The Dream
A couple of weeks ago I had a dream about my childhood home. In the dream, there were no locks on the doors of the house and I felt very vulnerable. I was also aware that the house was haunted.
At one point, in the dream, a mailman walked right in to deliver the mail without knocking. I didn’t feel threatened by the mailman necessarily but I was concerned about the haunting.
More than concerned, actually. Afraid. But I stood my ground in the center of the living room, said the St. Michael prayer from beginning to end. And then I woke up.
Why This Dream Seemed Important
When I was in the new age and occult I had some very mixed experience with dreams so I am always careful with them. In general there has to be something unusual about a dream for me to pay attention to it.
This dream seemed important to me because I was able to say the entire St. Michael prayer. Usually I can’t recite things in dreams or even speak out loud.
For me, hauntings in dreams (and in real life) speak to the presence of evil so I felt that aspect of the dream was about my traumatic childhood. I thought about the vulnerability I felt, the messages that had been delivered and the fact that I had the courage to say the prayer.
Then, after sharing the dream with a friend who has a knack for dream interpretation, I thought about what the messages that had been received.
My Take On the Dream
My friend felt the mailman and the symbol of the messenger was significant. A short time later, as I transferred some of my old blog posts to the new platform (this one) I found myself rereading the ones I wrote around this time last year, right after I came back from Israel.
Some were about me finding my voice and the decision I had made to speak out about my own past history of childhood trauma. I drifted away from that for a couple of different reason but I as I read those old posts I realized that I still want to do it.
I talk about that a bit more in this video and I will be blogging on it too. One thing I probably won’t be doing is a podcast. I just feel that posting here (whether it’s a blog post or video) once a week is enough.
But Was This Dream From God?
I’m not sure, to be honest. And the truth is, in my opinion, most dreams aren’t. The dream may have been psychological or it could have even been demonic in origin. This doesn’t rule out the possibility that it was divinely inspired but I just don’t feel confident saying either way.
My best guess is that it was an ordinary dream with both evil influences (most likely memories of evil and not actual evil spirits) and possibly a bit of help from my guardian angel in saying the prayer. Did he, as part of his divine mission, draw my attention to the old blog posts on my past or use the dream do remind me of them?
I’m not sure.
But I do know this. My ability to recite the full St. Michael prayer in the dream shows that I can stand strong in my faith. And writing about my past feels right. By that I mean that I keep coming back to it and my feeling about it are mostly positive.
While I think it is normal to sometimes have some very negative feelings about writing about essentially negative things, those feelings fade quickly, while the positive ones remain. Discernment, when it comes to something like this, isn’t easy, and the truth is that it is a decision no one else can make.
Which is perfectly fine because I do believe that God is at work in my life. It’s not about Him sending me a dream or whether He did or didn’t. It’s about me saying the prayer in the dream and my friend offering insight and the apparent coincidence of the blog posts.
And it’s about the role the Holy Spirit plays in leading us in the way of St. Ignatius.
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil; May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.”
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I post all my videos here on the blog but I am also trying to build my YouTube channel so please feel free to follow at youtube.com/c/barbaragraver!
UPDATE: I’ve decided to write a ebook on my healing journey and post the first draft as installments to this blog. Please read When Inner Healing is a Hero’s Journey for more info!
For more on Ignatian discernment, please see______________
