Two Ways to Understand Dreams

There are two good ways to understand dreams.

The first way is as an allegory.  Things happen in sequence because they are some kind of over all natural progression of meaning and events.  We usually interpret Daniel’s dream of the statue this way, or the opening of the seven seals in Revelations.  Or else you treat the sequence as just the order in which the elements were revealed and ultimately the over all meaning of the dream is all of the elements and their symbolic meanings taken together.  A lot of cool paintings of Lehi’s Dream show it this way.

The other way is to interpret the dream as a series of flashes of images which can sometimes have the same meaning.  The Christmas Carol is more like that, each ghost essentially has the same message for Scrooge.  Hebrew writing is like this, but in dreams its not just the Hebrews.  Looping around a message or insight is just one of the ways dreams work.

When you apply this second dream approach to Lehi’s dream, you get some pretty cool insights into what enduring to the end means, and the importance of revelation.  More to come.