Last fall, I read a book by a Christian author on the subject of dream interpretation after seeing a lot of chatter on social media concerning the topic. My point in this post is not to call out a particular person, so I'm not going to name the book title or author. But I do feel that some of the assertions made in the book need to be addressed using biblical principles.
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In the introduction, the author states that, while God definitely speaks our human languages, that it must really please Him when we make the effort to understand His "creative language of dreams." As someone who is fluent in Spanish as a second language, and has studied a bit of biblical Greek, I know a little about learning another language. Many people expect learning another language to be a simple matter of learning which word in the source language corresponds to which word in the target language, as though languages are just replacement ciphers.
This misconception can lead to a lot of false starts and bad conclusions. Anyone who sets out to learn a second language quickly discovers that context is just as important as knowing a list. I've lost count of the times a native Spanish speaker has asked me, concerning an English word, "What does the _______ mean?" Probably 80% of the time, my immediate response is, "Can you tell me the sentence you saw it in?" because that one English word could have three or more Spanish equivalents, depending on the context in which it is being used. So, before we can think about learning the "dream language," we need to have an actual understanding of how languages work.
