How to encourage your creative side for dream interpretation

Ways to stimulate your creative side for hearing God in the dream interpretation process.

Many people find that encouraging their creative side can help with prayerful meditation and listening to God’s voice.

This article contains practical ideas for stimulating creativity and right-brain thinking, and how that can be practically applied as part of the dream interpretation process.

I approach dream interpretation from a biblical perspective. My belief is that our dreams can come from God, and understanding them is best understood within the context of an ongoing relationship with Him.

If you have just come across this post and are new to dream interpretation, you might find it helpful to see my free ultimate guide to Interpreting dreams from God.

The challenge of creative thinking and dreams

We all know that dreams can seemingly be random and make no sense. This is usually because we are looking at them too literally, and from the perspective of a logical mindset – which is how many of us have been trained to think in the western world.

Our logical thinking tends to focus on linear/chronological order. This is often described as left-brain thinking, by which we mean being predominantly logical, analytical, and mathematical in our thinking.

However, the metaphorical language of dreams is not so logical. In order to interpret them, we often need to use our right-brained thinking, which is more creative, visionary, and intuitive.

Dream language is more intuitive in style

Dream language is generally similar to the colourful, creative, poetic language of the bible: The themes jump around, and they are more cyclical than linear.

Here are some non-linear things that can happen in dreams:

• Different scenes can be about the same thing, but providing extra insight, or saying it different ways. They are not necessarily chronological events!
• Dreams often repeat the same message several times, but using different symbols or illustrations. To interpret the dream, we need to make the connection between the various elements.
• One part of a dream can be expanded in another part. This is like taking a magnifying glass to one part, and then expanding it in a different part (or scene) of the dream.
• Some elements appear simply to give us confirmation. They highlight important points, repeat important symbols, and confirm the interpretation. In those instances we must abandon trying to be too precise and just receive the confirmation.

All of this means we need to embrace our creative, intuitive, right-brain side to interpret our dreams successfully – and this can be a challenge!

Overcoming a logical mindset

But we can overcome our left-brained tendencies and improve our creative side and intuitive ability – and, as a result, improve our dream interpretation skills.

In the rest of this article, we will explore some ways to stimulate our creative side when interpreting our dreams. Hopefully these ideas will be helpful – whether you are naturally creative/intuitive or not!

It is important to note that we do still need our logical/left-brain side to interpret dreams. We need it:

• To process the information that comes through our intuition.
• To check out those ideas, look for confirmations, and to make sure our interpretations fit with the dream as a whole and the bigger picture of what God is doing/saying to us.

Creativity and our relationship with God

Our first and most important asset for improving our creativity for dream interpretation is our connection with God through the Holy Spirit.

I have found that learning to listen to God’s voice can greatly help overcome our lack of intuition/creativity. Essentially, we can have the mind of Christ – with all his knowledge and creativity – to help us, which is awesome!

• Firstly, if God is the source of our dream, then hearing his voice is essential to understanding the meaning, and we would be foolish to ignore it.
• Secondly, God – who is the source of all creativity – personally mentors us in the dream interpretation process and helps us in our weak areas if we are willing to listen and learn.

God’s voice as intuitive flow

Tuning into God’s voice also helps with intuition.

The voice of God is an inner voice that flows from our connection with the Holy Spirit. The Hebrew word, naba, means to bubble up, which beautifully describes the way his voice wells up within us. Jesus described this as being like living water flowing from within.

• John 7:38, NIV “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

The resulting revelation from God generally flows through our intuition first, and then is processed with our logical mind. So, when we are building up our spirit, we are helping ourselves tune to that intuitive flow. Mark Virkler explains this more fully in his excellent book, 4 Keys to hearing God’s voice.

Here are some ways the Holy Spirit can help our creativity and intuition while interpreting dreams:

• He can draw our attention to certain parts of the dream.
• He can drop pictures into our mind that help us think of the right meaning.
• He can whisper a word or thought that helps us understand a symbol.
• He can remind us of other dreams and ideas that link up with the current dream.

I have found that the Holy Spirit often drops ideas and pictures into my mind to help me when I’m stuck – which is a great help.

But even better than that, we can deliberately invite God into our dream interpretation time and take steps to stir up our spirit and our connection with him – both before we start and during the dream interpretation process.

Here are some ways we can increase our connection to the Holy Spirit for dreamwork:

Praying in the Spirit

If we speak in tongues or have our own prayer language, doing so for a time can help us tune into the Holy Spirit’s flow before we work on a dream. In addition, some people I know find it helpful to stop and pray in tongues for about five or ten minutes when they get stuck.

I have also discovered, through practice, that I can pray in my tongues silently in my head – which is a great asset if other people are around. You could try this too. At first it will probably be hard to stop your mouth moving, but it gets easier.

Once I have tuned into the Holy Spirit in this way, I have found that I don’t need to consciously pray in tongues anymore; I can just relax and let it bubble up in my spirit. Maybe you can do the same; it’s a case of identifying what it feels like and then going with it.

This is useful, as with a bit of practice, we can do it at the same time as interpreting the dream – as it only involves our spirit and our mind is freed to think about the dream.

Background music and worship

Many people find that worship music helps them connect to the presence of God, plus it naturally helps with creativity.

Worshipping God with music can be helpful before we start looking at a dream. In addition, when we are stuck on a dream, we can stop, worship for a while, and then get back to the dream. I tend to choose the worship songs that currently get my spirit stirred up, which varies.

I find that songs with words tend to be more of a distraction than a help during the actual interpretation process. But some people find that playing music while thinking about the dream can help. Try and see what works for you.

While working on a dream, I personally prefer instrumental music or soaking worship music.

Relaxation and prayerful meditation

Relaxation and God-centred meditation can help our brainwaves enter a state where we can tune into that intuitive flow of the Holy Spirit better.

Here are some ideas of how to relax:

• Find a comfortable position.
• Close our eyes.
• Take some deep slow breaths, focusing on breathing from our abdomen rather than our chest. (You can place a hand on your stomach to check this; it should rise and fall while you are breathing).
• Relax our muscles by focusing on one area of our body at a time (such as our hand or shoulders); tense the muscle for about 5 seconds and then relax it again. Particularly focus on any areas which feel tense. I found an article which explains this technique better: How to do progressive muscle relaxation.
• Focus on God’s presence and tune to intuitive flow as previously described.

This type of relaxation can be done anywhere and doesn’t require a special place. Once we are in that meditative/prayerful state, we can start to think about the dream.

Lying down or reclining

This is something we can do when we get stuck on a dream. It involves lying down or reclining whilst tuning into the flow of the Holy Spirit as described before.

I find lying down to be the best position for this. Very often, if I do this and am patient, a sudden thought will come – and prove to be the key to unlocking the dream. Somehow, lying down helps my brainwaves get into a more prayerful state – closer to when we are asleep and dreaming!

You might have a special place such as a chair or recliner that helps you with this. I also have a sofa where I immediately relax and tune into God better. That is where I normally sit to review my dreams.

Obviously, we can only do this if we are at home, and when we don’t have any time constraints – as there is a hazard of accidentally falling asleep! Setting an alarm might overcome the time issue.

Ways to encourage our creative side

There is no better way help our creativity than to spend time in the presence of God. If you already have a relationship with God, you could use some of the above ideas, or do whatever best helps you become aware of his presence.

In addition to this, there are also some practical ways to help stimulate our creative side, which can also help us interpret dreams. For example, being naturally more creative helps us:

• Break out of chronological thinking.
• Come up with different ideas about what a dream symbol could mean.
• Make connections between different parts of a dream.
• Make connections with other dreams.
• Notice repeating themes and symbols.

For the purpose of demonstrating these ideas, here is a simple dream which I will use as an example during the rest of this section:

I was with some people from my church, and we had gathered to celebrate closing the church and moving to somewhere else. We were putting up black and white flags around the church. I knew that the white part of the flag was above the black part because God was in this. It wasn’t sad at all because we knew we would be coming back.

In case you’re wondering about the meaning, I was a church leader at the time, and we were considering joining with a larger church. The dream confirmed that we would need to close the church for a while (i.e., God was in it), and although the future was not yet revealed, we would come back in due time. We would have to trust the Holy Spirit (the white colour) above the unknown (the black colour which symbolised mystery, i.e. something God would reveal in the future).

Drawing the dream

Some dreams lend themselves more to drawing than others, and sometimes it is hard to explain a dream with words alone. This could be, for example, if there is a complicated road layout, an unusual looking item, or a particular detail that can’t be described properly without a picture.

But in addition to that, drawing a dream can be a choice during the interpretation process – to help activate the creative side of our brain. The dream can be drawn on paper, or on an electronic device using a suitable app – it doesn’t really matter.

Choosing to draw a dream can stimulate creative thinking.

It doesn’t even matter how good the drawing is! Anyone can do this, even those who don’t feel so confident about drawing – and we don’t even have to keep the drawing afterwards if we don’t want to! The point is to be creative and do something non-linear.

• Sometimes all that is needed is to do some drawing. And during that creative time, suddenly inspiration can strike, or the Holy Spirit can speak to us.
• Other times, the very act of having to draw a dream can force us to notice details that we hadn’t seen before – such as whether something is on the right or left, and what colour things are.

I also sometimes make images of relevant bible verses and thoughts using Canva (which is a simple graphic design app). I find this activity similar to drawing, in that it stimulates my creative thinking. The time spent finding good pictures and making images gives my brain space to process the idea intuitively.

Mind-mapping the dream

Many people find it helpful to mind-map a dream. This works in a similar way to drawing the dream, in that it forces us to be creative and think about the dream in a non-linear way. It can also give us processing time and allows the Holy Spirit to speak.

The general process is as follows:

1. Add the main person/subject of the dream in a box in the centre. This is the focus of the dream and would most commonly be the person dreaming (if the dreamer is involved in the action).
2. Add the main sub-focuses of the dream, spaced out around the page and branching off from the focus. These might include significant parts of the action, symbols, and important people/elements of the dream. There should be between two to five boxes, but around three is ideal. If there are too many sub-focuses, the dream story either needs to be simplified, or the dream should be divided into separate scenes with each scene mapped separately.
3. Add any further relevant details and actions branching off from those boxes. Keep them simple and stick to the most important things.
4. After that, any relevant notes can be made, thoughts can be jotted down, and different boxes can be linked up as necessary.

Mind-mapping can easily be done on paper, or electronically using a suitable app. It doesn’t matter what colour or shape the boxes are – and it doesn’t really matter what you put in each box; just use a system that works for you. The main point is to do something that stimulates our creative side and allows us to process the dream differently.

Here is a mind-map of the example dream that I drew by hand:

Mind-maps can also be created electronically, and there are many apps available for doing this – plus articles and videos which explain how to do it. I’d like to thank fellow dreamer, Latoya, for suggesting a free mind-mapping tool called miMind which she finds helpful for her own dream work, and I used it to create the example below.

Writing the dream by hand

The physical act of writing and forming letters by hand uses a different brain pathway to typing on a keyboard. We could handwrite our dreams on paper, in a journal, or on an electronic device like a tablet.

Handwriting our dreams could potentially help in the following ways:

• By stimulating a different part of our brain and boosting creativity.
• By forcing us to slow down, creating mental space to ponder what we are writing.
• By improving our memory of the dream so we can think about it at other times.

I personally find that writing my dreams by hand helps me to sit and engage with the dream better. I also write my notes, ideas, and thoughts by hand.

If you write your dreams down on paper, I recommend also finding a way to store them electronically, so you can use the electronic search tool. I hand-write my dreams using an iPad and pencil, using a handwriting app called Nebo. This means that I can later convert the writing to text.

Writing our dreams using a handwriting app, with an electronic device and pencil, gives us the best of both worlds.

In addition, I find that the very process of converting the handwriting to text helps me to engage with it better. Moving the words around and checking what I have written helps stimulate my creative side and gives me space to process the dream.

Making a spiral of the dream

This technique involves writing the dream out by hand in a spiral format.

I have only tried this a few times and not found it particularly useful. But I have heard some people say it has helped them. It could help in the following ways:

• The act of writing it in spiral form can help us break out from left-brain thinking when we are stuck.
• It brings different parts of the dream in proximity to each other in non-linear ways, which can sometimes help us see linking themes.

Here is my dream written in a spiral way:

Deliberately choose to think creatively

Half the battle is understanding how dream language works and being wise to their non-linear nature. And once we become more familiar with it, we will naturally approach dreams in the right way.

Here are some things we can deliberately do in the interpretation process to help:

• Look for repeating themes. Doing this deliberately can save time – and help us see whether different parts of the dream are repeating the same message or linking up.
• Brainstorm ideas for various dream elements. I have found this technique to be particularly useful when stuck: Brainstorm potential meanings for each of the dream symbols in the dream and list them all out; include anything and everything we can think of. Then look and see if there are repeated themes amongst the ideas, or if anything stands out.

Conclusion

We have seen that dreams are not always logical, and tend to be more colourful and creative in nature – in the sense that they are not chronological, they jump around, have repeating themes, and different parts link up.

We have also seen that to interpret dreams we need to learn to embrace our creative side – otherwise it can get quite frustrating!

• We have learned how the Holy Spirit is our greatest mentor and asset in this, and how building up our spirit and tuning to intuitive flow from his presence can help the creative process.
• We have explored some practical ways to stimulate our creative side, such as drawing, mind-mapping, hand-writing the dream, and listening to music.
• We have seen that we can choose to work around our logical mindset if we understand how different parts of a dream might link up.

For a bit of fun, you could try the following test to see whether you favour left-brain or right-brain thinking: https://www.mentalup.co/blog/right-brain-left-brain-test

So, relax and have fun with your dreams! Try out some of the ideas, embrace your creative side, and enjoy the journey!