An Illicit Dream?

Last night I had a dream right before waking up. Here is what I saw…I was in a military setting and I was watching a video taken from a spy device of a group of people gathered outside around a tent. The scene looked like the Middle East. While watching, someone near me said that we were next going to watch a sex scene between some of the people in the video. I had the impression that somehow this was going to be happening right there in the open area. Based on the location of the spy camera, we could only view what was happening in that open air location outside of the tent. Next, I saw a brief up-close view of some people in what looked like athletic clothing and they were in a posture of leaning forward in some type of exercise activity. At that point, the dream ended. I never saw an actual sex scene or anything even remotely close to it in the dream.

Breaking Down the Pieces

I almost always write down my dreams and record the date and time when I wake up. This dream occurred on a Sunday morning around 4:30 am. I have several lists of dream symbols which I use whenever there are symbols that I don’t understand. In this case there were three primary details of significance:

people gathered outside a tent
sex
athletic gear and activity

The tent is fairly simple and indicates something portable or temporary. The temporary aspect of the tent seems to be related to what the people were doing. Since there was no actual sex in the dream, there is something symbolic about this. Seeing people in athletic gear and in athletic postures rather than in a sex act seems to call attention back to the first two symbols. I see these all like a form of circular symbology where each detail points back to the previous one and they all link together.

Now What?

This was, like most of my dreams, quite confusing. My first thought was what am I doing watching a video from a spy camera? Why is there a mention of sex but no such thing appeared in the dream? Why would sex even be in a dream anyway if this is from God? And what was the athletic stuff all about? I wrote down the dream and the approximate time on my dream journal and started looking at my symbols lists. Nothing really made sense to me until several hours later when I just happened to be looking out my window before I would be off to church.

I live in a neighborhood that has a large open park and circular pavilion in the center where many different activities take place during the year. It is not unusual to see something going on in this area, but on a Sunday morning, I had never seen anything there. Except today was different. There was a gathering of approximately 20 people out in the grass and they were wearing athletic clothing. As I stood watching, I noticed very quickly that they were also putting themselves in some type of postures just like I saw in my dream. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were doing: yoga.

About That Dream…

In the last year, I’ve done a fair amount of homework on what yoga is all about. If you do a google search, you will find exactly what I found out. It is based on Hinduism and each yoga posture is symbolic of one of the many Hindu deities. “Yoga” itself is a religious term that means “yoked to”. You might ask yourself “yoked to” what? If you do some searching around on this, you will find the answer: someone or something named “Shiva”. According to Indian and Hindu sources, Shiva was either the inventor of yoga or the deity called the “destroyer” (or both). Further research into the practice of yoga will turn up articles that openly admit a direct opposition to the Christian faith.

Adultery?

So Israel yoked himself to Baal of Peor. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel.
(Numbers 25:3 ESV)

But I have a few things against you; you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality.
(Revelation 2:14 ESV)

Throughout the Bible, “spiritual adultery” is mentioned over and over. In the Old Testament, Israel at times engaged in the worship of false “gods” and made sacrifices to them. God describes of this type of worship as an act of spiritual fornication. The first of the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20 says, “you shall have no other gods before Me”. In short, God takes seriously anything that has the appearance of worship of false “gods”. God is not a selfish tyrant but instead He knows something you may not be aware of. There is host of demonic entities that all follow Satan and anytime a person worships anything other than the God of the Bible, they are actually worshiping demons and bringing destruction on themselves. God’s command here is for your good.

They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods; with abominations they provoked him to anger.
They sacrificed to demons that were no gods
(Deuteronomy 32:16-17 ESV)

Author’s Comment

So, in conclusion…my dream turned out not to be so hard to figure out after all but the interpretation and fulfillment was very surprising to me. This was probably the first time I’ve ever had a dream that played out in real life within hours of receiving it. Let me say here, if you are a Christian and you are involved with yoga, I have a very straight message: the spirit realm is not a game, it actually does exist and you have no idea what you are getting involved in with this stuff. You need to find out exactly what it is that you believe. Do the same homework I did and find out exactly what this is all about rather than taking my word for it.

I found an article in my search where a yoga instructor from India mocked the idea that there could be a such thing as “Christian yoga”. Even they know this is totally incompatible with the God of the Bible. As Elijah said on Mt Carmel, “if Baal is god, worship him, but if Adonai is God, worship Him”. You cannot serve both. This is not a game, this is not the time to be acting in a careless, uninformed manner. If you continue in this, you can expect that the only one true God will give you a certain amount of time and then He will just back off from you. This is a serious matter.

As we see here from my dream today, next time you have a dream where sex is involved, it might not be what you think. Dreams from God are mostly symbolic and rarely literal. The more you study them, the more they begin to make sense. In this post I want to recommend another author and prophet who is an excellent teacher on dream interpretation: Doug Addison. Out of all the dream books I’ve read, he is by far the easiest and simplest to understand.

Takeaway points:

Most dreams from God are symbolic
Write down every dream including the date and time you woke up
Study dream interpretation from reliable Christian sources (see my posts and external links page)
Know that God wants to speak to you, when sleeping He has your undivided attention
Take your dreams seriously