Demons exploit dreams to cause disorder and harm to human souls. Even inexperienced monks harm themselves if they pay attention to their dreams. For this reason, it is essential to understand the significance of dreaming in a person whose nature has not been renewed by the Holy Spirit. During sleep, God has arranged it so that the person fully rests, losing awareness of their existence and slipping into self-forgetfulness. All voluntary activities governed by reason and will cease, leaving only the functions essential for human existence. The body continues to circulate blood, digest food, breathe, and excrete, while in the soul, thoughts, fantasies, and emotions continue to multiply, not under the control of reason and will, but under the influence of unconscious nature.
Dreams are woven from such fantasies, followed by thoughts and memories. They often appear strange because they do not belong to the human system of conscious and deliberate thinking and imagining but rather occur passively and silently, dependent on nature. Sometimes dreams carry the mark of disconnected thoughts and fantasies, and other times they reflect one’s moral state. Therefore, dreaming, by itself, cannot and should not be given any significance. It is absurd and completely illogical for some people to see in obscure dreams the prediction of their or others’ futures or any other meaning. How can something happen when there is no reason for its existence?
Demons have access to our souls while we are awake, but they also have access during sleep. Even during dreaming, they tempt us with sin, adding their fantasies to our own. Moreover, seeing that we pay attention to dreams, they strive to make them more interesting, stirring even greater attention to such nonsense and slowly heating up our trust in dreams. This trust is always closely tied to vanity, and vanity gives a person a completely false image of themselves, causing their actions to lose all correctness. This is precisely what the demons desire. For those who give them space, the demons begin to appear as bright angels, martyrs, and saints, even as the Mother of God and Christ Himself, promising them heavenly crowns and leading them into the heights of vanity and pride—a height that is simultaneously a deadly abyss. We must know well that in our current state, while we are still not renewed by grace, we are incapable of having any dreams other than those filled with nonsense and demonic illusions. Just as in our wretched condition, thoughts and fantasies arise from our fallen nature or are delivered to us by demons, so too in sleep do we see fantasies influenced by our fallen nature, represented by demons.
Our consolation in a wakeful state comes from the compunction that arises when we become aware of our sins, remembering death and God’s judgment. Consoling thoughts appear in us from the grace of God that has lived within us since holy Baptism, presented to us by angels according to our penitent state. This sometimes happens in dreams, but very rarely, and only in extreme need. At such times, God’s angels may show us our death, the torments of hell, or the Last Judgment. After such dreams, we are filled with the fear of God, compunction, and we weep for ourselves. However, such dreams are allowed very rarely, either to the ascetic or to the grievous sinner by a special and unexplainable divine providence. Let none of us think that this is given to us so rarely because of the lack of generosity of God’s grace toward us. The reason is that anything that happens to us outside the usual rules arouses our vanity and obscures our humility, which is so essential for our salvation.
God’s will, in which human salvation lies, is so clearly, forcefully, and thoroughly presented in the Holy Scriptures that it is often unnecessary to break the general rule for the sake of salvation. To the rich man who had died and pleaded with Lazarus to come from the other world to his brothers to persuade them to switch from the broad path to the narrow path of salvation, it was said, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.” And when he again said, “No… but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent,” he received the answer, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:29-31).
Experience has shown that many who have been granted to see in dreams the tollhouses, the Last Judgment, and other posthumous horrors, were shaken by the vision for a short time but then became complacent, forgot what they had seen, and continued to live as before. On the contrary, those who had no visions but carefully studied God’s law gradually became filled with the fear of God, achieved spiritual progress, and attained the joy that comes from the hope of salvation, passing from the earthly valley of tears to blessed eternity.
Saint John Climacus speaks about the involvement of demons in the dreams of monks: “When we leave our home and family for the Lord’s sake, devoting ourselves to monastic life out of love for God, the demons retaliate and try to disturb us through dreams, showing us our relatives crying or dying, or in prison and suffering because of us. He who believes in dreams is like one who tries to catch his shadow. The demons of vanity appear to us in dreams in the form of prophets, and thanks to their cunning, they predict what may happen in the future and inform us so that when the vision comes true, we fall into delusion and begin to think highly of ourselves, as if we are already near the prophetic gift. The demon often becomes a prophet to those who trust him, but to those who despise him, he is always a liar. Being a spirit, the demon sees everything that happens in the air, and when he realizes that someone is dying, he immediately informs the gullible person about it in a dream. The demons cannot foresee anyone’s future because if they could, diviners would also be able to predict death. They present themselves as angels of light and often take the appearance of a martyr, and thus, in dreams, they show us their companionship, and when we wake up, they cause us joy and vanity. Let this be a sign of deception (demonic delusion). The holy angels show us torment and death so that after waking, we are filled with fear and trembling. If we start obeying the demons in dreams, they will begin to mock us even when we are awake. He who believes in dreams is completely inexperienced, but he who believes in no dream is truly wise. Believe only in those dreams that show you torment and judgment, but if after such dreams you begin to fall into despair, then they are also from demons” (Saint John Climacus).
Venerable Cassian the Roman tells of a monk, originally from Mesopotamia, who lived an ascetic and solitary life but fell into delusion through demonic dreams. When the demons saw that the monk cared little for his spiritual development and focused all his attention on bodily asceticism and attributed great importance to it (and therefore to himself), they began to show him dreams which, by their cunning, began to come true. When the monk became steadfast in his belief in his dreams and himself, the devil presented him with a beautiful dream where he saw the Jews enjoying heavenly bliss and Christians suffering in the torments of hell. The demon, of course, took on the appearance of an angel or some Old Testament righteous person and advised him to adopt the Jewish faith to gain the opportunity to share in the bliss of the Jews, which the monk did without any hesitation. (Discourse on Discernment, Philokalia, Vol. 6).
This example is enough to explain to our beloved brothers, modern monks, how foolish it is to pay attention to dreams, even more so to trust them, and what terrible harm such trust can cause. When we give heed to dreams, trust in them inevitably creeps into the soul, and that is why paying attention to dreams is strictly forbidden.
Certainly, nature renewed by the Holy Spirit operates under entirely different laws than the fallen nature entrenched in its sin. The Holy Spirit governs the renewed person. “The grace of the Divine Spirit has warmed them,” says Venerable Macarius the Great, “and settled in the depths of their mind; for such people, the Lord is like their own soul”. Whether awake or asleep, they dwell in the Lord, free from sin, free from earthly and bodily thoughts and fantasies. Thoughts and fantasies that, during sleep, are outside the domain of human reason and will, are unconsciously obeyed by the demands of fallen nature in others, and in these, they operate under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, so the dreams of such people have spiritual significance. Thus, the righteous Joseph was instructed in a dream about the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word of God; in a dream, he was commanded to flee to Egypt and return from it (Matthew 1 and 2). The dreams sent by God carry in themselves an unshakable conviction. This conviction is clear to the saints but incomprehensible to those still struggling against passions.
Source: Благовести
