If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it is that God’s love never ceases to go after us. That is including in the night. When we are off sleeping, dreaming, re-energizing, He is right there with us still depositing freedom, hope, and truth into us.

I had always been a pretty vivid dreamer, especially after getting saved at 18, and would wake up remembering the stories and details the night would play out for me. I thought it was normal and what happened when you fell asleep! Although I dreamt, I didn’t realize yet what a significant way God used this to speak.

I also had a few hard years of nightmares and battling sleep paralysis. But I started to notice through the good or not great nights that sometimes the dreams felt more meaningful or that God was trying to say something.

I later discovered on my walk with the Lord that this would be a way He would not only communicate things to me but things that were going on inside me, that I was even afraid of. It was when I moved to Redding to attend Bethel’s Ministry School that clarity finally met what felt like the floodgates of dreams that were coming up in the night for me.

I had been taking my first dream interpretation class where we had to submit our dreams to our teacher, Ben, and he might interpret one in class. A couple months prior I had had a pretty detailed dream that entailed one of our leaders here at Bethel, Kris Vallotton, myself, and a witch. I had titled it “Kris Vallotton and the Witch,” because of the nature of the dream (it felt like two opposing things pulling me). I had decided to submit mine but had been battling with feeling forgotten in this big school environment and wondered if I’d ever really get chosen.

This is why God is so funny and so personal.

My dream not only got picked to be interpreted in front of the class (yikes kind of scary) but also addressed my deep issue of feeling forgotten. Not only that, it went into previous things I had dealt with to some degree: men in my life, and feeling every-time I went higher in God, something was trying to take me back down.

These were not things God was bringing up as doom and gloom, but were things that were already going on inside of me. He, as a loving Father and counselor, wanted to bring truth, freedom, and restoration to these things. And He really did. That is when I started to see it all, that in previous dreams He was speaking His love to me and trying to show me things I might be burying. Again, it was not to scare me but to bring His truth and perspective into the situation. How beautiful!

He truly loves to sow freedom to us, even in our sleep. He truly loves to use dreams as a love in the night.

By Brandy Hassis