Visions and Dreams

What are visions? What are dreams? What does the Bible say about them? What does the church tell us to believe? What if dreams are messages from God expressed in symbols that we have to rightly decipher? What if dreams are actually figments of our own imagination expressing our own fears and desires and nothing more? Are divine visions in the Bible actually just hallucinations? Can scientific research provide a possible answer? For centuries, there have been conflicting and shifting views about visions and dreams, even though there is little or no controversy about those that occur in the Bible. Joseph, Daniel, Zechariah and John, to name a few, had these direct encounters with God and Jews and Christians alike are expected to believe by faith they actually happened and were real. But it's yet a difficult, sensitive and divisive issue when any person today claims to have had a divine vision or dream. But why? Visions and Dreams: Are they Communication from God, or Just Us? explores the nature of visions and dreams and the biblical interpretations surrounding them across cultures, denominations and time. As dream interpretation remains an important practice in certain faith systems as well as modern psychology, Judeo-Christianity and psychology are also closely compared and contrasted. The result is an anthropological road map on the journey to contemplating one of the deepest mysteries of all human experience: are visions and dreams real, or just us?