330. Dreams

Dreams

Joe_2:28 : ’93I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh… your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.’94

In this photograph of the millennium the dream is lifted into great conspicuity. You may say of a dream that it is nocturnal fantasia, or that it is the absurd combination of waking thoughts, and with a slur of intonation you may say: ’93It is only a dream;’94 but God has honored the dream by making it the avenue through which again and again he has marched upon the human soul, decided the fate of nations, and changed the course of the world’92s history. God appeared in a dream to Abimelech, warning him against an unlawful marriage; in a dream to Jacob, announcing, by the ladder set against the sky full of angels, the communications between earth and heaven; in a dream to Joseph, foretelling his coming power under the figure of all the sheaves of the harvest bowing down to his sheaf; to the chief butler, foretelling his disimprisonment; to the chief baker, announcing his decapitation; to Pharaoh, showing him first the seven plentiful years and then the seven famine-stricken years, under the figure of the seven fat cows devouring the seven lean cows; to Solomon, giving him the choice between wisdom and riches and honor; to a warrior under the figure of a barley-cake smiting down a tent, encouraging Gideon in his battle against the Amalekites; to Nebuchadnezzar, under the figure of a broken image and a hewn-down tree, foretelling the overthrow of his power; to Joseph, of the New Testament, announcing the birth of Christ in his own household, and again bidding him to take the Child and the mother and flee from Herodic persecutions; to Pilate’92s wife, inciting her to warn him not to become complicated with the judicial overthrow of Christ.

We all admit that God in ancient times and under Bible dispensation addressed the people through dreams. The question now is, does God appear in our day and reveal himself through dreams? That is the question everybody asks, and that question this morning I shall try to answer. You ask me if I believe in dreams. My answer is, I do; and all I have to say will be under five heads.

Remark the first: The Scriptures are so full of revelation from God, that if we get no communication from him in dreams, we ought nevertheless to be satisfied. With twenty guide-books to tell you how to get to Boston or Pittsburg or London or Glasgow or Manchester, do you want a night vision to tell you how to make the journey? We have in this Scripture full direction in regard to the journey of this life, and how to get to the celestial city; and with this grand guide-book, this magnificent directory, we ought to be satisfied. I have more faith in a decision to which I come when I am wide-awake than in one suggested when I am sound asleep.

I have noticed that those who give a great deal of their time to studying dreams get their brain addled. They are very anxious to remember what they dreamed about the first night they slept in a new house. If in their dream they take the hand of a corpse, they are going to die. If they dream of a garden, it means a sepulcher. If something turns out according to a night vision, they say, ’93Well, I am not surprised. I dreamed it.’94 If it turns out different from the night vision, they say, ’93Well, dreams go by contraries.’94 In their efforts to put their dreams into rhythm, they put their waking thoughts into discord.

Now, the Bible is such a complete revelation that we ought to be satisfied if we get no further revelation. Sound sleep received great honor when Adam slept so extraordinarily that the surgical incision which gave him Eve did not wake him; but there is no such need for extraordinary slumber now, and he who catches an Eve must needs be wide awake! No need of such a dream as Jacob had with a ladder against the sky, when ten thousand times it has been demonstrated that earth and heaven are in communication. No such dream needed as that which was given to Abimelech, warning him against an unlawful marriage; when we have the records of the county clerk’92s office. No need of such a dream as was given to Pharaoh about the seven years of famine; for now the seasons march in regular procession, and steamer and rail-train carry breadstuffs to every famine-struck nation. No need of a dream like that which encouraged Gideon, for all through Christendom it is announced and acknowledged and demonstrated that righteousness, sooner or later, will get the victory.

If there should come about a crisis in your life upon which the Bible does not seem to be sufficiently specific, go to God in prayer and you will get especial direction. I have more faith, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, in directions given you with the Bible in your lap and your thoughts uplifted in prayer to God, than in all the information you will get unconscious on your pillow.

I can very easily understand why the Babylonians and the Egyptians, with no Bible, should put so much stress on dreams; and the Chinese in their holy book, Chow King, should think their emperor gets his directions through dreams from God; and that Homer should think that all dreams came from Jove, and that in ancient times dreams were classified into a science: but why do you and I put so much stress upon dreams when we have a supernal book of infinite wisdom on all subjects? why should we harry ourselves with dreams? Why should Eddystone and Barnegat lighthouses question a summer fire-fly?

Remark the second: All dreams have an important meaning. They prove that the soul is comparatively independent of the body. The eyes are closed, the senses are dull, the entire body goes into a lethargy which in all languages is used as a type of death, and then the soul spreads its wing and never sleeps. It leaps the Atlantic Ocean, and mingles in scenes three thousand miles away. It travels great reaches of time, flashes back eighty years, and the octogenarian is a boy again in his father’92s house. If the soul, before it has entirely broken its chain of flesh, can do all this, how far can it leap, what circles can it cut when it is fully liberated! Every dream, whether agreeable or harassing, whether sunshiny or tempestuous, means so much that rising from your couch you ought to kneel down and say: ’93O God! am I immortal! Whence? Whither? Two natures. My soul caged now’97what when the door of the cage is opened? If my soul can fly so far in the few hours in which my body is asleep in the night, how far can it fly when my body sleeps the long sleep of the grave?’94 Oh! this power to dream, how startling, how overwhelming! If prepared for the after-death flight, what an enchantment! If not prepared for the after-death flight, what a crushing agony! Immortal! immortal!

Remark the third: The vast majority of dreams are merely the result of disturbed physical condition, and are not a supernatural message. Job had carbuncles, and he was scared in the night. He says: ’93Thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me with visions.’94 Solomon had an overwrought brain, overwrought with public business, and he suffered from erratic slumber, and he writes in Ecclesiastes: ’93A dream cometh through the multitude of business.’94 Dr. Gregory, in experimenting with dreams, found that a bottle of hot water put to his feet while in slumber made him think he was going up the hot sides of Mount Etna. Another morbid physician, experimenting with dreams, his feet uncovered through sleep, thought he was riding in an Alpine diligence. But a great many dreams are merely narcotic disturbance. Anything that you see while under the influence of chloral or brandy or ’93hasheesh’94 or laudanum, is not a revelation from God.

The learned De Quincey did not ascribe to divine communication what he saw in sleep, opium saturated, dreams which he afterward described in the following words: ’93I was worshiped, I was sacrificed, I fled from the wrath of Brahma, through all the forests of Asia. Vishnu hated me. Sceva laid in wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris. I had done a deed, they said, that made the crocodiles tremble. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed with the cancerous kiss of crocodiles, and lay confounded with unutterable slimy things among wreathy and Nilotic mud.’94

Do not mistake narcotic disturbance for divine revelation. But I have to tell you that the majority of the dreams are merely the penalty of outraged digestive organs, and you have no right to mistake the nightmare for heavenly revelation. Late suppers are a warrantee deed for bad dreams. Highly-spiced salads at eleven o’92clock at night, instead of opening the door heavenward, open the door infernal and diabolical. You outrage natural law, and you insult the God who made those laws. It takes from three to five hours to digest food, and you have no right to keep your digestive organs in struggle when the rest of your body is in somnolence. The general rule is, eat nothing after six o’92clock at night, retire at ten, sleep on your right side, keep the window open five inches for ventilation, and other worlds will not disturb you much. By physical maltreatment you take the ladder that Jacob saw in his dream and you lower it to the nether world, allowing the ascent of the demoniacal. Dreams are midnight dyspepsia. An unregulated desire for something to eat ruined the race in Paradise, and an unregulated desire for something to eat keeps it ruined. The world during six thousand years has tried in vain to digest that first apple. The world will not be evangelized until we get rid of a dyspeptic Christianity. Healthy people do not want this cadaverous and sleepless thing that some people call religion. They want a religion that lives regularly by day and sleeps soundly by night. If through trouble or coming on of old age or exhaustion of Christian service, you cannot sleep well, then you may expect from God ’93songs in the night’94; but there are no blessed communications to those who willingly surrender to indigestibles. Napoleon’92s army at Leipsic, Dresden, and Borodino, came near being destroyed through the disturbed gastric juices of its commander. That is the way you have lost some of your battles.

Another remark I make is that our dreams are apt to be merely the echo of our day-time thoughts. I will give you a recipe for pleasant dreams. Fill your days with elevated thought and unselfish action, and your dreams will be set to music. If all day you are gouging and grasping and avaricious, in your dreams you will see gold that you cannot clutch, and bargains in which you were out-Shylocked. If during the day you are irascible and pugnacious and gunpowdery of disposition, you will at night have battle with enemies in which they will get the best of you. If you are all day long in a hurry, at night you will dream of rail-trains that you want to catch while you cannot move one inch toward the depot. If you are always over-suspicious and expectant of assault, you will have at night hallucinations of assassins with daggers drawn. No one wonders that Richard III, the iniquitous, the night before the battle of Bosworth Field dreamed that all those whom he had murdered stared at him, and that he was torn to pieces by demons from the pit. The scholar’92s dream is a philosophic echo. The poet’92s dream is a rhythmic echo. Coleridge composed his Kubla Khan asleep in a narcotic dream, and waking up wrote down three hundred lines of it. Tartini, the violin player, composed his most wonderful sonata while asleep in a dream so vivid that waking he easily transferred it to paper.

Waking thoughts have their echo in sleeping thoughts. If a man spends his life in trying to make others happy and is heavenly-minded, around his pillow he will see cripples who have got over their crutch, and processions of celestial imperials, and hear the Grand March roll down for drums of heaven over jasper parapets. You are very apt to hear in dreams what you hear when you are wide awake.

Now, having shown you that having a Bible we ought to be satisfied not getting any further communication from God, and having shown you that all dreams have an important mission, since they show the comparative independence of the soul from the body, and having shown you that the majority of dreams are a result of disturbed physical condition, and having shown you that our sleeping thoughts are apt to be an echo of our waking thoughts, I come now to my fifth and most important remark, and that is to say, that it is capable of proof that God does sometimes in our day, and has often since the close of the Bible dispensation, appeared to people in dreams.

All dreams that make you better are from God. How do I know it? Is not God the source of all good? It does not require a very logical mind to argue that out. Tertullian and Martin Luther believed in dreams. The dreams of John Huss are immortal. St. Augustine, the Christian father, gives us the fact that a Carthaginian physician was persuaded of the immortality of the soul by an argument which he heard in a dream. The night before his assassination the wife of Julius C’e6sar dreamed that her husband fell dead across her lap. It is possible to prove that God does appear in dreams to warn, to convert, and to save men. In 1695, a vessel went out from Spithead for West India, and ran against the ledge of rocks called the Caskets. The vessel went down, but the crew clambered up on the Caskets, to die of thirst or starvation as they supposed. But there was a ship bound for Southampton that had the captain’92s son on board. This lad twice in one night dreamed that there was a crew of sailors dying on the Caskets. He told his father of this dream. The vessel came down by the Caskets in time to find and to rescue those poor dying men. Who inspired that dream? The God of the rocks, the God of the sea.

The Rev. Dr. Bushnell, in his marvelous book entitled Nature and the Supernatural, gives the following fact that he got from Captain Yount, in California, a fact confirmed by many families. Captain Yount dreamed twice one night that one hundred and fifty miles away there was a company of travelers fast in the snow. He also saw in the dream, rocks of peculiar formation, and telling this dream to an old hunter, the hunter said: ’93Why, I remember those rocks; those rocks are in the Carson Valley Pass one hundred and fifty miles away.’94 Captain Yount, impelled by this dream, although laughed at by his neighbors, gathered men together, took mules and blankets, and started out on the expedition, traveled one hundred and fifty miles, saw those very rocks which he had described in his dream, and found the suffering ones at the foot of those rocks, brought them back to confirm his story. Who originated that dream? The God of the snow, the God of the Sierra Nevadas.

God has often appeared in resource and comfort. You have known people’97perhaps it is something I state in your experience’97you have seen people go to sleep with bereavements inconsolable, and they awakened in perfect resignation because of what they had seen in slumber. Dr. Crannage, one of the most remarkable men I ever met’97remarkable for benevolence and great philanthropies’97at Wellington, England, last summer, showed me a house where the Lord had appeared in a wonderful dream to a poor woman, The woman was rheumatic, sick, poor to the last point of destitution. She was waited on and cared for by another poor woman, her only attendant. Word came to her one day that this poor woman had died, and the invalid of whom I am speaking lay helpless upon the couch, wondering what would become of her. In that mood she fell asleep. In her dreams she said the Angel of the Lord appeared, and took her into the open air and pointed in one direction and there were mountains of bread, and pointed in another direction and there were mountains of butter, and in another direction and there were mountains of all kinds of worldly supply. The Angel of the Lord said to her: ’93Woman, all these mountains belong to your Father, and do you think he will let you, his child, hunger and die?’94

Dr. Crannage told me that by some divine impulse he went into that destitute home, saw the suffering there, and administered, unto it, caring for her all the way through. Do you tell me that that dream was woven of earthly anodynes? Was that the phantasmagoria of a diseased brain? No; it was an all-sympathetic God addressing a poor woman through a dream.

Furthermore, I have to say that there are people who have been converted to God through a dream. The Rev. John Newton, the fame of whose piety fills all Christendom, while a profligate sailor on shipboard, in his dream, thought that a being approached him and gave him a very beautiful ring, and put it upon his finger, and said to him, ’93As long as you wear that ring you will be prospered; if you lose that ring you will be ruined.’94 In the same dream another personage appeared, and by a strange infatuation persuaded John Newton to throw overboard that ring, and it sank into the sea. Then the mountains in sight were full of fire and the air was lurid with consuming wrath. While John Newton was repenting of his folly in having thrown overboard the treasure, another personage came through the dream, and told John Newton he could plunge into the sea and bring that ring up if he desired it. He plunged into the sea and brought it up, and said to John Newton, ’93Here is that gem, but I think I will keep it for you, lest you lose it again;’94 and John Newton consented, and all the fire went out from the mountains, and all the signs of lurid wrath disappeared from the air, and John Newton said that he saw in his dream that that valuable gem was his soul, and that the being who persuaded him to throw it overboard was Satan, and that the one who plunged in and restored that gem, keeping it for him, was Christ. And that dream makes one of the most wonderful chapters in the life of that most wonderful man.

A German was crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and in his dream he saw a man with a handful of white flowers, and he was told to follow the man who had that handful of white flowers. The German, arriving in New York, wandered into the Fulton Street Prayer-meeting, and Mr. Lanphier’97whom many of you knew’97the great apostle of prayer-meetings, that day had given to him a bunch of tuberoses. They stood on his desk, and at the close of the religious services he took the tuberoses and started homeward, and the German followed him, and through an interpreter told Mr. Lanphier that on the sea he had dreamed of a man with a handful of white flowers and was told to follow him. Suffice it to say, that through that interview and following interviews, he became a Christian, and is a city missionary preaching the Gospel to his own countrymen. God in a dream!

John Hardonk, while on shipboard, dreamed one night that the Judgment Day had come, and that the roll of the ship’92s crew was called, except his own name, and that these people, this crew, were all banished; and in his dream he asked the reader why his own name was omitted, and he was told it was to give him more opportunity for repentance. He woke up a different man. He became illustrious for Christian attainment. If you do not believe these things, then you must discard all testimony, and refuse to accept any kind of authoritative witness. God in a dream!

Rev. Herbert Mendes was converted to God through a dream of the last judgment; and I doubt if there is a man or woman in this house today who has not had some dream of that great day of judgment which shall be the winding up of the world’92s history. If you have not dreamed of it, perhaps to-night you may dream of that day. There are enough materials to make a dream. Enough voices, for there shall be the roaring of the elements, and the great earthquake. Enough light for the dream, for the world shall blaze. Enough excitement, for the mountains shall fall. Enough water, for the ocean shall rear. Enough astronomical phenomena, for the stars shall go out. Enough populations, for all the races of all the ages will fall into line of one of two processions, the one ascending and the other descending, the one led on by the rider on the white horse of eternal victory, the other led on by Apollyon on the black charger of eternal defeat.

The dream comes on me now, and I see the lightnings from above answering the volcanic disturbances from beneath, and I hear the long reverberating thunders that shall wake up the dead, and on one side I see the opening of a gate into scenes golden and amethystical, and on the other side I hear the clanging back of a gate into Bastiles of eternal bondage, and all the seas lifting up their crystal voices, cry, ’93Come to judgment!’94 and all the voices of the heaven cry, ’93Come to judgment!’94 and crumbling mausoleum, and Westminster Abbeys, and pyramids of the dead with marble voices, cry: ’93Come to judgment!’94 And the archangel seizes an instrument of music which has never yet been sounded, an instrument of music that was made only for one sound, and thrusting that mighty trumpet through the clouds, and turning it this way, he shall put it to his lip and blow the long, loud blast that shall make the solid earth quiver, crying, ’93Come to judgment!’94

Then from this earthly grossness quit,

Attired in stars, we shall forever sit.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage