For the last few months, I have been having dreams within dreams. Last night I had several. The initial dream was a portal that led me to the discovery of a second dream contained within the first. In the first dream, I had the ability to consciously interact with the content of the dream and press through its imagery and sound to discover the second dream that contained a message the Lord wanted me to discover.

I thought the phrase “a dream within a dream” was familiar. It is the title of a poem written in 1849 by Edgar Allan Poe. In the poem, Poe is distressed that his life is slipping away like grains of sand falling through his fingers. The poet felt life was an illusion, like a dream within a dream.

While poets and philosophers grapple with the meaning and reality of life, as a follower of Christ, we have an understanding they did not possess. Jesus is our all. He is our life, both now and into eternity. Dreams offered to us have the purpose of revelation, not desperation. While many of our dreams can appear like a mental carnival show filled with weird metaphoric images, if we can train our sleeping mind to interact and dissect what we are viewing, our dreams contain a multitude of hidden dreams that offer a discerning inquirer deeper revelation not available in an undisciplined dream state.

Each night as I stand at our bedside, one request of several that I pray is for the Lord to speak to me in my dreams. I have done this for years and it is bearing unique results, like being able to see dreams within dreams. Most of these dreams are given not to make a public declaration, but to motivate me to pray. My dreams wake me up in the middle of the night to pray for things I was unaware of before I got into bed. 

Prophetic dreams are on the rise because many of the sources we once trusted for reliable and trustworthy information, both within and outside the Church, have been compromised. The Lord wants direct and unfiltered access to His followers. He is using dreams, and sometimes, dreams within dreams as one way to speak to us.