There are two planes of existence: The physical and the metaphysical, corresponding roughly to the visible and the invisible. Even in the natural order, the invisible elements and creatures – such as the invisible electromagnetic waves and the microorganisms – far outnumber the visible.

 

Furthermore, while reality is concerned with the visible and the physical, dreams and visions are in the realm of the invisible and the metaphysical. Dreams and visions are part of our regular experiences. While a dream is the projection of our innermost thoughts when we are fully asleep, a vision is the end product of intense concentration and meditation while we are partially awake, or in a sub-conscious state. 

From time immemorial, God has been communicating with us through dreams and visions, particularly to the prophets of old. Abraham and Moses, for instance, met God almost in facial encounters and had extended dialogues with Him. But, most of the time, God uses the Angels to communicate special messages, and the Angel Gabriel is the favourite messenger, employing the medium of dreams or visions.  It was he who delivered the Incarnation message to Mary, and the news about the extraordinary pregnancy of Elizabeth at old age to give birth to John.

While Angel Gabriel communicated with Mary in a vision, he passed on the same message to Joseph in a dream.  Visions are more powerful, more graphic than dreams. A vision needs intense fasting and praying to occur, depending on the degree of purity of mind.

Frightening dreams or nightmares result from evil thoughts nurtured earlier in the day, particularly close to sleeping time. They also proceed from the types of movies, horror movies especially, that we watch regularly.  Prayer is not a one-way communication with God. When we pray, we must pause for a few moments to listen to God who can respond to us through our feelings and intuitions. Listening to God and accurately interpreting the feedback we receive is a habit that we must learn, through regular practice. The less sinful we are, the greater the chances of hearing from God.

Reality is concerned with the here and now; what is happening to us every second of the day. While we have little control over our dreams and visions, we are largely in control of our thoughts and actions from day to day. Most of the sins of commission are consciously committed through our thoughts and actions. Hence, we must closely watch what we think, what we say, and what we do, to avoid slipping into sin.

Sin begins from the mind, first consciously conceived before implementation. A sinful thought is already a sin, even without its execution, which simply aggravates it. As the Bible says, adultery begins from lustful look and lascivious thinking.  “You have heard that it was said to the ancients: ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, that anyone who will have looked at a woman, so as to lust after her, has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28).  But this is quite different from admiring a beautiful lady or a handsome young man. There is no sin in admiring the works of nature. It is the intention behind the admiration that matters.

Dreams and visions are different from hallucination and fantasy. The Internet defines hallucination as “a false perception of objects or events, involving your senses: sight, sound, smell, touch and taste.” Thus, hallucinations are usually negative perceptions which are often false or misleading.

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Hallucination is synonymous with fantasy which is false imagination of the impossible or the improbable. Both hallucination and fantasy are products of a diseased mind that needs psychological attention, if it experiences them too often. A healthy mind should neither hallucinate nor fantasize. There is no vacuum in nature. The mind is never vacant; it is filled with either good or bad thoughts. Thus, to keep negative perceptions at bay, one should nurture clean and holy thoughts that would produce positive dreams and healthy visions. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and it should be kept pure and serene all the time to facilitate divine communication. 

A dream is also a sort of wish-fulfilment; the fallacious actualization of a desire that one had been nursing for some time. But, when wishes come true in a dream, it may be a hopeful signal or a grand deception. If you dream of having won some millions of naira, you will need another dream to access the money and spend it all before you wake up, because your real life account will remain as empty as it has been.

We all have our dreams and earnest desires, but we should make them our prayer points to enable them come true sooner than later. Here is where the exercise of faith becomes important. Faith is crucial to the realization of our hopes and dreams. Absolute and undiluted faith is difficult to achieve; but if one can strike it, whatever one wants from God will definitely be realized without delay. Jesus promises that “if we have faith as small as a grain of mustard seed”, we will be able to move mountains, although we sometimes need to accompany this with prayer and fasting (Matthew 17:19-20). Faith is more powerful than belief because the latter always seeks for foolproof evidence like doubting Thomas.

In conclusion, dreams and visions are the other side of reality which can be pleasant or unpleasant, depending on what we encounter. Dreams and visions are sources of divine revelation which provide an insight into future occurrences. In the Book of Revelation (Chapter 21), John saw the vision of the new heaven and the new earth, and the New Jerusalem descending from God “prepared like a bride adorned for her husband” (21:1-2). That is a vision of the Apocalypse, the End of the World, which is yet to come, and remains God’s closely-guarded secret.