Why We Never Discuss Our Dreams

Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today on the Files, I have the first of a six-part series on dream interpretation. It's coming at you today on the Firestone Files. All right everybody. Well, welcome to a series I have been anticipating for some time now and that is dream interpretation. We've been covering a lot of philosophy on the files and taking trips together and dealing with the um issues of the time. This one is kind of a throwback. It goes way back in human history about as far as humans go back. And that is our experiences of dreams. And so that's uh that's what we're going to be covering here in this six-part series.

Now, how did this come about, you might ask? Well, um, as you know, we've been doing the Firestone Files for some time now. And um, I've been dealing primarily with the basic issues in philosophy from logic and ethics to metaphysics to the tree of philosophy, uh, to other aspects of philosophy. And, uh, we really haven't done topics that relate to everyday life. um in any sort of explicit way. We're using illustrations. We're doing other things like that.

Well, this series is an attempt to jump kind of all into the deep end on a very difficult topic, but also one that's close to home to everybody, and that's dream interpretation. Now, if you're like most people, you have dreams every night. If you're also like most people, well, you probably don't remember most of them. Unless of course they have memorable characteristics. Maybe they're coming at a moment in your life where there's some trauma or some stress or something extraordinary going on and you dream and those dreams kind of uh impact you when you wake up and you try to process them. Well, dream interpretation and dreams in general have been around human beings forever.

And for most of human history, we took them quite seriously. And yet over the last two and 300 years, particularly in the West, they've fallen off the table. Maybe they're they they've come into some kind of uh illreute or disrepute. um they're not what we thought they were. Um and that has to do with I think the development of the western mind and um dreams are one of the things that have been marginalized. So we're going to talk about that. Now what makes me qualified for this? I'm a philosopher. I'm not a dream interpreter per se.

But many years ago, probably 20 now at least, um I was uh you know asked by students to talk more about dream interpretation since it was an interest of mine as a younger philosopher and I developed a course called dream interpretation and philosophical analysis and I taught that course a couple of times when I worked for Trinity um and it was a student favorite.

I always had large groups in that class and even though it wasn't a required class for the major it was like one of those extra classes that you know an elective but I always had uh large groups of usually philosophy majors but sometimes other people and I would get spillover into that class and students loved it and the class was centered around first learning the art of harvesting your dreams journaling your dreams then we looked at interpreting your dreams and how various historically significant dream interpreters would help us to analyze those dreams and uh yeah those courses went great.

We always talked a lot about our dreams and it was a a space kind of a spa safe space for students to share their dreams and for us to talk about them openly and um and so we did and that's something I think there's a hunger for and so that's why I've developed this six-part series. We could probably have gone longer. I was considering seven, eight, nine parts, but for systems sake, for clarity sake, I'm focusing in on this six-part series. Today, we're introducing the topic.

Next week, uh, we're going to be diving into, um, some of the psychologists, historically significant psychologists, Carl Jung, and and, um, and, uh, Sigman Freud in particular. The week after that, we'll be looking at uh, Fritz Perils and Vilhelm Vunt and maybe Kelvin Hall as other dream interpreters. And then we're going to be going to the Bible for episodes um four and five where we deal with the Old Testament dreams and New Testament dreams. And Lord willing we'll get to episode six and that'll be kind of a watershed where I am going to culminate this series with a methodology for dream interpretation.

one, I believe that you'll be able to utilize and make the most out of interpreting your own dreams and those who you come into contact with or who you share those with. So that's the generic plan here. That's the sort of overarching super structure. As I said, today we're diving into the first kind of introduction of this topic. Now, that course alone wasn't enough to get me to do this. I uh it did it did give me lots of material to review and books to read and other things as I was preparing for these episodes. But the trigger was uh believe it or not were the prep year students at Turning Point uh prep year in Fort Worth.

I taught that as you guys will recall in the fall of 2025. I was in an immersive situation with them for the entire semester. I was hired by Turning Point for six months and really dove in, loved my time uh there with the students. And it was during that time that the students kind of got to know me as I got to know them and they found out that I taught dream interpretation in the past and they just asked repeatedly like squeaky wheel, you know, and uh squeaky wheel gets the grease. And so I gave them one day on dream interpretation where we discussed for about 3 hours in the morning uh some of what I had uh covered in my class years ago. Well, they love the topic. It sparked within me a renewed interest to jump back into that material and the results are episodes uh six episodes here on dream interpretation. And if you like these episodes or if you want to hear more on one or more parts of them, let me know.

Chime back in here and um you know, put a comment in and I'd love to discuss this more with you. You're going to find out how important dreams are in this series. And you are going to be um hopefully it'll wet your appetite for remembering your dreams in the first place, harvesting them, thinking about them, talking about them, and interpreting them. And that's no small recovery. As you're going to find out, dreams are just about as plentiful as the waking life. You know, we have a If you're like me, you try to get about eight hours sleep if you can. That's a third of your day in which you are immersed in dreams.

And so those experiences are super important. Even if you don't remember them, there's something going on here. We're going to try to unpack this as we go, but uh something significant going on in dream interpretation. So, um, without further ado, you know, I'd love to jump in this topic with you in a kind of an introductory way. Um, as I've mentioned, these aren't topics we typically talk about and I think we don't talk about them oftent times because, well, a couple of different reasons. One, they seem kind of mystical, right? They're not scientific. They're not necessarily measurable in the way that our regular experiences are.

You don't usually share them as a momentous experience. You don't take pictures of them, put them in a photo album. Um, if you're lucky, you you may journal on them, but journals aren't typically read by other people. Um, and so they feel kind of mystical. They feel like I can't, you know, can't get my hands around them. Why would I share them? Why would I converse with them? I think the other uh reason is is that they're very personal.

Uh sometimes things are revealed in dreams about us and um maybe they're things that we don't want other people to know or maybe they're aspects of our personality that we'd rather remain hidden or maybe we're fearful that there's something in them that others might see that we um that we don't see. And so that can make us uncomfortable. Well, today I'm going to really be addressing three things. What are dreams? Uh why are dreams being ignored? Um and in that sense, I'm going to bring up a book that I wrote with uh Dr. Nathan Jacobs of the Nathan Jacobs podcast, and that's this book, Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought.

And I'm really going to talk about the situation of contemporary people in the west. Why is there this sacred secular divide and how does that impact dreams and you know what can we do about it? And then the second part is how do we make sense and uh and reclaim the significance of dreams? And this is a book that I had forgotten about for a long while. one I used in class years ago and that's Bible dreams, the spiritual quest. It's by a Jewish scholar named Seamore Russell. And so I'm going to be talking a little bit about that book.

And I'm sure these things will come up in the succeeding le you know lectures here episodes where we do a deep dive first into the philosophers and psychologists and then second into the Bible itself and then as I've mentioned before um try to bring all that together into a useful methodology for dream interpretation. So it will demystify u dreams. Um, there's always going to be mystery in dream interpretation.

I'm not going to like totally demystify you're going to have a, you know, a scientific approach to dream interpretation, but I do feel like we can get to a kind of understanding of the art of dream interpretation using science to help us to understand and better understand dreams and also of course using the revealed word in the Bible to help us with this process as well.

And then at the end here, um, we're going to talk a little bit about the types of dreams that we have. There's a there's a Christian, uh, psychologist, counselor named, um, named Harry Hunt that I think can help us to categorize some of our dreams and kind of get us launched into the episodes to follow. So, that's the general plan here. Well, of all the many dreams I've had in my life, some stand out. And I'd like to start by sharing with you a dream that I had um when I was in my early 20s. And so, it's not a long dream, but it was a very profound dream for me.

And it's one of those dreams that is kind of a trigger for me to be interested in dreams in general because not only did it did I have the dream did it impact my life, but it had a profound impact on my life. And um and so I'll probably use it as an illustration along with a number of other dreams. I've got probably three or four dreams I'm going to share with you along the way of these next uh six episodes. formative dreams for me, meaningful dreams for me, and ones I think that are illustrative of dream interpretation generally.

And so, we're going to try to do one or, you know, one of those uh one or two of those every um every episode so that we can see how dream interpretation might work itself out in practice. Well, anyway, I uh like I said, I was in my early 20s at the time. I'd graduated college. I had just been I was either at work with my first job or making the transition into a master's program at the time and I had a dream. Um now just by way of context, one of the things you really would be helpful to know generally speaking is not only the dream details but the waking life context of one's dreams.

What's going on there? that would potentially have some interpretive u influence or meaningfulness for helping us to understand the dream. Well, for me, I was early in life. I was um graduated from college. I was uh looking for work, looking for my place in the world. And one of the things that I was interested in were the ladies at that point. And now I had uh I was a Christian young Christian at the time but really just in formation and um did not have I don't think a healthy attitude towards women at that point in my life. I was aspiring as it were um to become a better Christian but at the same time I was struggling with um with with uh trying to figure out how to navigate uh the opposite sex.

and uh was really in an essence treating them more like objects than as a telos of a of a good life uh of a you know of of a of a married life of a life together and really more of uh you know what I could get out of the situation rather than what I could invest into it. So that's the context probably was having some psychological um uh tension if you will between my say religious commitments commitments as a Christian but also my interest in finding a significant other for whatever reasons I might have on my mind at the time. Well, one night I had this dream.

And in the dream I was laying in a uh room, kind of a sterile room, all kind of white, very simple, very sort of a Spartan room. I was on a uh on a platform resting for lack of a better term, laying there when some people broke into the room and burst into the room I guess and they were wearing kind of laboratory coats and um masks. They were for all intents and purposes they looked like doctors or nurses or something, but they were fully covered and I couldn't make out who they were. But uh they came right over to me and they held me down and one of them, the ring leader I guess, took out a syringe and stuck me in the neck with it and I was immediately paralyzed.

I was motionless. I couldn't move at all. I just knew that I was in this sterile room with a bunch of sterile people who um I don't know what their motives were. All I know is that I was immobile. The only thing I could move were my eyes. I could look around apparently because I could kind of scan the room. But it made me nervous obviously unnerved me really. Um, and I was wondering what was going on. Well, at my feet there was a square uh I I don't know almost frame at my feet. And uh this person who had stabbed me with the syringe and made me immobile um and paralyzed walked over there, hit some kind of button and a door opened.

And that door at my feet had a hole in it there. And suddenly the gurnie or this conveyor belt that I was on started moving and my feet went in first and I was marching right inside the wall. That of course was nothing I could fight because I was immo. I didn't know what uh what to do about it. And um lo and behold um the door shut behind me. And I became very nervous indeed, especially when I noticed these jets that were on at my feet, at my side, at my head, all around me. And they had one of those little pilot lights. And this pilot light um had a little fire on the end of it.

And I said to myself, "Oh no, where am I?" It was as if I had been uh moved into some kind of crematorium. And suddenly my whole body started to get hot as I realized, hold, I got to get out of here, but I can't move at all. All I can do is look around and see these jets firing up. And it was at that very moment that dread overcame my soul. I started to sweat profusely. I had to get out of there, but I couldn't do anything. Was totally totally immobile.

And the next thing I know is that the jets fired on. And when they fired on, fire burst in there. And I immediately knew that my life was over. It was at that very moment that I woke up in my bed and my bed was completely soaked with sweat. My whole body had emptied out as it were just uh to this really I guess it was a nightmare honestly uh that I had had. But my first thought when I woke up is I like whoa. I was so glad it wasn't a dream. But at the same time, I realized, Chris, you are being spoken to.

You are being spoken to in the sense that you know you're headed down the wrong pathway. And that pathway that you're headed down will lead to your destruction. And so you need to pull up your bootstraps. You need to change your life, young man, lest it goes this way permanently. Well, I didn't mean to sort of shock you guys or I really I I don't think I've ever shared that. I may have shared it in that class years ago. Probably did. Um, but you can see that this made a profound had a profound influence on me. I uh I did straighten up.

I did take action at the time and I don't take it to be an accident that not too much later after those after I recalibrated my life that I found my future uh spouse Beth Firestone who I've now been you know married for I should know this 34 years or something about there anyway um but uh I I don't take that to be an accident. I take it to be a kind of revelatory dream with maybe some prophetic uh element to it. And that was very very influential uh for me. And so um you know it was a warning. It was a warning that I heeded u and it turned my life around.

So that uh that experience demonstrated to me profoundly how important dreams can be. And as I recall it, I never failed to remember that one as a pivotal point in my life. It was a gift. It was a gift that I received. And now you have to decide what you're going to do with it. And um and I did. Why don't we talk about these things more? Why is it that these things are anomalies when they happen so frequently in our lives? They're not always that profound. I think that you when I look at my life, probably every 5 years I'd have something that profound, but maybe in a different way.

Um, but I have many, many other dreams that are maybe not quite that profound, but still important and meaningful. Why is it that we typically ignore these things? Why is it that they are secondass citizens as we think about our world view and our commitments in life and how we're going to live our life and all of those questions?

Well, if you're like me, you're a product of the 21st century. You are. It's not an accident that this that our approach to dreams has come to this. that the only ones we really remember are those super profound ones that you can't hope to forget because they're so potentially traumatic or eyeopening or meaningful in some fundamental way that they press themselves upon you and they say listen to me. Um otherwise we don't think much about them. Uh you know they might be a a momentary conversation. I had this crazy dream last night or whatever. But that's because we are living in a secularized age. Now what do I mean by a secularized age?

This is not an accident in the west. We have been sanitizing our cultural spaces, our political spaces, our educational spaces from religious faith, from religious influence for the last couple hundred years now. And um it's kind of a watershed moment in that regard in the west. I think that a lot of what we're seeing in culture now is because of this sacred secular divide and we have a kind of polarization thing going on everywhere in society. Now I had mentioned this book that Nathan Jacobs and I edited together called the persistence of the sacred in modern thought.

And you know, I'll talk a little bit about that because it's where it was quickened in me just how important these experiences um are and why it is that we don't focus on them as much as we used to. Now, in that book, it the book came about out of my work with Nathan Jacobs on the philosophy of Emanuel Kant. and you think, "Wow, Emanuel Ahad, that seems so far a field from dream interpretation." Well, it's much closer than you'll ever could have realized. And hopefully you'll get a sense of why that's the case here as we go forward. Emanuel Khan talked about phenomena, that is the waking life, and numina, the spiritual life.

And a lot of people say Emanuel Kant sort of kills off the numina, the spiritual stuff, in favor of the scientific immediate stuff. I mean, that's the standard portrait of Kant that that uh we oftentimes would hear about in school. I certainly was trained thinking that that was Khan's position. But as I read Khan for myself, I noticed it was much more nuanced than that. And he was far more open to spiritual realities, what I'm calling the sacred, than was commonly thought. And Nathan Jacobs and I wrote a book called In Defense of Kant's religion where we make this case that he has this thing going on called rational religious faith that opens up an entire world of possibility through the eyes of rational religious faith which you might call critical religion.

Remember at the end of this year I'll be doing a deep dive probably another six episodes or so on the philosophy of Emanuel Khan. This is this whole dream interpretation um uh set of lectures or episodes here hopefully will wet your appetite for that because hopefully a you'll be able to see just how significant our dreams are and how meaningful they are and how important Kant and the Kante that follow him are to interpreting dreams but also tell us that we need to know more about this philosophical system in order to understand this better. So, that's coming up later in the year. But for now, we're focused in on dream interpretation.

When we get in the next episode to some of the psychological interpreters of Kant, some of the philosophers and psychologists, you you'll see just how important Kant is to them. They're all sort of reacting to Kant. He opens the door to dream interpretation even as he appears to be shutting it, if you will, to the sacred. complex story, but I think it's going to be important for us to understand it to a certain degree. Okay. Well, getting back to the persistence of the sacred and modern thought, we re we Nathan Jacobs and I really revolutionize K studies with that book by showing that Kant is far more theologically astute and religiously affirmative than has been commonly thought.

And as we were sort of putting our finishing touches on that, it dawned on us that this very same problem seemed to be going on in some of the other interpreters, uh, some of the other philosophers in modernity. And I'm thinking particularly of somebody like Renee Decart. I did a special on Renee Decart last holiday season. Uh but not just daycard hobbs, uh lock linenets, Christian Wolf, um David Hume, uh George Hegel, uh I mean the list goes on and on. It it just dawned on us as we aren't experts in those fields. We were philosophers who read who read those thinkers, but it always struck Nathan and I that they were just as theologically affirmative as Kant was.

And yet when I took these modern philosophers at the University of Illinois, when I studied them, when I read the sort of standard histories on these persons, you would think that they're all secular, that they're all anti-religious, that they're all non-Christian. Quite the opposite is the case. Almost every one of them is a theist, and almost every one of them is a Christian.

Now, not necessarily an Orthodox Christian like somebody you might find in the pews at your local church, but they were clearly theologically affirmative, Christian in orientation. And so we in this book, we decided, let's go ahead and see if there might be a contributor volume here. And um we went out and we uh started to reach out to some of these um some of these experts in the field not in con studies because that's where Nathan and I were doing our work but we looked at Renee Deart and John Codingham. You'll see in chapter 1 he wrote an essay called the descularization of Decart.

Decart so many is near and dear to my heart because I noticed immediately when I read his meditation his six meditations and we talked about that like I said last last uh holiday season but right in the heart of his argument are are is the onlogical proof for the existence of God. In fact there's a couple of proofs for the existence of God buried in Decart and they are pivotal to understanding Decart's worldview. And yet when I took Daycart at the University of Illinois we only made it to the first two meditations.

the rest of it was like h you know he's off his game you know we don't need to read that part but for Decart the center the hub of the entire argument is the relationship between the logos both in terms of reason and God and the existence of God and you don't get the existence of the external world in the Deart formula without the existence of God anyway so we reached out to John Cottingham who's world's expert, world's leader in the field of uh you know Deart studies and he immediately said yes I want to write this essay the desecularization of Decart and believe it or not this this ne oh I won't say never because I got one counter example here but it almost never happens in Khan studies or or in any study of any of these major figures that they send you their essay immediately. Well, John Cottyham not only said yes, he had his essay attached. I don't think I've ever seen that before. Um, and so he was one contributor that I remember early on.

The other one that I remember very early on in the process was um, let's see here. It was um, oh yeah, uh, Hegel, the Hegel scholar, Peter Hodgson, he also said yes immediately. Anybody who's done these contributor volumes knows that the publishers would rather have u you know original author texts, not editorial books or cont what we call contributor volumes because they're a little bit harder to sell unless they are thematically focused. And um so you need a couple of really good anchor essays if you're going to submit a proposal to a publisher for a contributor volume. Well, John Cottingham had gotten us his essay and then Peter Hodgson also got us his essay on Hegel.

Same same thing. He wrote his essay. This is chapter 14 in the book called Hegel and secularization where he argues that Hegel is far more theologically affirming than is commonly thought. And these guys are not alone. So we you could go through the book yourself and you see Martinik was did his on Thomas Hobbes. Phil Clayton did Spinosa. Um, we have uh Nicholas Walter Stof worked on John Lockach and the list goes on and on. I could talk a lot more about the book, but the bottom line is these guys all came on board in record time and we had this editor volume sort of drafted within months of sending out the requests to these scholars.

And that that's a big deal. I mean, that book came together fast. It was ended up being published by um Notre Dame University Press and we were honored as you can see up here in the top with a choice book award because I think there were so many people struggling with this secular sacred divide and trying to figure it out if all these modern thinkers were against God and religion that maybe the secular sacred divide is the way humanity should go. And yet what we were suggesting is no the sacred persists in these thinkers.

Now, it's not always unified in terms of their theology or orthodoxy, but to a person, they're theists, they're theologically affirmative, and they see a relationship between the sacred and the secular. Um, that has been lost in these revisionist histories. Now, in the introduction to the book, Nathan Jacobs and I did some deep diving on how this could possibly happen. And uh the story is is rather interesting. In the 19 middle of the 19th century, particularly in 1871, a book came out by Jacob Holio called the principles of secularization illustrated. And in that book, he cites FW Newman's work with the free thought societies. And now these are all atheist and naturalists who are taking it upon themselves to be cultural change agents.

And they're arguing that everything historical and everything worth archiving in philosophical history um should be seen through the eyes of atheism and naturalism. And so they uh they write this book, it becomes very influential uh called the like I said the Holy Oaks book in particular principles of secularization illustrated and u basically suggesting that there needs to be a kind of whitewashing of the theologically and the religiously affirmative materials not only in society of the day but also revising histories of the past because this is something humanity has been struggling to utter uh for a very long time in philosophy and so um that became very important.

Now, the watershed of these free thought societies and this secularization push, you guys probably know a lot of the sort of stuff that's been happening in the United States in terms of uh clearing out the religious from our public spaces and how the university has slowly eroded away from Christianity proper to a kind of theological theism, nominalism to a kind of uh atheism, naturalism, power and logic motif that we see embedding itself in the humanities and other places within our universities. This is part of the sickness that we have in our country right now and it's comes in the academy of all places now not everywhere in the academy.

I've taught at some great places and I know of some great places but by and large the thought leaders have been taken captive by these ideas. Now the key person that we focused on in the introduction was a scholar named Leo Strauss. He wrote a book in 1952 that has become kind of all the rage of the revisionist historians who are trying to kind of rewrite history of modernity and even further back all the way back to the Greeks. Believe it or not, this book is called uh persecution and the art of writing. And in it, uh, Leo Strauss basically argues that because of the lack of separation of of church and state, all of these great minds of the past, particularly modernity, but it extends further past, are under pressure, cultural pressure to tip their hat towards Christian, theologically affirmative, you know, state power authorities and so forth.

And really what they're doing is they're slowly trying to extricate themselves from it. So when you look back at Daycart or you look back at Kant or anybody uh you know in and around those thinkers, they're all under censorship pressure. They're all under pressure from the authorities and they can't really say what they truly believe. And so he argues for kind of an esoteric reading of all of these figures. And that what historians need to do 1952 onward is to revise all their standard histories to remove all of those influences from them. In other words, to pull the theologically and religiously affirmative material out of because they really didn't hold it.

They were only saying it so that they could be published. So that was a very influential move. And so what we have done in the book and this I think pretty much my last point here is to say time out a second. You cannot properly understand Emanuel K unless you understand his theological affirmation. And one of the problems with scholars post 1952, really the last 75 years now, is that they don't understand enough theology to um make sense out of the arguments of Decart or of Lock or of Linets or of Kant.

And so we have these specialized people in these sub fields. And because they can't make coherent sense out of these arguments, generally speaking, they tend to dismiss them. And they're given license to dismiss them because of the likes of Leo Strauss and other people in this sort of free thought society trajectory. The elimination of religion and theology from public spaces. This creates what I'm calling the sacred secular divide that we now have. We live in a bifurcated space. I was always trying to understand myself in this regard because I was at the University of Illinois studying mathematics and philosophy. I would go to church. I was a churchgoer.

I was a Christian, a young one. I've already admitted that I was a struggling one, but I was sort of on a pathway of um of of formation, you might say. But I struggled with the fact that I was being taught by a university that to a person seemed to reject religion and theology. And yet I was going to church every Sunday and I was doing missions and I was doing outreach. How do those two worlds work for a guy who's 18, 19, 20 years old? I felt the bifurcation in my in my soul. And I thought it was just me. But the more I've studied over the years, the more I've come to realize it wasn't just me.

It was the entirety of my society that we all have this kind of I don't know schizophrenia about the sacred and the secular. Our ancestors did not have this problem. They saw a more unified worldview than that. You might call it an open system. Francis Schaefer talks about the closed versus the open system. Society today and education today has been defined by a closed system. You have nature. You have cause and effect.

You have space and time and there's nothing else. And it's all either determined or locked down in some sort of black box of mystery. And yet that's not the biblical worldview. That's not the worldview of the common man generally. We are more spiritual than that. We are more interested in our eternal destiny than that. We are more quickened in our thinking because of the belief in the good and the true and the beautiful and the importance of faith and love and hope. Things that aren't in that closed system per se. And so if we have a problem, it's because we've been trained to have a problem.

And that is something that I it took me a while to figure it out. And I think it was this book, this watershed book for me that helps me to understand that there's more to this world than this philosophical closed system would allow. Okay. So that is uh in a sense why we're having trouble interpreting our dreams. We marginalize them inherently. We dismiss them because society has dismissed them. We were trained to dismiss them where it's sort of in the air that we breathe as a 21st century people. And yet there's a watershed momenting happening moment happening right now in culture where we're being reawakened to the fact that we've been sold a bill of goods in this regard.

Okay. Well, I'm going to move on here to Bible dreams and say more Ross because I think he does a yman's job really at helping us to understand that there's more to this world than meets the eye and certainly more to our dreams than we than we've been taught that there is. Um, a couple of points that he makes that I think are helpful to our discussion here is that modernity has been reduced and dreams have been reduced. And yet the sacred persists. People like myself still have dreams. We still see them as meaningful. They still speak to us as if from the outside, as if this were an open system and not a closed system.

And um he makes a number of good points in this regard. He tells us in the book that dreams are experiences. When you have a dream, you are every bit as much invested in that world of the dream as you are in the waking life. What's interesting even about dreams is that they can be even more impactful than the waking life because they don't have any competitors. Typically, when you're in the waking life, I've got my office here. I've got a lot of things on my plate. I got a lot of things to do today. There are competitors for my attention. When you're in a dream, says Russell.

You don't have such competitors. You are fully immersed. Everything else is faded away. You're totally focused on what's at hand. And these are profound experiences for that reason. secular norms and dreams uh uh you know uh dream stigmas suppress our dreams as well. They're due to you know all sorts of factors which dehumanize us. One of the beautiful things of dreams that I think Ross will help me to realize is that they make us more human. They help us to realize that the experiences that we have are our experiences. They're our processing.

They're our relationship to God and that's important. They're inherently an open system. They're sacred and secular in dynamic integrated unity. He makes another point that I think is really helpful in this book and I think it's going to help us to bridge the sacred and the secular in our minds. And that is that when you're in a dream, you're in another world. But it's not an ontologically other world. It's a different aspect of this same world. Like I said, it's a unified thing that we're experiencing. The waking life and the dream life are they can't be understood apart from one another. What happens in your dreams is first in in a sense experienced in some other way outside in your waking life.

And what happens in your waking life is informed by the processing of your subconscious and your relationship, your soulful relationship with a deeper world, a more profound world, a more enchanted world than the one that uh you know scientists look at in repeatable experiments. Um, so in other words, you're experiencing one world, one open system with two aspects to it, not two different worlds with an infinite divide between them. It's one world, integrated as it were, but you can kind of look at it in two different ways. It's almost like that box that you see, a 3D box. You can look at it as you're underneath the box or you look at it as you're over the box. But regardless, it's just a matter of perspective. You're looking at an other world. Uh I mean another world, not an other world. There's not two onlogically distinct things going on.

There's one thing happening, one set of experiences with two aspects to it. One is the dream and one is the waking life. And the two can't be understood without some kind of reciprocal relationship um between them. Other thing to keep in mind about dreams is that they're an inexhaustible resource. When you start harvesting them, when you start taking notice of them, they start coming to your conscience conscious awareness much more frequently. They're inexhaustible. They can go on and on for long periods of time. And heck, the longer you can sleep, the more dreams you can have. And you know, they're like an infinite well of possibility.

And so they're a a natural resource that we have access to that's unlimited. And yet often times we don't take advantage of that. Um I think the last point I want to make from Rossell's analysis, I think that helps us to bridge the sacred secular divide is that um the the dreams are limitless, but they're very fragile. You can wake up in the morning. This has happened to me more times than I can count and I I really should know better. But life goes on, you know, we're busy.

You have a dream. It was a very interesting dream. Maybe it has real clarity, real precision, a kind of meaningfulness that you can sense but you can't quite utter yet. You need to write that down, says Russell. If you don't write it down, it's shocking how fragile that dream is. It will disappear like a drop of the water in the ocean or you know a fragrance that is blown away by the wind. Um and so the fragility if you will of these dreams is prodigious. And so one of the things I did in my class uh was to ask my students to keep a dream journal.

And that dream journal needed to happen every morning. As soon as they wake up, keep that dream journal next to them. Open it up. Write down everything they can remember. And we're going to talk about this when we get to episode um six, the final part of this um of this set of lectures. You've got to write it down. And you don't just write it down generically. You need to write it down specifically. Every detail that you can remember the moment you have it because every second you delay, something is lost. And those things can be really important to the meaningfulness of the dream. And so there's a kind of fragility there that we need to be cognizant of and harvest these things right away.

Now, as I said, some are so crystal clear to us, like the crematorium dream that I had. You can't fail to remember it. I'm sure some of the details have been lost or smudged over by me, but I I didn't forget it. I I actually did write it down and have some of those details uh you know, sort of written out, but I don't think I would ever have forgotten it. So, anyway, something to keep in mind.

Now, um, as we open ourselves to the possibility that our dreams are just as sacred as they are secular, in fact, they may even be more sacred because they're unique to us. We had those dreams. Nobody else has access to those dreams. They're precious. They're a precious unlimited fragile natural resource that all of us have. And um that I think as as as we contemplate that we I think we get open to the possibility that there may be more to these dreams than meets the eye.

And when we turn next to the Bible, after we look at the psychologists, which will be very influential in their own right, there's some going to be some really important teachable moments for us when we look at Sigman Freud and Carl Jung and uh Fritz Perils and and u Bill Helm Vunt and Kelvin Hall and some of the great uh you know 19th and 20th century psychologist, philosophers. We can then go back I think with new eyes to the Bible. And that's one of the things St. Rosel was really I think helpful for me is don't go to the Bible with a spirit of disbelief of a scientific questioning and so forth. Read it as a more integrated worldview.

And when you do that, if you sus what what Russell calls suspending disbelief, sometimes when you go into a movie or to the theater to enhance the meaningfulness of it in the experience that you're going to have, you need to suspend disbelief. Now, sometimes, you know, directors and actors can really help us with that. And other times they can unmask that and sort of loses it it's it uh, you know, enchantment over us. But you really need to go into the biblical text and even into your own dreams with an open-mindedness to kind of allow it to speak to us. When we do that, a whole new world of possibility of meaningfulness opens to us.

And I think this is where Russell really helped me to understand. Our biblical ancestors saw very little difference between the waking life and the dream life. When we get to the uh fourth and fifth episodes where we do a deep dive on the Bible, you're going to see this that biblical writers did not have the secular sacred secular divide that modern man has. And um meaning kind of flows, if you will, between the waking life and the dream life. and they and they reciprocally sort of inform one another for biblical writers.

That's going to be huge. Um, dreams and scripture are not random selections as well. What we're going to notice when we get into those later episodes is that these dreams and visions and transes that are happening in the Bible aren't side notes. They often come at very pivotal moments in the uh biblical narrative. They're hugely important. I've got my just as a teaser here, I've got my Bible open to Genesis 15. This is Abram in his uh in God's covenant with Abram. And uh you know, I'm just going to share a little bit of this and it'll it'll show you immediately just how important dreams are.

So this is uh basically 151 kind of down to uh you know 14 or 15 or so. It says after this the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. You know like I said we find these words vision and trans and dream almost used interchangeably in scripture. In this vision is God speaks, "Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward." But Abram said, "Oh sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless? And the one who will inherit my estate is Eleazar of Damascus." And Abram said, "You have given me no children, so a servant in my household will be my heir."

Then the word of the Lord came to him. This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir. He took him outside. Obviously, he was inside in this having this vision in his tent. And it was late at night. It's not clear if he's awake, if he's asleep, if he's sleep walking, or what's going on here. He took him outside. Look up at the heavens and count the stars if indeed you can count them. Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be be." Abram believed the Lord and he credited it to him as righteousness.

So God credits Abraham with righteousness in this vision or trance that he has because he believes the Lord will do what he says he will do even though it appears to be scientifically impossible. He also said to him, "I am the Lord who brought you out of and of the Calaldanss to give you this land to take possession of it." But Abram said, "Oh sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?" So the Lord said to him, "Bring me a heer and a and a and a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon."

Abram brought all these to him. He cut them up. He had a sacrifice. And as the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated for 400 years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. This is a prophetic dream. Clearly, he's in a deep sleep. Clearly, he's having a dream and the Lord speaking to him. And there doesn't seem to be any difference between the way the Lord is speaking early on and the way he's speaking now. That's in one voice. A vision, a trance, deep sleep. They're all happening to Abram and they're all very meaningful.

And then he gives him some prophecy. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. It goes on and on from there. This is just one. Now, we're going to do a deeper dive into the Old Testament and into the New Testament in sub succeeding episodes here, but I wanted to point out to you that the biblical worldview is far more integrated between the sacred and secular than the modern person would ever believe or make sense out of. And we go to the scriptures with this scientific naturalistic atheistic mindset that somehow these things don't matter that only the waking life matters and what can be measured.

Well, that is not the way God works apparently at least not according to the scriptures. Okay. Well, that's all I think kind of interesting, kind of important. I think, you know, the combination of being, you know, uh, I don't know, swindled into dividing the sacred and the secular for a couple hundred years now, we're only now beginning to become aware of what's happened to us in the West and the polarization that it has caused. But the Bible helps us to bridge the gap. And Seymour Russell is one of those books along with others. We're going to be looking at some others here um throughout this uh throughout these episodes. They're going to help us to bridge this gap. We're first going to look at the philosopher psychologist.

Then we're going to look at the biblical text itself. And then we're going to develop a dream interpretation methodology where we take all these truths and all these aids and all these helps to develop a system for understanding um dreams and interpreting dreams better. I want to close here by pointing out uh one more a Christian psychologist counselor a guy named Harry Hunt and talk about my crematorium dream one more time. Harry Hunt says that there are at least six different types of dreams that a more unified understanding an open system understanding of the relationship between the sacred and the secular. Um there's like I at least six different types.

There's instructional dreams which give us guidance and direction. It's oftent times symbolic. Um there are warning dreams. We see that for example when we get to the New Testament. We see them very clearly in uh Joseph the uh you know Jesus's father or stepfather um and um we see warnings about you know King Herod and having to go to Egypt so forth. Revelatory dreams these are dreams that uh have a kind of spiritual reality to them. They uh they bring insight to your disposition. There's prophetic dreams and these concern oftentimes future events or uh you know foretelling or what's sometimes called forthtelling where they see more clearly where everything is going. So they're in the truth and they're trying to awaken us to the truth. There are soul dreams says Harry Hunt. They flow from your subconscious.

There's sort of emotional processing, stress, uh internal conflicts that you're having. The soul dreams will percolate up in your very being. We're going to look at those more in the next couple of episodes. Spiritual warfare dreams involving demonic attack. They emphasize the importance of the spiritual disciplines, prayer, understanding biblical authority, having spiritual discernment. So these are some of the types of dreams I think that uh Harry Hunt uh points us to. There's also according to Hunt patterns that we're going to see in our dreams. So u before I go there I will when we look at the crematorium dream it definitely falls into the category of a revelatory dream.

A revelatory dream has a kind of spiritual reality. I immediately took it as saying something about the nature of my soul and uh I needed to take action because of it. So it could also be a warning dream. It's definitely has instructional components and it definitely concerns my soul. It could be a soul dream as well. You're going to find that in dreams. So when every time we get a typology like I just gave you, it's not the only typology out there, but there's going to be blending. Your dream doesn't necessarily fall only into one category. There might be one that's most operative or most profound.

I think that it's revelatory character for me was probably the most profound. Um it had a strong warning component as well for me. But uh dreams are as much art as they are science. And so we're going to be uh uh noticing that in the in the coming episodes as well. All right. Well, there are patterns that come in our dreams. We're going to see these in the next episode. There's there's sort of uh personal or sort of mimic dreams that that have to do more closely with your waking life. Maybe you're replaying the day's activities.

These are pretty uh common dreams to have. Uh maybe they're nostalgic. They're looking back at your younger days or something like that. There's medical uh sematic dreams and these are usually caused by some kind of physical stress that you're under. Maybe you're too hot or you're too cold or maybe you got to use the bathroom or maybe um you you have some strong illness. There's symbolic dreams and symbolism we're going to find is pretty common in dreams. Your body consolidates ideas into objects of your dreams. And so in interpretation, we're going to have to look at the symbolic nature of different things that you describe as you're writing out your dream journals.

There's prophetic dreams, as I mentioned before, with has foretelling and forthelling. Uh there's nightmares and there's lucid dreams. This is all terminology you may have heard of before, but it's stuff that happens that will signify how important these dreams are, where they're coming from. Uh if if it's a a recurring dream, those typically have more importance than other dreams. What some of the symbols like water having to do with depth uh of the subconscious and other things like that. We're going to be looking into some of these things as we go along in this uh in these episodes.

Uh all of this is really a kind of fascinating interface of art and science as we try to describe and picture the dreams that we've had marking down everything we have and then utilize some of the tools of the philosophers of the psychologists of the uh prophets and the apostles. And we're going to try to boil that all down in episode 6 to a kind of a methodology if you will for interpreting dreams. All right. Well, I've already pushed my normal time limits. There's so much more I'd love to talk about here, but this is an introduction.

Next time in the next episode, we're going to start out with a place that you may be familiar with if you're a college educated person or even just somebody who's educated themselves. That's with Freud and Jung. What can we learn from these guys? And then we'll move on to other psychologists and philosophers. Then we're going to get to the Bible. and then we will get to our watershed methodology. All right. Well, that's it for this episode of the Firestone Files, part one of a six-part series. Looking forward to the next one coming next week. Uh have a blessed day and uh hope to see you next time.

Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on Bible. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions and remember the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.