"Decoded Nightmares and Spiritual Intelligence Revealed" with John Redenbo @DreamLifeDecoded

0:00 It's like turning up the volume. Like he really wants you to be bothered by the dream. So you seek the interpretation. So nightmares are usually pretty easy to interpret because they're made to be interpreted specifically. The Bible is full of dreams and dream interpretation. And as you're reading through the Bible, you come across some of my favorite characters in the Bible. And these aren't just characters, these are real people. People like Daniel and Joseph, people that God used to interpret dreams that changed a nation. And you might be thinking that a dream that you had is just because of the weird pizza that you ate, but God is speaking through you.

0:40 And my guest today says that all dreams come from God. And so John Redenbow of Dream Life Decoded and Spiritual Intelligence, it's great to have you here on Charisma News. Hey John, it's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me on. So you say that all dreams come from God. And so I just wanna start with that because that is a big issue because I know a lot of times people say, well, that was just a pizza dream or something that I ate caused this dream to happen or a nightmare. How can a nightmare come from God? I've had dreams where I'm flying or doing other things that definitely seemed like it was from God, but all dreams come from God.

1:24 Let's talk about this. You know, this is something I'm super passionate about and I don't get asked about it as often as I'd like because it's very, very highly controversial. And the reason is, is because there's people that have taught for years and years and years that there's demonic dreams, soul dreams, God dreams. So I believe that and I had no problem with that until one day I'm in the middle of interpreting a dream for an executive from Facebook and there's a riddle in the dream and we're not getting it and we're not understanding it. And this dream was about a relationship. She thought she was gonna potentially marry this guy and right after she has this dream, the guy ghosts her, never talks to her again. This is like 10 months later and we're trying to figure it out, but it's obviously bringing up a level of pain in her heart.

2:10 And she says this, she goes, you know what, I hate dreams. I wish I would never dream again. And at that moment, I felt like the Holy Spirit got sucker punched right in the gut. It was just like this, oh, and I just felt like he was grieved, but I've been there. I've been in that situation where I've had dreams about somebody in a relationship where I thought God was saying that maybe this was the one and then they married somebody else. And so I've threw all my dreams and dream journals in the shoe box in the back of the closet and said this dream thing is whacked. Why would anybody be looking at dreams or anything practical in their life? It took like two years off. This was like 17 or 18 years ago.

2:53 But so I understood what she was saying. But right at that moment, I just really felt the presence of God and I heard not audibly, but pretty loud, just in my spirit, I heard, arise my darling, my beautiful one and come along for behold, the winter is past. The rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared. The time of singing has come. And I'm like, what the heck? This song of Solomon, I think it's 210, have anything to do with the fact that this lady doesn't wanna dream anymore? I just thought it was so random, but it was clearly wasn't from me. And then I heard the question, who do you say arise to?

3:38 I'm like, well, somebody that's laying down, somebody that's sleeping. And then he said, dreams are the love language of God to his children. Wow. Now I wish I would have done that. I wish I would have taken a moment to like say la and be like, wow, that's deep. That's profound. I've never heard that. But instead, John, I jumped in and immediately argued, well, I've always heard that there's demonic dreams, soul dreams and God dreams. And his only response was like, yeah, you should probably look that up. And so for the next like two years, I started looking up every dream in the Bible, every verse on dreams.

4:21 And there's a lot of dreams in the Bible. There's a lot of dreams in the Bible. More than we realize. Yeah. And Old Testament, New Testament, men, women, kids, like kings, regular people, carpenters, the governor's wife, I mean, it's crazy stuff. And so I got tired of looking them all up. And so I cut and pasted the story, the dream, the interpretation, what happened after into what we now call the ebook, because we just give it away for free, into like a Word document that's like 27 pages. And then I print it out and I take it with me like on airplanes and I would just read over and over and over again, all the dreams in the Bible, all the verses on dreams.

5:04 And you know what I found? There's zero demonic dreams. In fact, there's zero actual theological basis. To the point that I now believe that the devil doesn't even have the technology to read our minds, let alone to create a movie, crawl into our head at night and make us see in our unconscious mind while we're sleeping what he wants us to see. And if he did, wouldn't we all be like watching Freddy Krueger on reprieve every single night? We'd never get sleep. Right? Well, okay, maybe the demonic. Now there were people that were terrified in the Bible. Like I'm gonna kill people if they don't tell me what my dream means.

5:46 Kind of terrifying. Oh yeah, yeah. You know, like Nebuchadnezzar. Right. But those dreams were 100% from God. That's true. And so I'm like, man. So I, well, what about soul dreams? I found a verse in Ecclesiastes. When the mind is troubled, dreams come. I'm like, aha, this is it. I got you, God. I got you on this one. You know, if I have a bad day at work and I come home thinking about work and I go to bed thinking about work and I dream about work, it's because that's where my mind is. And he just laughed at me, chuckled. And he's like, son, when do you need for me to speak to you more than when your mind is troubled? And I was like, oh man, I thought I had him.

6:27 And there's a couple of verses where people are like, what about the verse that says these dreams that they made you dream or that they caused you to dream or what about false dreams or what about, you know, and so when I first started teaching dreams, we went into this thing where we did the dreams through the Bible study series where it's, and it's on my YouTube page, it's free. It's 20 to one hour Bible studies about every single dream and every verse on dreams in all of scripture. It's the most comprehensive biblical study. And I didn't wanna do it. I thought, surely people who have been teaching dreams for years, they would have had a really comprehensive biblical. I just wanna look that up and refer people to that.

7:09 And John, I couldn't find it anywhere. And so I felt like God said, you do it. So that was the first part. That was like the first two years after that. I find that that's what God does a lot. If we can't find what we're looking for, God said, God wants us to do it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Wow. So let, I just wanna interject here. You know, I've seen a lot of books and I have several of them that are dream dictionaries. And you know, it's, there's topics and themes and things like that. And sometimes those are helpful, but what's your take on some of these things and how do we, do we use those as tools or, you know, what is a dream dictionary then?

7:51 Here's the problem with dream dictionaries is by what I've seen, and you have to have a different mindset that I think people have taught in past seasons about dreams. We view dreams, and that's why I don't call it dream interpretation. I change the name to spiritual intelligence because we view dreams as intelligence. And when you do, you have to ask, cause people ask me all the time, why doesn't God just tell me what he wants to tell me? Why do I have this crazy dream about my dead mother-in-law and about this car driving down a freeway, 50 miles up in the air, and I feel like I'm gonna fall off the bridge. And what is that about? You know, and it's, it's because you remember it, but it's also because the message is encrypted. It's eyes only.

8:32 When you send a message as a warfare commander, the commander of the allied forces, you know, back to Roosevelt, you know, Ike to Roosevelt in World War II, they encrypt that for a reason, because they only want eyes only people to read it. And so when you start realizing God is giving you a message that is not hackable, that the enemy can't see at all, and the enemy couldn't read it if he could tap into your mind and read your mind. And so if you understand the weight of the importance of why God would encrypt a message directly to you, then you start wanting to write all your dreams down. You know, because as soon as I, I started studying scripture about this stuff, the next thing I did was, can I prove this wrong?

9:17 And so whenever I'd have a dream conversation, like when you and I first met, we talked dreams right away, which, you know, I'm introduced a lot of times as kind of the dream guy, you know, and that's fine. But when people would say, hey, I got a dream. I want to tell you, I've said, don't tell me your dream. Tell me the worst nightmare you've ever had in life. Because I'm like, I'm going to find the nightmare that didn't come from God. I'm going to find the nightmare where somebody has PTSD or they're so traumatized, or the enemy is bothering them with these demonic forces at night. And then I'm going to be able to say, aha, see, here it is. In 17 years of doing this, of doing really focusing on my dreams and doing dream interpretation, I have never found one dream.

10:03 Now I found false dreams where people have said, I had a dream. And then I'm like, no, you didn't have that dream. You said that dream to try to manipulate your way into a place of favor, because that's not how God talks. Really? I've had those, they're rare, but I've never had one. And especially nightmares, because nightmares, John, it's like turning up the volume. Like he really wants you to be bothered by the dream. So you seek the interpretation. So nightmares are usually pretty easy to interpret because they're made to be interpreted specifically. Nightmares are made to be interpreted. Okay. So is it because of the traumatic side of things with that, that it's made to be interpreted?

10:47 Well, God has a sense of humor. And the thing is, is unfortunately, because there's been, and I wanna tread carefully because at first I didn't realize, I thought that there were three sources of dreams. There's a lot of incredibly great men and women that are still teaching that, that have taught that. If they haven't gotten that revelation, I would like to challenge them with the journey that I had, because I didn't believe it, because I've heard these other things. And so I was blowing off the majority of my dream life because somebody else, not myself, had told me, well, there's demonic dreams and soul dreams. Nobody can prove that to me. I've had a lot of heavy duty conversations with people and I'm like, well, what about this?

11:31 Well, that's not what it says. It doesn't say the source of the dream was the devil. There's no place in scripture that even alludes to the fact that maybe he has the ability to do us that. I mean, people go back into the garden, into Jesus was led into the wilderness and the devil took him up on a mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the universe. There's no way he could do that literally. So he must have given him a vision, which is very much like a dream. So the devil can give you a dream. That's weak as heck. The point is we may not understand that verse, but it doesn't mean that the enemy can give us dreams. But this is one of the most damaging teachings, unfortunately, in the dream world. And it's just from a place of probably not verifying if this is real or not.

12:16 And what I tell people is, look, it took me four years to make the jump to say all dreams come from God. So nobody's fought against it harder than me, but do this. If you have a dream where you're 100% this terrified me, God would not want me to be terrified. Write it down anyway and seek an interpretation, because just assume that you don't know if it's from God or not. People are like, no, I know. God would never make me feel that way. Okay, so it's all soul level. It's all about how you feel. Because we can prove that wrong with scripture all day long, because you know very well. Yeah, I wonder, I think that thought probably comes from the fact that whenever people are learning how to hear the voice of the Lord, we know that there's, the devil will whisper to us and try to convince us of things.

13:01 We hear the devil's voice. We have our own flesh voice, and then we have God's voice. The devil doesn't like us. He is gonna put us down. He's gonna steal, kill, and destroy our flesh. Pretty much the same thing, but it's also very selfish. But whenever God's speaking, there's normally peace. There's love. There's vision. There is purpose with that. And so it's probably easy to then take that same thought process to the dream world and say it's either the devil, your soul, or God that can be speaking. So I could see how people would make that connection and how that would just be easy to accept.

13:43 But with you saying all dreams come from God and with biblical resources or biblical sources that you've just laid out and from your own experience and your four-year battle with this, that's really, really interesting to kind of help us break this down. I wanna share a nightmare with you, if you're okay with that. Absolutely. I'm sure you are. And so this dream happened a few, probably about a month and a half ago. I don't remember what led up to it. I felt like scenes in a dream change quickly. And so it was one of those moments where I all of a sudden was in the hallway at work, we're actually just down the hall from where I'm at right now.

14:33 And I turned, I heard this voice say, ask me, are you sure? And it was like this demonic voice. And I turned around and like from about a quarter of the way down the hall, so maybe 10, 15 or 10 feet away from me, there was this demonic figure that was like starting to reach to me. And I was kicking and I was kicking and screaming and trying to get away from it. I actually woke up kicking and screaming in my bed and my wife had to lay on me to calm me down. And so I just was like, okay, what was disappointing for me was that in my dream, the first thought wasn't speak the name of Jesus to that thing, because I have done that in dreams before.

15:23 I've cast things out in the name of Jesus, but this didn't happen. It just like, I turned around and this thing was attacking me. It asked me, are you sure? And then it was basically, it was over like that. It was so fast and so quick. But I was terrified and I haven't had a lot of those in my life where I was literally kicking and screaming and my wife had to calm me down. So, but I don't know, what do you do with something like that? Well, there's a code in your dream. What actually was called an anagram that relates back to the first words that the deceiver ever used, which I find absolutely fascinating.

16:04 But before I get to that, let me just say this. When people have a dream with a demonic entity in it, they say, I was attacked by a demon in my dream. You're right. But the devil didn't give you that dream and the demon didn't give you that dream. God gave you that dream. And here's why, because if you go to a hotel room and God forbid somebody was brutally murdered in that room and you don't bother to clean the room, you don't do spiritual warfare, you don't ask the presence of God to be with you and you go to sleep, you might have this dream of this demonic force or somebody dying or something like that. And what it is is it's God giving you the intelligence through your eye gate, through the seer gifting to show you what's happening in the room.

16:52 And so there are people that, a lot of people would say this is a demonic dream. And I would agree that this is a dream about a demonic entity. But the way that I say it so people understand what I mean by all dreams come from God is in the movie theater of our dream life, only God has the keys to the projection room. So there's no question you were fighting a demonic influence in your dream. God was showing you that. So you're at work, place of employment, right? Your career path, hallway, you're in a place of transition. You're going from one place to another. So a lot of times transitions are places where we're aren't sure, we really don't, man, I don't know, do I make the leap?

17:38 Do I apply for this job? Do a lateral move? Do I quit and go to another company? Do I, what am I doing? So there's a lot of uncertainty in a place of transition. And of course the enemy is gonna use that to the best of his ability. And he says, are you sure? Now for some reason God doesn't always- It was in a mocking tone too. Yeah. Yeah. Almost like saying, you're not sure, but he's not telling you that he's just asking a question because question seems helpful and harmless more than saying, you're an idiot. You don't know what to do. It's like, are you sure? So sometimes God will be like, look at the words.

18:19 And the first thing that I realized of the words is they all start with A-Y-S. A-Y-S. So if you change the letters around, which is an anagram into S-A-Y, it's say. Okay. So the serpent appears to even the garden and says four words, did God really say? And so he took the last word, made it into an anagram and made it into a question for you because it would be conversationally awkward in the situation of your dream for him to say, did God really say?

19:05 But this is exactly the same MO, even the same words in an anagram that the devil used to create the fall of mankind, facilitate the fall of mankind. Did God really say, are you sure? He wasn't lying to you. He was placing doubt. And then you're facing this thing and then it runs towards you, is that what happens? Yeah, yeah. And just starts attacking you, right? So what this is, is it's the, and many of us have had this, like when you're right at a place where you're about to move to another city or you're about to buy that house or you're getting ready to ask a girl to marry you, right?

19:47 Or you're gonna start a company, you're in that place of extreme transition. And all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh, what if this is the wrong thing? You're like, can I pull my offer on the house? Can we not move? Can I get my old job back? Like there's that moment of like, what if this stepping out in faith is wrong? I'm headed the wrong way in this transition. Can I backpedal? And that's when it's like, are you sure? Nobody's ever sure a transition. That's the lie. The lie is you can't answer that most people. Yep, I'm 100% sure that in this transition of my life, everything's gonna be fine and it's gonna work out.

20:28 The only way you can say that is through the eyes of faith. Most people, if they're honest in a transition, they don't feel that way. They feel a little unsettled and they can't wait until they move and they get to the new city or they get to the new job and they find out everything works out and not only is it okay, but God led them there and it's better than they thought. But when they're getting in the car with a U-Haul packed, quit the job, moving to a new place, they're like, man, I sure hope this works. And so it's at that moment that invites those overwhelming feelings of what if I screw this up? What if this is wrong? I'm not sure. I think my dad asked me the morning that I was, yeah, a lot of dads do, right?

21:12 The morning you're going to get married, are you sure? You know? And it's like, I'm sure we got about 500 people showing up at the church in three hours. I'm like, I don't know, I've never been married. Like, what are you, you know, come on. But not to equate my dad to the enemy at all. I've been saying, when somebody's in extreme transition, probably don't offer the option of doubt. Offer the option of surety. But that's where the enemy can come in, is he can just ask questions that create doubt. And doubt, because doubt, what is doubt? Doubt is thinking negatively or questioning your decisions, thinking negatively, negative scenarios about the future.

21:53 It's literally the opposite of faith. And when you're in a place of extreme transition, you can literally, people have had panic attacks thinking about the future and how they think it's gonna be. And it's never that bad. I mean, they say one of the worst fears that anybody can have ever, for a lot of people, it's worse than the fear of death, is the fear of public speaking. Because they're sitting on the side of the stage thinking I'm about to walk out with the lights and cameras and 3,000 people or whatever it is. And what if I forget my lines or I don't remember what to say or I get lost and I look foolish and I feel ashamed? And for many hundreds of thousands of people, they'll never get on a stage because they're not sure that when they do, it'll be okay.

22:38 That's really interesting. Yeah, that does, that whole question of are you sure does resonate with the, going back to what the devil first said to Eve, did God really say? And I don't feel, I mean, I guess I am in a season of transition. I just got married less than a year ago. The company here, we're moving buildings very, very shortly. There is some transition, but I'm not planning on leaving charisma or things of that nature at this point in time. But there's still uncertainty in my life.

23:19 And there's definitely things that definitely has felt like an attack in a lot of ways. And so, but I mean, I was just writing down that, I love what you said that God has said that God has been a great help to me. I love what you said that God has the keys to the projection room. And that's really encouraging to know that, even though that was a traumatic experience that I had, that God is still wanting to speak through that. And I'm sure as I process it more and think about it, I'm sure that there's some more things that I can look at and say, wow, what did God mean by this? But if we're open to the idea that all dreams come from God, then we're looking for the code that's in there.

24:06 So that makes me want to go, and first off, thank you for addressing that particular dream. But I wanna find out your story of how you realized that God was using you in prophetic dream interpretation. And really you call it a new term now, spiritual intelligence. So tell me about how God showed you that this is what he's calling you to do. Sure, well, let me demonstrate spiritual intelligence with that last dream. We always like to go, we interpret the dream, just like when Joseph said, there'll be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Okay, that's what the dream means. But what do I do? And he says, now here's what you should do.

24:47 Let Pharaoh appoint a man, put eight commissioners underneath him, store up 20% in the walls of the city during the times of plenty. That's an action plan. We call that actionable intelligence. So many times somebody will have a dream and somebody will pat him on the head and say, oh, well, God just wants you to know he loves you. Or you should go pray. God just wants you to pray more. Dreams never mean never in scripture mean just pray or just that God loves you. That's not what they mean. Because God is giving you actionable detailed intelligence. Like when he appears, the angel of the Lord appears to Joseph, the husband of Mary, the father of Jesus in the dream and says, leave right now, take your wife in the sun and go to Egypt, Herod's trying to kill you.

25:33 There's no like, well, I need to pray about, no, you need to leave right now. Grab the go bag, brother, you're out of here. And so what God is telling you in that dream is that there's an attack of doubt in a season of transition. And so it's not like, well, I need to pray about it. No, you need to fight it. You need to exercise your faith and you need to rebuke the doubt and realize that it's the enemy. Realize that you're in a vulnerable place, which is a place of transition and you're in a place of transition at that moment. You're in a place of transition at work and it could be the building move, whatever.

26:13 A lot of times God'll just as I'm talking, people will be like, man, I really thought about this particular situation. Well, that's because God is highlighting. That's probably what he's talking about, but he's giving you the playbook of the enemy. The enemy wants to come in and attack you in a season of transition with doubt. And if you know that, then you're like, no, I'm gonna get together with my wife. We're gonna pray, we're gonna have faith. We're gonna read scripture on faith. We're gonna be 100% convinced in every direction we're taking in any area of life and we're gonna rebuke the spirit of fear, doubt, and unbelief categorically and it's not gonna have a place with us. That's much more helpful than telling somebody, oh, well, you are getting attacked by doubt.

26:55 Well, okay, but what do I do? I didn't like how I felt in the dream. I literally woke up kicking and screaming and my wife had to call me down. How do I not do? Well, God is telling you this is the enemy that's attacking you. This is what's coming at you in this season. And you know how to do spiritual warfare. So again, it's not like we need to pray, God, what does this mean? We need to take action, put on the full armor, those kinds of things. And so I realized because I was so dogmatic, I just kept feeling in my spirit, but yeah, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? I just got tired of kinda just really kinda milquetoast dream interpretations that you get at church or this, well, this just kinda means that you should pray.

27:41 And I'm like, no, it doesn't mean pray. And there's so many people that are saying things right now. Like this country is in a difficult part of its history. And I believe we're in a state of all out war. Say spiritual war. There's more than that going on. But even if you just say with spiritual war that this is where this country is in, the idea of just pray, what like say, God, please bless America? Like, do you think that's gonna move the needle on what's happening in Washington, DC, on our southern border in all of these cultural questions that are arising in our day that are difficult and school boards and everywhere else.

28:22 Do you think that, you know, no, we need to take action and pray. So what is the action we need to take? This is the intel that God is giving us in dreams. Wow. So spiritual intelligence is marching orders. Its dreams are given for direction, strategy and tactics. I've had some prophetic people that, you know, really incredible prophets that have said, had this dream, what does it mean? And that I would interpret the dream and they'd be like, wow, that's really cool. We need to pray about that. And I've actually been like, no, you don't need to pray.

29:03 You need to take the action. God already gave you the answer. That's what we do. When we don't know what to do as Christians, we wanna pray. We're like, wow, we need to pray. No, you prayed. You asked God, what's going on in my life. He showed up. He showed you. Now do what he showed you to do. Yeah. You know, and so if we look at it that way, and it's really just a whole, I was in the military. And when you have a military background and you start looking at things as marching orders or orders of the day or lawful orders that you have to obey and you start looking at these dreams as being this type of a thing, then you wanna know when you wake up, what do I do? Not, I just wanna pray about that and I wanna get more clarity.

29:46 The clarity is the dream. The answer to the question is the dream to the point that we do this thing called an RFI, a request for intelligence. I meet somebody new. I met a movie producer once and I'm like, and I don't really know anything about this person. I'm like, tell me about this person. And then I went to sleep and then I had two dreams about this person. I went to sleep and then I had two dreams about them. And in the next several interactions that happened, those dreams came true and I knew what was going on and where we were because there was gonna be a season of confused communication and difficulty that could potentially put that friendship at risk. But I knew because I had the intel already from day one, like from first meeting someone.

30:33 And so when you get that type of information, you realize when you start to look at dreams like intelligence, it will 100% absolutely change your life because if we even have the doubt in our mind, ah, that dream was just probably from me because maybe you had a tough day at work and you didn't like the way they painted the hallway and so it was probably pizza and stuff from work. No, and then you ignore it. And God is saying, you're gonna enter a season where more is gonna be required of you in the season of transition and I want you to move forward in faith, son. So the first thing you need to do is you need to full on attack and win against the spirit of doubt.

31:16 So it has no place with you, no place with you as you lead your team at work, as you lead your family at home, because you're entering a season where you are gonna need to be rock solid because that's the position I've placed you in and that's why the enemy wants to attack you there. Wow, that's some good actionable intelligence and I know what I can do about that. You know, that's just like what Joseph said to Pharaoh, he laid out a plan, a strategy for, here's the interpretation of the dream, but this is what you gotta do. Hey, put somebody in charge of that. Joseph wasn't trying to be the second in command of Egypt at that time. He was just some guy that came out of the prison.

31:57 Literally, he went from the prison to being the number two, not because he just interpreted the dream, but because he also had the action plan and God gave him favor because he was willing to speak with that was. And so that's really interesting. So back to kind of your story of how you went to, you know, how you started interpreting dreams and I know you just recently within the last several years are in this ministry now full time from a business background, but now you're in ministry. You know, with some of the time that we have here, let's talk about your story and how God started using you in dreams.

32:40 Sure. Yeah, I wrote my first dream down at 13. That's the only dream I wrote down as a kid. I wish I would have wrote all my dreams down, but it's the only one I have in my little 13 year old diary. And then in 2003 or four, I started writing down dreams more. Not every dream, but a lot of dreams. And then around 2006, there was a romantic relationship and I started dreaming about this person a lot. And so I'm like, wow, this is fun. It's fun to dream because, you know, I'm dreaming. I'm getting to know this person or I'm spending time with them or their family or whatever. And around the situation, there was like all of these real life encounters that would happen where I would go to this place and that person would be there.

33:29 And I'm like, wow, this is like in the dream. And so the dream world and the real world seem to be intersecting. And I'm like, well, it felt very compelling for me that God was saying there's a future of something here. And so I'm just trying to, you know, give her the time to realize that as well and kind of be laid back. But, you know, and so this went on for a period of a couple of years and I'm just trying to, you know, approach and hey, you know, can I buy you a coffee or whatever, but at the same time, not, you know, you know, but I was excitement was building and apprehension was building in my spirit.

34:09 And I was praying about this person and all that. She got engaged to somebody else. And the day she got engaged, God told me, like I was getting ready. I was up visiting friends in Alaska at the time. And I was getting ready to fall asleep on somebody's couch. And I just felt in my spirit, look at this lady's Facebook page. And I'm like, no, I rebuke that. I spend way too much time looking at her Facebook page. I was like, no, no, no, really look at her Facebook page. And I'm like, no, no, I'm just gonna take a nap. And I took a nap and when I woke up, I checked my phone and I started seeing on all of my friends' Facebook pages that they were congratulating this woman who had just gotten engaged.

34:52 So she had just posted probably right when God was telling me, look at her Facebook page, the fact that she was engaged. And the thing that was interesting for me was I did what I believe is the right approach to take because I know there's so many single people that we're teaching don't prophesy mates, dates and babies. And there's people that wanna be married. You and I had this talk because you weren't married when we first met. We're like, man, you know, God, hook us up, right? We need a wife. So a lot of people will have dreams and they'll put a lot of stock in their dreams because there's not a lot of prophecy, personal prophecy related to the area of mates in their life. So they're dreaming about, I've had so many young, incredible ministry school girls, oh my gosh, the bass player or the drummer.

35:40 I've dreamt about him three nights in a row. And I think, do you think God is telling me he's my husband? And I'm like, well, let's interpret that dream. Like, let's not be afraid of the question. Let's ask the question. But I got to the place where I'm like, God, I know she wants to be married. I know I wanna be married. I'm just gonna pray that you hasten her husband. And if it's me, great. And if it's not, I'll know. And that's what happened. And I feel like even the way that God kind of closed that chapter in my life was like he was telling me, so I would know. But after that, I was frustrated. I'm like, this dream thing is stupid. I put a lot of stock in decisions. I was at events I was going to because maybe she would be there and I had had a dream and blah, blah, blah.

36:24 And so I'm like, this dream thing is bunk, man. So I put my stuff in a box, threw it in the back of the closet and went on my way for about two or three years. And I don't know why, but for some reason, people would be like, hey, John, do you know anything about dreams? And I'm like, I don't wanna talk about dreams. I'm frustrated about dreams. Right, right. They'd be like, well, let me just tell you this dream. And I'd be like, fine, tell me your dream. And they tell me a dream. And I'd be like, and God would just drop thoughts in my head. I don't know, maybe it has to do with a situation at work. I don't know, did you loan somebody money? Oh my gosh, how did you know? That's amazing. You know, and I'm zero, I'm not into it. I'm not trying to be into it.

37:06 And like everything I would say, people would be like, oh, that's amazing. I mean, it was just so annoying. So you're almost running away from it. I was, I was totally running away. And then I have a bunch of friends that were like prophetic voices in the earth. And some of them are national level kind of guys. And they'd just be like, hey, can I tell you about these dreams? And I'd be like, sure. And then they'd be like, man, you really got a gift. And I'd be like, yeah, whatever. I just blow it off because I, you're my friend. I appreciate you saying that. And then one or two people finally are like, no, listen, like we know everybody doing dream interpretation right now.

37:48 Like we knew John Paul Jackson, we knew what you're doing is somehow different. And I'm like, what'd I do? I don't, I don't have a book. I haven't never taught this. I've never been to a dream class. I just, somebody will tell me something and I'll hear a question or something drop in my spirit as they say that. And they're, you know, and then I would just say, well, here's, here's what I'm thinking. And they'd be like, wow, that's incredible. And that's when I realized that it was God that was doing that. But everybody I knew was reading books, taking dream classes, doing dream. And I thought, and I even thought, man, maybe I need it. What's a good book I need to gather? What class should I take? And what I realized is, is when I finally went to a conference, a friend of mine was doing on hearing from God, especially in the word of knowledge, they said, here's how you hear from God on the word of knowledge.

38:41 Shut your brain off. You even shut your prophetic discernment off because if you're a prophet and you're used to that bubble up flow, you can start prophesying over someone when they tell you a dream and your prophecy can be accurate, but that's not dream interpretation. And so it'd be like, you need a word of knowledge, which means shut your brain off, be still, be quiet, listen, and let God drop things. I'm like, that's it. That's what I do. You know, and so when I realized that, then I realized that's why I don't like dream dictionaries. That's why I don't like it when people in ministry are like, well, if you had a dream about a car, it means ministry. I'm not in ministry, I'm a business guy. That means nothing to me.

39:21 And then I realized car doesn't always mean ministry. Right. In fact, what we're trying to do is we're trying to institutionalize a encoded, encrypted, multi-generational, multicultural language. Like when we understand the power of pictures, we could show up in fifth century BC in Egypt and we could try to communicate with them 400 ways. They would know nothing. We show them a picture of a cat. They're not gonna know how we got a picture, but they're gonna point to the cat and they're gonna know what we're talking about. Yeah. You know, and so that's what I love about dreams. And so to try to put dreams into a box, I got a friend that put together a database of, you know, tens of thousands of dreams.

40:06 And they were working with a data scientist who took the dream set, the whole data set to MIT. And that was a group of doctorate degree MIT data scientists and people from the NSA who studied this data set. And you know what they found? Absolutely nothing. They were looking for, well, can we say definitively that a car means this or a cat means this? Well, what about a lion in scripture? Well, the enemy's like a roaring lion seeking who he may devour. And then there's the lion of the tribe of Judah. Exactly, yeah. What is it? Well, you need to hear from God. You need to sermon either way. Well, I know that dreams are personal.

40:47 God is, as you said, God is the love language that God speaks to his children. And so God speaks in a way that we, as an individual, are gonna be able to understand. That's probably why God spoke to Nebuchadnezzar in a dream about this giant statue where he was the head of gold. And all these other things, God was speaking to Nebuchadnezzar in a way that he could understand, or the way that would make sense to him or mean something to him. But Daniel had to give him the interpretation and the action plan from that. So yeah, I mean, a car might mean ministry. It might mean transportation. It might mean a dozen other things based on the hearer.

41:30 Yeah. And I think it's interesting that even though it's a way, like you said, it's a way that that person is gonna understand it when it's interpreted. Like, and you know, I didn't, I really started studying Daniel. I never made this connection. Daniel one is Daniel in training. Daniel two is him interpreting the dream in Nebuchadnezzar where he says the head of gold is you, oh, King. Daniel three, Nebuchadnezzar builds a 90 feet tall statue of himself made of gold. Exactly. And that's based on what God said. He got the message. I'm the stuff. And everybody's gonna bow down and worship me. And then Daniel four is God course correcting and saying, no, no, no, no, no.

42:10 If you have so much pride, you're gonna crawl around in the grass for seven years. And that's Daniel four. But it's literally a juxtaposition in the life of Nebuchadnezzar between, let me give you an identity that's so great that you understand how good of a monarch you are to, you know what, you need a little bit of humility. So we need to pull it back a little. And you need to realize that you are in fact not God, I'm God, but you're still a great King. Yeah. And reading through the Bible this year with my wife, there's so many times that Nebuchadnezzar is referenced. I used to just think of Nebuchadnezzar as always the bad guy. I mean, obviously he didn't do everything right. And he, you know, invaded Israel, took everybody captive, but God refers to him as somebody that he's using.

42:56 He's actually following God's purposes, whether it's misguided and making a gold statue of himself, or not. I just had a new appreciation for Nebuchadnezzar, especially in chapter four, because if you read it, he's actually the one that's writing it, or at least he's dictating it. Or he's then saying, you know, he had to be crazy for seven years, and then God restored him whenever he, you know, whenever he repented. So it's just fascinating to see how you can take a dream and then run in the wrong direction, because you don't have, you're not applying the right action to that.

43:41 And as God's speaking, we're kind of just, we're kind of just taking sections from your story and kind of breaking it up. But, you know, I do wanna get to the point where you are now actually giving actionable intelligence to government officials because of the dreams that God is using you to interpret. But let's kind of figure out how to get from there to, you know, from where we were to that place here. So I came out of my season of frustration with dreams, and people, I didn't seek it out at all. People would come up and say, hey, do you know anything about dreams?

44:23 I think the first time I met Lou Engel, he said, sit down, I want you to interpret some dreams for me. And I'm like, how does he even know that I can do that? You know, it was, and then we spent about two and a half hours just talking about dreams. It was just, it was an incredible time. But I'm like, do I get a sign on my head, like ask this guy about dreams, because it keeps happening. And it was, like I said, it was a point of frustration. But what it really was, was it was God, you know, the lover of our soul, romantically pursuing me, and saying, I want to communicate with you in this way. I have something for you, not just in your own dream life, but in interpreting the dreams of others. And so after a while, when I listened to my friends, and I said, okay, they're not just trying to tell me, you know, you know how to do this, that maybe I do have a gift, then in my life, you hit a point where once you go down a path long enough, and you feel like God is moving in that direction, you realize it's God, now I believe you have an obligation to lean in.

45:25 I'm like, well, if I have a gift in this, I'm not stewarding it, because I'm avoiding conversations about dreams. So how do I steward it better? How do I get to understand more? How do I study to show myself approved? And it was around that time that I was having some more conversations, people were saying, can you come over here and speak? And can you show up at this conference? And can you just bring a team of dream interpreters that you've trained? Or can you speak at this prophetic deal over here, or church or whatever? That I'm like, I'm always kind of bulldog-ish about scripture, it's like, I wanna make sure that I have the 100%, as much as I can, of an understanding of what scripture says.

46:09 And I'm not operating from a place of my own ideas. And so it was right around that time that God presented me the opportunity to look it up. And so I really started studying scripture, and I started getting into it, and that's how I started leaning in. And then I also had a time when I was up at Bethel Church in Reading where I took a period of a couple of months where God said, I want you just to rest, lay on the prayer house floor, go to the prayer house every day. So I went to the prayer house for eight hours a day, every day, for two or three months. And it was so frustrating, because I was trying to work, I was trying to raise money for a startup company and do this and do that, and God was like, you need to stop and just rest.

46:51 And when I did, I started hearing him a whole lot clearer. And I didn't even realize that that probably really accelerated my ability to hear the voice of God and dream interpretation. And so I have this thing where I just love to replicate. So when I'm doing business, I'm teaching young people how to do business. I'll have a strategy group, or I'll have, you know, a business startup group where we'll get together and hang out and, hey, let me give you everything I know in 16 years of owning a finance company, approaching investors and writing pitch decks or whatever. So I was having a conversation, I had just moved to Orlando, Florida, and I was having a conversation like that with some young entrepreneurs. And one of the girls just says, hey, do you know anything about dreams?

47:33 I'm like, tell me your dream. So she does, I interpret her dream, and she was like, oh my gosh, she goes, can we come back next week and just talk dreams? Well, you don't like the business? Oh yeah, that's fine. And so they came back the next week and then we ordered, and this had to be God, I don't know why we did, but we just got hungry. And so we ordered pizza. Pizza, the food most often blamed for people missing the voice of God. So I go, it was a pizza dream. So we started having dream night and having pizza every Monday. And so what started as three or four people turned into 25 or 30 people. Wow. And instead of it being, you tell me your dream and I'll interpret it, I got out a whiteboard and I said, let's interpret these together.

48:18 Okay, so here's the five main symbols in this dream. Let's write them on the board. Okay, what do you guys think the seven fat cows were? And then people would yell their answers out. And then a lot of times they would yell them out at the same time, the same thing. And we'd be like, whoa. And they'd feel like goosebumps, like, man, the Holy Spirit dropped that in and three of us heard it at the same time. And so people would get really excited at learning how to hear the voice of God on their own. And then it went from there to when I moved to Dallas, my strategy consultancy in my finance business, I just kind of hit a lull. I moved out there to work with some startups. They didn't have the money to pay me. I'm like, God, this is what I moved out here to do.

49:00 If I'm gonna work for free, I'd rather do what I wanna do. God says, well, what do you wanna do? Well, maybe that dream thing. He goes, okay, do dreams. So at the end of 2019, I shut off trying to make money at all. And I was getting a fair amount of dreams. People would send me dreams. I was working with people that were, you know, part of the administration at that time that were asking me dream questions. I was getting introduced to CEOs of a hundred million dollar a year revenue firms that were like, I have questions on what do I do with this phase of my life, this phase of my business. And I would just say, if you had any dreams lately. And so it was a really rich time, all of 2020.

49:40 But I asked the question somewhere along that journey, probably 2016, 2017. I was working on a movie project and I asked somebody that was also a friend of mine in the entertainment industry that spent a lot of time working on prophecy and word of knowledge. I said, do we really believe this stuff? Like I'm kind of all or nothing. If we believe it, I'm all in. If we don't, that's fine. It's just fluff. I'm gonna do something else. But if we really believe we can hear from God in dreams, visions, word of knowledge, word of wisdom, prophecy, then we should have the best information like literally on the planet. So why isn't there a full-time group of people working to keep America safe or advise the president of the United States directly?

50:24 And we all have friends that are pastors or prophets that'll go out there maybe once every two months, meet with the president for 10 minutes and pray over them and maybe give them a brief. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm like eight o'clock in the morning of every day, the Central Intelligence Agency places a folder on the desk of the president of the United States that says president's daily brief. If our information is literally from God and he's the source of dreams and he's speaking through these dreams and we can interpret like Daniel, like Joseph, our information should be better than theirs. So why don't we do this full-time because we have a lot of problems in this nation that need to be fixed.

51:07 And so I started working to build the team of people that would do that. And as I did, people would hear about some of the things that we were doing and I would get calls from people sometimes in the intelligence community, sometimes military, sometimes governmental people in the administration. And we started having opportunities and doors open up and you don't just send somebody an email, you don't have a consultation on the phone where they give you their dream like you just did and I just give them an answer. You write it up in a government style report with a cover page. And so we started doing that and it just kind of took off from there. Yeah, and so people were actually looking at this though.

51:48 Wow, John, our time is running a little bit short so we're gonna have to do another session with you, I think to be able to kind of go in a little bit deeper about some of these things. And but I don't wanna miss the opportunity to let people know about your amazing YouTube channel and the things that you're doing on a regular basis to help people understand their dreams. Can you just talk about the Dream Life Decoded and the spiritual intelligence ministry that you have that people can kind of tune into? Sure, we picked the name Dream Life Decoded because it's exactly that. Everybody has a dream life and they wanna know what it means.

52:28 And so Dream Life Decoded on YouTube is probably the best way to get in touch with me, which by the way, every Tuesday night at 6 p.m. Eastern, we do two hours of live dream interpretation. So they can do what I just did for you. You can hop on, share a dream. We put in the comments, here's the stream yard link, hop in, sometimes people like, I don't wanna be on camera, great, just write it in the comments. And I'll spend two hours, I usually bring one or two friends that I've taught for two years or so. And we'll interpret those dreams together. But if people are always like, can I send you a dream? The best way, probably the quickest way is to hop on live dreams on Tuesday night, every Tuesday, 6 p.m. Eastern.

53:08 But I also have the full Dreams Through the Bible Studies series, that 22 episode, like Joseph saw the sun, moon, and 11 stars bow down to him. It takes me an entire hour to unpack all of the depth of what that means. It's crazy. And so we have all of those that's on there. It's a playlist called Dreams Through the Bible. I do some special events like around Christmas, Halloween, we'll do a couple of nightmares only, live dream interpretation, where if you're calling in, you have to have a nightmare. And we've done a couple of those. Those shows are really, really fun, because you hear some crazy off the wall, zombies and death and mayhem, and it's pretty interesting.

53:50 But then I also have a show called Dream Talks, where I interview people whose lives have been changed by dreams and the intelligence in them. These are people that have solved murders. Wow. That are investors that have invested their money in the stock market and done so well by following their dreams that they were investigated by the SEC. Like these are people that have found their spouses, bought real estate, all these kinds of things that are in those interviews, which are super powerful and a whole lot of fun. And then, but at the beginning of 2021, I started, I had a friend working with me at the time, and we just decided to do the Bible. So it was the first take on the Bible study.

54:31 The take that we have now is a remake, because it's a lot better, it's a lot more polished. But we also started what we call the spiritual intelligence mentorship, where we train people. There's a lot of stories, as you can imagine, that I can't share publicly, because of the names involved. Some of them had to do with the election, they had to do with major things that happened in our, some of them were national security, warnings that we had to get to the right people. I don't put that stuff out there, because we treat dreams like Intel. But if you're part of my spiritual intelligence mentorship, we can train you on using those examples, and we can show you real life things that happened when we were working with people in an administration, or in government, or sometimes in a three-letter agency.

55:17 And we're able to share a few of the things of what happened, not that would compromise any information, but you can find more information about that at spiritualintel.com. But the best way to get in touch with me is Dream Life Decoded on YouTube, or spiritualintel.com. That's really cool. You know, John, we probably talked about half an hour before we hit record here, because there's so much to talk about. And I just kind of realized, oh, we need to actually record this. And so we didn't even touch part of the stuff that we planned to talk about. So if you're available, we'll find another time to go another level here.

55:59 And that would be just wonderful. Yes, we didn't get to the story about your wife. We didn't get to your nightmares. I wanted to hear some nightmares from you. We need to do a show where we just spend most of the time talking about your dreams, because you've got a fascinating dream life, man. Yeah, I definitely do. And I just wanna encourage people right now that if you want to have dreams, start writing them down. When you wake up, don't let it pass by. I started a note in my phone just to keep track of things. And sometimes I'll write them down as well. But if God is speaking, we need to be ready to receive what he has, whether we understand it or not. And so we're gonna do more sessions to talk about your dream life decoded and my dream life too.

56:45 So John, thanks so much for being here on Charisma News and looking forward to doing another session with you. Thanks again, John, always a pleasure. From 1975, Charisma has been at the forefront of reporting on revival, miracles, and the move of God in our world. Charisma Magazine is now going exclusively online to reach beyond the physical barriers of a print issue. Charisma Magazine online is committed to bringing you the very best spirit-led content to inspire your walk with God in this upside down world. Go to mycharisma.com for exclusive content today.