hello fellow believers

[Discerning_Spirits]

I am troubled at a vision from last night, and I was going someone was good at symbolism & dream interpretation. I can only remember being in a new store setting up decorative on the long handles where key chains can dangle. I displayed mini ghost rider like skulls up but had too many to put on one pole. I noticed a glowing white spirit like a man who was on top of a chandelier and I tested him asking if he was or was of Jesus, he bent down and prayed upward to God and I felt he my have been either teaching me or interceding revealing his nature. Then I had crucifix keychains with rainbow gems and as I displayed them I saw a class of white children passing the store front display glass, the spirit said to tell them about Jesus, whether teach or tell my testimony, he gave me the decision to teach....

If you can help me I am grateful/ I believe where I was could of been my body which is new, holy, w/o sexual immorality in repentance.. I am taking a good guess that I am to leave behind the worldly skulls n reveal Jesus or my testimony which is the spirit of prophesy

[shooraijin]

In general, I think dream interpretation is at best complicated by the particular biases of the dreamer and the interpreter, and at worst completely out of left field. While God certainly has spoken to people in dreams in the Bible, it is a comparatively unusual occurrence even then. With my moderator hat on, please avoid turning this thread into an exercise in divination.

[Discerning_Spirits]

Ok Shooraijin, I realized today in the mens shelter I live in, they showed the movie "Ghost Rider", and I am now puzzled at the chances of me dreaming something with the flamming skull the night before...so I believe, even on Full Moon nights, my dreams are extremely important to future events...."we know in part, prophesy in part", also I would not know what divination really means, in Deutwronomy I know it was forbidden, and Diviners were an abomination to the Lord. I am going to leave my dreams alone because I thought I could possibly be used for Prophesying. I do recall a vision of the watching the Red dragon devour the lesser dragons hurled into the lake of fire, but this is a whole other topic so I will just try to focus on what's at hand. I understood wht you meant by the rare dreams given in the bible so I will try to listen to Gods calling since I hold His testimony... How does one know their spiritual gift(s)??? I once spoke in an unknown language before many witnesses, crying out words that were uttered with a dialect

[goldenspines]

[mod snip: Inappropriate image. Please be mindful of how you post in the future, please.]

[Discerning_Spirits]

Image? What image? I did'nt post anything...

[Davidizer13]

Image? What image? I did'nt post anything...

The image was posted by someone else, and got edited away by the moderators.

Anyway. Like Shooby, I'm kinda skeptical about dream interpretation - maybe it's just that I haven't had any dreams I remember that made any sense, let alone had any meaning to something happening in my life. I'm not saying this is always the case, but what may be happening here is a form of apophenia, which is when our brains pick up patterns in otherwise meaningless data, regardless of whether there actually is a pattern there or not. A good example of this is face recognition - since we're wired to spot other peoples' faces, there's times when we see inanimate objects that look like faces, and that part of our brain springs up, insisting it's a face even though it's clearly not. There might be selfish cognitive biases mixed in there too: You say you think your dreams are prophetic, so when you have one, you start looking for things to justify your belief that you have prophetic dreams, and given enough time and effort, you'll probably find something, remembering the time you got it "right" while discarding all the times when images in your dreams didn't appear in real life.

As for spiritual gifts, I'm a bit out of step with the common view of there being a set number of specific gifts. Based on the several different listings Paul gives of gifts, I think he was just saying that some people are called to do different things in service of the church, rather than trying to harmonize the different lists or relate them to something concrete, repeatable and immutable. Whatever you feel called by God to do, that's your spiritual gift, be it preaching, serving peoples' physical needs, counseling others, playing music, giving to charity, or anything else you think God has given you the ability to do. Martin Luther once said, "Here I stand, and stand here I must" - wherever God is leading or has placed you, that's where you need to make your stand, and that's where you'll use your gifts in whatever way you can.

[Nate]

One time I dreamed it was the end of the world and God Himself commanded me to be the angel of death and I flew around with sweet superpowers killing dudes and lifting giant rocks.