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Citation: Newman, Sarah. “Dreams as Divine Revelation: A Wesleyan Approach.” 
Paper presented at the Annual Wesley Studies Symposium, Tyndale University, 
Toronto, Ontario, April 25, 2023. (MPEG-3,  25 min.)

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So thank you so much for coming to this talk. If you're here, you're probably here for one of a few reasons. Either you're here to support me in my talk, and that's really great. Thank you. You know, me personally.

Maybe you just held out your pamphlet, and then you closed your eyes and pointed to it and went to the first talk that you pointed to. If so, awesome. You're welcome here, but hopefully you're here because you have an interest in dreams or how God can speak through them, and how, as a Methodist, we can approach the confusing world of dreamland. So if you had one word that you could use to describe dreams, what would it be? This is a question that I'm asking you guys.

I want you guys to be involved.

Easy, vivid, and weird. We can go with that reason. This board can read that chicken strap pardon? Online.

Can you describe dreams again for us?

Okay. Anyone else? Repetitious. Thank you. Okay, there was a hand up here.

Every processing. Okay, nice.

Symbolic. Okay.

Ambiguous. Okay. Lot of words here.

And symbolic. Sorry. After symbolic, you totally forgot what got it. Lots of them.

Gary? Yes.

Awesome.

Handsome. Kind of like my writing.

Okay. Yeah. Cookie.

Okay. I think that's a lot of great examples, guys. Thank you. And you're. All right.

When I was thinking about dreams, I was thinking, sometimes they're unstable, sometimes they're unpredictable. Sometimes when interpreting them, they could even be unreliable. Kind of falls into mystery, symbolic, vivid, weird.

I've also had a lot of questions in my study on dreams. Are they wish fulfillment? Do they predict the future? Where do they come from? Are they?

Messages from God. What about nightmares? Maybe you're here right now because you want to understand the difference between a message from God and last night's Taco Bell.

Some of you in this room may be very skeptical about dreams, and I think that's a really good thing, because the skepticism forces us to be methodical, which is a trait very much in line with methodism. Our reason allows us to question and really think critically to come to stronger, more well informed conclusions. In this session, I will be taking us back to the roots, to our roots of the Methodist revival period. Here we can assess John Wesley's approach to dreams and gather some clues as to how to think about them and what the purpose could be. So before we really get into it, let's try to define divine revelation.

Again, I'm going to turn this over to you. What are some answers that come to your mind when you think about what divine revelation could be?

Yes.

When God speaks is a great answer.

That's pretty good. Pardon? It awesome. Illumination.

Okay. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's in, like thank you.

Got it. Okay. There's a hand in the back.

Okay. So, like, predicting the future. Okay.

Yes. Sorry. Zoom. People. So far we've had suggestions of when God speaks, as in to define divine revelations.

When God speaks, how God speaks, illumination, scripture and prophetic dreams. All right. I think those are great examples. So awesome.

According to Wesley, divine revelation is communicating when God's communicating from Himself to God's messengers, usually in the form of prophets, evangelists or apostles.

Since Scripture is written by God's messengers, much of Scripture is written as defined revelation. So you're right, scripture is defined revelation. However, often people wonder how God's word can be accurately relayed, since humans are prone to error and making mistakes. If you've ever played the game Broken telephone with a group of people, you will know how true this is. Instead, Wesley minimized the human element of transcribing and emphasized the faithfulness with which the message is transcribed.

In other words, Wesley knew that God's message carries through despite our flaws. This is because God often speaks not just through words, just as I'm speaking, like for you, Mao, but through symbolism, accountability and prophecy. All things that we see in Scripture and also things that we see in dreams. And God's word in the Bible was encountered often through a dream or a vision.

For example, Jacob dreamt of angels moving near heaven as they tread the stairway connecting heaven and earth. God spoke to Jacob in a vision. Lebanon and Abelik were given warnings from God in dreams, and the Lord made a covenant with Abraham in a vision. Joseph and Daniel both had prophetic dreams of the future and had the gift of dream interpretation. Through this direct contact, it is clear that dreams and visions in the Old Testament were used by God as a special revelation of Him.

And it is special because his revelation is quite relational and intentional. Remember that God's revelation is communication between God and his chosen messenger. Chosen as in he's intending to speak to that person. This is much different from the other gods of the ancient Near East, actually, because the revelation was known to be more of a result of happenstance and rooted in human fear, as opposed to being rooted in intentional Godly love. Instead, God makes the first move talking to his children directly and calls them by name, such as he did with Jacob in Genesis 46.

He says, I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go. I know you did this with a clear conscience to your descendants I give this land. In every case, God is initiating contact with his children, resulting not only in self revelation, but also strengthened relationship.

And if God doesn't change that is, if God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow and the future forever, then it must follow that dreams can be used as points of contact with God today as they once were in the Bible. This is what Wesley believed. So let's talk about Wesley for a little bit.

Wesley was a scholar entrenched in the heart of the Enlightenment period, which was a time that highly valued logic and reason, and therefore he was shaped by the critical methods of his day, using reason via textual criticism and Scripture's linguistic and historical context to come to conclusions. He also embraced the Reformation's emphasis on individual believers freedom to interpret the Bible for themselves, which naturally extends to what we just concluded, that dreams can be a form of divine revelation. However, there was also a Christian enthusiasm movement during this time. At first, when I read about this enthusiasm movement, I'm like, okay, what's the big deal? What's so wrong with being enthusiastic?

Can't we all be a little bit enthusiastic sometimes? Isn't it good to be passionate about your belief and have some zest for life? But this isn't what the enthusiasm movement really meant. It was more about being more than being enthusiastic, but it was a false belief about how the Holy Spirit moved, and it resulted in irrationally attributing everyday occurrences to divine intervention without being based in Scripture, prayer, or hearing the real word of God. This belief, unfortunately, also immediately linked anyone who believed in dreams as revelation from God.

To be an enthusiast. Enthusiasm encouraged people to expect knowledge from God without searching Scripture or consulting other believers, to expect spiritual strength without constant prayer and steady watchfulness, and to expect blessing without hearing the word of God at every opportunity. In other words, enthusiasts were those who were convinced that they didn't need to read their Bible because they believed God writes Scripture on their hearts instead. And they judged people to do right or wrong by consulting their own feelings. Hopefully, you can see the danger in this.

If you don't, you should know. It is dangerous letting you know now. But to be accused of being an enthusiast implied not only extreme irrationalism in a culture of rationality, but it also threatened social cohesion, because revolutions could be started based on individual intuition, following the premise that one could build their own world by conforming to a pure idea in mind. So this is what we don't want when we talk about dream interpretation.

However, even though Wesley claimed that all irrational religion is false religion, methodists were still labeled as enthusiasts because of this dream connection. The difference, though, between enthusiasts and Methodists, if you look back at history, is that Methodists not only referred to Scripture, but they also wrote about their spiritual experiences for the community at large. They wrote their journals with intention for publication and to encourage each other and to encourage discussion. Wesley even wrote down the dreams and visions of his day in the Armenian Magazine, his influential periodical, making the invisible world visible to public eye. Enthusiasts, on the other hand, seem to have more of an individualistic focus, focusing more on the feelings of the experience.

Wesley's belief in dreams inspired his followers to believe in dreams as God's self revelation. To us, too important theological issues that would surface in dreams would also be interpreted in ways that provided direction for the believer.

There we go. In particular, Wesley corresponded with many women who experienced revelatory dreams such as Sarah Ryan, Mary Fletcher and Sarah Mallet. Sarah Ryan dreamt an angel instructed her to leave for her host family, else she be damned. So she left. Mary Fletcher had a dream of being in a church and seeing written on the wall in gold thou shalt have no other god but me which is Exodus, chapter 20, verse three.

And so she was encouraged to follow only the Lord. Sarah Mallet was struck with a vision at breakfast time where she had seen two angels which showed her a full view of those in hell, in heaven. And after she asked if she might join those in heaven she was told she had work to do on earth and so she was encouraged to keep living to do the Lord's work. Scattered throughout Methodist biographies, diaries and letters were also accounts of dreams that displayed God's power through providential epiphanies. Mary Bozeman K.

I think I misspelled it on the screen.

Thank you. Mary Bozen Kay recorded multiple supernatural encounters in her autobiography and her letter correspondence portrayed her life as filled with dreams, visions and apparitions. In one of these dreams, it is said that Jesus appeared to her. Leslie himself also dreamed, though not always good one. In a purse of a manuscript he wrote describing his troubled feelings over his romantic relationship with grace Mary, he writes how he prayed one night for some revelation which was followed by a cream of grace being executed, unfortunately and him mourning over her, only to wake up as she began to speak.

John Wesley viewed salvation as first and foremost a supernatural event with empirical real world consequences just like dreams. On the one hand, Wesley structured position of the visible and invisible provided a coherent portrait of reality. As we as human beings often straddle between the spiritual and the physical world. This in between that we live in might provide the clues that we seek. Wesley believes that visionary experiences were explained as the manifestation of human unrest caused by an unregenerate self and the quest for lasting happiness.

I propose that dreams in Scripture could also be a result of this unrest. And if we review the context in the biblical dreams I mentioned earlier, this is affirmed.

Many biblical dreams result out of the dreamer being in a time of distress. Jacob's dream in Genesis 28 immediately follows his mistake, giving Isaac, not Esau, the blessing meant for his eldest son.

When God spoke to Jacob in a vision in Genesis 46 jacob had just discovered that his son Joseph was still alive in Egypt. Though this news would have made him happy, it would have been confusing because he would have had to wrestle with the fact that his other sons were lying to him. As for Lebanon and Abimelech, they were given warnings from god in dreams. But if we remember, both of these people were not in good headspaces. Levon was in pursuit of Jacob, not for good intention, and Abimelech had done wrong because he was about to marry an already married woman.

In Genesis 15, the Lord made a covenant with Abraham in division. But prior to making this covenant, abraham had been wrestling with uncertainty about his future legacy. Joseph was given dreams in the midst of being hated by his brothers. And Daniel was given a dream at the beginning of Belshazar's reign who was a king who dishonored God and was later struck dead for his actions. Having to live under such a monarch's rule must have been a stress point for Daniel.

Likewise, Wesley included several dreams in his journal referring to spiritual and emotional disturbances.

While we don't know the mental or emotional states of every dreamer, we can discern that since each dream was a form of warning to ultimately put God first, that perhaps these women were under spiritual distress or overwhelmed enough to need divine intervention, even if not consciously so. We do know, however, that the states of other dreamers the states of the other dreamers from the same time period one Mrs. Holloway, had fallen into discouragement and cynicism despite having survived being struck by lightning. Then she had dreams of an apocalyptic or even prophetic nature, seeing three people, one with a spear in his hand, one with a broom, and one with an hourglass, all with different purposes. Other dreams seemed to predict more immediate future events.

One woman had a premonition in a dream of being drowned or drowning. And after she told her friends about this dream, she was ridiculed and she set off on horseback back to market, where then she did end up drowning and died. Not the best prophecy, but happened. Dreams could also be construed as diabolical attacks on the soul and symptomatic of a time of trial. For example, John Bolton dreamed a lion pursued him up and down, being harassed to visit the sick who he did not known or how to get to.

His belief was that Satan was attempting to tire his spirit out. Even if Wesley's dream, even Wesley's dream of his loved one being executed page flipping here that came at a time when he was seeking answers in the midst of troubled feelings. So overall, whether our dreams come in a state of discouragement or a time of trial, it seems typical for dreams to appear at times of unease or at times of stress in individuals. Therefore, Wesley may have been onto something with his belief that some level of unrest may exist prior to a dream. And if we look at psychological literature, several studies indicate a link between empathy and higher stress responses.

And since dreams seems often to be a result out of a stressful context, then maybe those who dream of higher levels of empathy, this would indicate an association between stress and dreams.

Sorry, I lost my spot. That's okay. This would also make sense as to why we have so many records of female dreamers as well, because research has shown us that overall, on the whole, while men can also display empathy, women tend to demonstrate more empathy than men. However, while dreams are correlated, or maybe correlated to empathy levels, dreams are not gender specific, nor are they necessarily female dominant. And this is, and we can see this because most of the dreams in the Bible are from men.

There's only one female recorded dream in the Bible, and that's in the New Testament.

And also, psychological research indicates that everyone dreams, whether or not the dreams are remembered upon waking. So as we come to a close, let us remember how we began, not only with this presentation, but also with a Methodist movement. For Wesley, faith was both a personal confidence in God and a vital element of divine life that permeated human consciousness, including dreams. And we must only use our reason to come to this conclusion. Like dreams, Wesley viewed salvation as a supernatural event with real life consequences.

Another case where the invisible world becomes visible. Just like salvation.

Words are hard today. Using our Wesleyan reasoning ability, try saying that ten times fast. We discovered that after comparing Methodist revival dreams with biblical dreams, revelatory dreams may be a gateway for the supernatural to make acquaintance with us through special revelation obliging, to answer our subconscious questions, either to embolden us or to discourage us. This does not mean that every dream has supernatural meaning. I have many dreams that can attribute that I can attest that are not supernatural in base, but it could mean that some could have some basis and not to discredit them or discount them.

The good thing is that even if we don't understand our dreams, or if we forget them, god is persistent, so he's still going to get our attention in other ways. So don't worry, you're not missing out. But what I hope this presentation does is to get us to just think differently about dreams and to perhaps make space for conversation about spiritual experience at the community level.

With that, thank you for listening.

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