Every Dream in the Bible

Friday's Thought:

It's extraordinary to see how God has worked through dreams in Scripture.

I recently saw this infographic over at the Overview Bible Project blog and thought I'd share it here today.

Infographic: Every dream in the Bible (and what they mean)

Sometimes in the Bible, God communicates to people in dreams. Some of them are symbolic (like the dreams in Daniel), and some involve explicit instructions from God.

Dreams fascinate me, and I figure they’re interesting to you, too. Since God has revealed some of His word through dreams, I thought it might be cool to find all the dreams in the Bible.

So, I Bible-geeked out and made this for you.




So just to recap (because some of you will want to copy-paste this), the 21 dreams in the Bible are:

1. Abimelech’s warning
2. Jacob’s ladder
3. Jacob’s call home
4. Laban’s warning
5. Joseph’s gran
6. Joseph’s stars
7. The cupbearer’s grapes
8. The baker’s baskets
9. Pharaoh’s cows
10. Pharaoh’s ears of grain
11. The runaway barley loaf
12. God’s offer to Solomon
13. Nebuchanezzar’s statue
14. Nebuchadnezzar’s tree
15. Daniel’s four beasts
16. Backstory for Joseph
17. The magi’s warning
18. An angel directing Joseph to Egypt
19. An angel telling Joseph to return
20. God telling Joseph to steer clear of Judea
21. Pilate’s wife’s nightmare

 A few takeaways:

• Although the symbolic dreams from Genesis and Daniel are most memorable, the majority of these dreams are direct, explicit messages. “Go to Egypt.” “Now go back.” “No, not that way!” There’s no ambiguity in most of these. 
• The text for the barley loaf dream in Judges is just too awesome not to share:
  

  And he said, “Behold, I had a dream; a loaf of barley bread was tumbling into the camp of Midian, and it came to the tent and struck it so that it fell, and turned it upside down so that the tent lay flat.” His friend replied, “This is nothing less than the sword of Gideon the son of Joash, a man of Israel; God has given Midian and all the camp into his hand.” (Jdg 7:13–14)

  Seriously? This guy wins the “Best at Connecting Dots” award for all time.
• Lots of these dreams are just people being told to go different places.

So there we are: every dream in the Bible. Of course, there’s a lot more to those symbolic dreams that I couldn’t fit here. Maybe I’ll do a piece on those individually sometime in the future.