That's all any of us have on this particular point, our own opinions, and anything else comes from an argument from silence.
No. I have been saying throughout this thread that my views are not just "opinion" but based on experience of actually operating in interpretation.
That's taking this to an extreme that I don't.
Ok, only that is very akin IMO to the stand most everyone in this thread seems to be taking; that there is no thinking involved in interpretation. By extension, there is no questioning, there is no testing, there is no scrutinizing, there is no human involvement whatsoever other than speaking out of one's mouth, "Thus saith the Lord!," whether it makes any sense or not. This not a position that leads to the control of the Holy Spirit; it is a position that leads to the opposite, and to people writhing around in the floor like a snake and calling it "the Holy Spirit." We are called to test the spirits, and this involves testing the veracity and authenticity of what
message that spirit is teaching, which necessitates thinking things through on a mental level.
But let's move on to some actual examples.
The problem is that we don't need to be leaning to our own understanding. We are seeking HIS understanding in these matters.
The key lies in the statement made. IS it dream interpretation, or is it of men and is really SKILLS of interpreting dreams.
you spoke of there needing to be skills and principles in dream interpretation and I still think it is something that can't be taught/learned.
Ok, let's start here, and I am inviting Pearl, TLH and Amigo for their responses as well, as I don't mind discussing it. I am very into this subject, so I never grow tired of it. I will tell you all exactly what I was doing at each point in the conversation (or at least in the early parts anyway), and feel free to critique things as to how you feel interpretation was being done, i.e. whether it was in keeping with sound practice as led by the Holy Spirit or not. I was asked if I have any formulas, and I don't. I just set about doing it. Sometimes I receive things from the Spirit of God quickly, and sometimes I do not. This was a case where I didn't.
I start my involvement in Post #6.
What does my dream mean?
Now, at the end of this first post, I tell her "there simply isn't enough to go on here." That means that the Spirit of God was not giving me anything yet - that there was nothing to key off of yet that would give me the interpretation, so I was asking her for prayer and more detail. This isn't that rare because many people don't give near the detail that is actually included in the dreams they receive, and because they short change the dream in their description you have to coax it out of them.
Post #9 is the Spirit of God responding through her by bringing to her remembrance details necessary to interpretation after I asked her to seek God about it. This is one of the reasons why you ask questions. If they have not sufficiently explained the dream or even remembered parts of it, this needs to be brought back to their remembrance. Happens all the time, actually.
In Post #10, I still have nothing, so I am trying to get her to see if she can remember more details.
Post #11 is where the lights go on, and there's no time signature recorded in those posts, but I remember how this one went, and that was only a few moments later. I realized what the interpretation was because the Lord has just given it to me. The rest pretty much follows suit. I'm still asking a few questions but I really don't need to at that point. This was a young girl who was deeply, i.e. very compulsively addicted to blues music. She had obsessive compulsive disorder, and her fascination with the blues was a manifestation of it, as she even posted elsewhere on the forum. When she joined CF.Com she was heavy into David Bowie's music, and if you notice in the early quotations of her posts from others (see Post #4) she was originally going by the site name "Big Bow Boi" which was a David Bowie stage name, and using a red lightning bolt as her avatar, a symbol he used. Both were evidences of her having a crush on David Bowie, a musician from the 70s. The problem was that Bowie was a disciple of the Satanist Aleister Crowley, just as Jimmy Page was, and there was a demonic spirit behind his music that drew people in just like with Led Zeppelin's, which got kids addicted to it and then influenced them into the occult.
That's the setting for this interpretation. She goes on to post about potentially being "raped" by this man, who I discerned was Jimmy Page. I revealed to her that in her compulsive state she was about to get hooked on his music as well, and Page was another Crowley disciple and a Satanist. The dream was telling her to avoid listening to Led Zeppelin before she got hooked by the same types of spirits. There is no way her dream could have made sense any other way, IMO, because she mentioned halfway through it that "an old woman with a raspy voice and red hair" is the person who would "save" her, and I pointed out this was very likely Bonnie Raitt, a blues singer who had a much more Christian upbringing and background, and would be a much better alternative if she was absolutely hooked on listening to blues music.
Anyway, that is one example of me interpreting in the moment. Give me your honest opinions on if you think this is proper interpretation or not. But keep in mind two things:
1. This girl left the forum in a better state than when she came in. She is a prime example of the kind of person who would need help with interpretation. Not only was she hardly Christian if even Christian at all (and thus would not have been able to interpret the dream well), but she didn't even know the subject matter she was dreaming about yet. It had to be explained to her. But she had changed her site name away from David Bowie by the time she left, and was no longer so obsessed with him.
2. Thinking was very much involved in this interpretation, and so was prayer. It did not just "happen" for me. There was thinking, questioning, and prayer until the lights finally went on, and even then there was research and analysis involved to put the entire thing together.
So tell me what you think.
