow, that was it. It is sometimes good to keep some dreams to your chest and expose others to those you trust.
The thing is, God communicates through dreams. Some people should not simply describe dreams as mere products of our subconscious minds during our sleep. Otherwise, you may be missing great messages from God to you.
God can tell you good things that he has designed to happen in your life. God can also warn you about bad things that will happen in your life unless you change and he can cancel it.
And strangely, God for his own purpose can also make something bad happen in your life. In this case, you have nothing to do about it. It is predetermined and sealed.
He will show it to you in the dream to simply inform you that it will surely happen. It may be a punishment for wrongdoing, it may be a means through which to purge and reform you, or it may be a means through which to exalt your name or to justify his future reward to you.
By showing it to you in a dream, God is also reminding you that you will suffer, but not to worry because he is aware of it and he is in control of the situation.
Remember the questions people ask such as why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It is a topic of its own that deserves a different article.
The most wicked or sinful person on earth may enjoy life and become very rich and healthy, while the most righteous person by the world’s standard can suffer and become a poverty-stricken person in the world and vice versa. Adolphe Hitler for sure enjoyed life and power on earth.
God who applies his own life equation knows the answer!
And don’t ignore your dreams…
And a piece of advice, don’t fake dreams and tell people about them. Faked dreams will have no effect in real life.
Cheers!