Holy intrusion: the power of dreams in the Bible

WE CHILDREN OF the Enlightenment do not regularly linger over such elusive experiences as dreams. We seek to "enlighten" what is before us and to overcome the inscrutable and the eerie in order to make the world a better, more manageable place. We do well in our management while we are awake, and we keep the light, power and control on 24/7.

Except, of course, that we must sleep. We require seasons of rest and, therefore, of vulnerability. Our control flags. We become open to stirrings that we do not initiate. Such stir rings come to us in the night unbidden. Dreams address us. They invite us beyond our initiative-taking management.

The ancient world and the biblical tradition knew about dreams. The ancients understood that the unbidden communication in the night opens sleepers to a world different from the one they manage during the day. The ancients dared to imagine, moreover, that this unbidden communication is one venue in which the holy purposes of God, perplexing and unreasonable as they might be, come to us. They knew too that this communication is not obvious. It requires interpretation.

Here are four familiar examples from the Bible in which the Holy Other addresses people in the vulnerability of the night:

The first occurs after Jacob has duped his older brother and is fleeing for his life (Gen. 28:10-22). He is alone, running to his mother's relatives. But he must stop to sleep. In this condition, he is a good candidate for an intrusion from beyond. He dreams of angels coining and going, messengers and promise-makers. He hears God's voice of promise. The God rooted in his family promises land. This odd holy voice of the night also promises to be with this fugitive and to bring him safely home.

The dream requires a total redescription of Jacob's life defined by God's promise. The place of his sleep is converted, by vision and by utterance, into a place of promissory companionship.

That disclosure requires a response. Jacob pledges to be allied with the God of promise, a pledge that entails accepting himself as a carrier of the promise. Quite concretely, Jacob promises to tithe (v. 22). When he awakes, the world is different because of this holy voice in the night.

A dream also invades the troubled sleep of the mighty Pharaoh (Gen. 41:14-24). Who would have thought that this manager of the daytime world would be so vulnerable? His dream involves a confusing scenario featuring cows and shocks of grain. He has no clue to the meaning of the dream. After Pharaoh's magicians and wise men, his "intelligence community," fail him, he summons an outsider, an Israelite, someone uncredentialed. Joseph tells Pharaoh the meaning of his dream: there will soon come a time when the empire will be destabilized. Truth in the night is spoken to the one who has power in the daylight. This dream, so the narrative reports, will cause settled power to become more aggressively acquisitive.

In this reading of the nighttime reality, Pharaoh is invited into an alternative world of need, trouble and deprivation. This reality, which comes to dominate the larger narrative about Joseph, was not even on the horizon of Pharaoh with all of his technical apparatus, his economic and military power and his intelligence community.

Too bad that Joseph ceases to be an interpreter and becomes a manager for Pharaoh! By his "Egyptianization," he signs on to the task of stabilizing the regime that the dream had worked to destabilize (Gen. 47:13-26).

Paralleling the story of Joseph at the be ginning of the Old Testament is the story of Daniel at the end of the Old Testament (Dan. 4:19-37). It concerns a dream that assails power. Like Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar represents a settled life of exploitative power that expects not to be disrupted. Dreams are dangerous for such a ruler. They come in the night and declare God's intentions. The dream dispatches the king to a condition he did not intend--into a grass-eating beast.

The dream and the narrative about the dream deconstruct the king in his power. He had come to think of himself as autonomous and did not acknowledge that sovereignty belongs to whomever God may give it (Dan. 4:9,5). The dream asserts that Nebuchadnezzar had misunderstood his status in the world by disregarding the ultimacy of the holy God.

Daniel, the gifted Jewish dream interpreter--gifted, surely, because of his rootage in faith--counsels Nebuchadnezzar to practice mercy and justice (4:27). The dream is given because of Nebuchadnezzar's "insanity." The narrative goes beyond the dream to tell of a return to sanity: Nebuchadnezzar offers a doxology to the most high God and accepts his own penultimacy in the world of power (4:34-37).

Perhaps the best-known biblical dream appears at the conclusion of the visit by the Magi: "And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road" (Matt. 2:12). The Christ child is threatened by power (see v. 16; Exod. 1:16). In order to secure a future for the child, the voice of the holy intervenes in the night when the royal menace is at rest.