SID: Hello, Sid Roth here. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. How would you like to have one-third of your life in direct communication with God that is totally inactive? What am I talking about? When you sleep! You sleep away one-third of your life. How would you like to have dreams from God? Now for me, I’ve had a few literal dreams in my life that have been just totally changed my world, totally changed the world. It’s been wonderful. But most of my other dreams, they’re symbolic. Frankly, I don’t understand the symbolism, and I’m such a pragmatic type of individual. I just don’t pay any attention to them. But as I understand the Bible, dreams can give you warnings. Dreams can give you ideas that would change the world. Dreams can give you wisdom. Dreams can release destiny in your life. It’s so important. If I could understand the symbolism. If you could understand the symbolism, God is speaking to us. Mark Virkler, were you like me at one time in your life?
MARK: At one time I believed dreams were left over undigested food from yesterday. I didn’t understand them, didn’t take them seriously; ignored them completely.
SID: Just to set the stage a little bit, give me an example from the Bible of a dream in which someone got a warning, like you talk about Nebuchadnezzar.
MARK: Nebuchadnezzar, he received a warning from God in a dream. He’s got arrogance in his heart. He says, “I’m the greatest king who’s lived forever.” He has a dream that night of a tree being chopped off at the roots. And the interpretation of course is, “I can cut you down.” Alright, this is counsel saying, “Look, you need to deal with your pride. If you don’t deal with your pride I’m going to cut you down.” And Daniel came to Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel said, “Look, why don’t you repent now because if you repent maybe this won’t happen.” Because dreams aren’t fatalistic, they don’t have to happen. And a year later, the Bible says, a year later, God cut him down and he took him out to the field to live with the beasts for seven years. But he had one year to repent from that warning that God gave him, and he refused to repent. And so he suffered the consequence of it.
SID: What changed you from having what I call pizza dreams, I mean just nonsense dreams to being able to hear directly from Heaven, wisdom from God while you sleep? What changed you?
MARK: A man named Herman Riffel. He was teaching in Toronto, near Toronto, and I was up in Toronto doing a seminar myself, but I wasn’t booked for the evening. So I went to his seminar and I heard him teach on dream interpretation, and I said, I need to learn how to hear from God through my dreams. So we invited Herman to our Bible school. We taped doing a whole series and he taught us principles for dream interpretation.
SID: Now he had an experience with dreams. They changed his whole life. He would have never been able to teach you if he hadn’t understood his dream.
MARK: Well exactly. He tells about a dream where, in the dream, he’s walking along a side of a mountain on a very narrow path and his family is behind him. And the path gets narrower and narrower, and finally crumbles beneath his feet, and him and his family go down in the destruction. He wakes up in the morning and he says, “Lord, what is this dream about?” And he journals about it. And the Lord says to him, He says, “Herman, this private fantasy life that you’re engaged in, that you think is so carefully controlled, if you continue on it, it’s going to take you and your family down to destruction.” And so he repented, and he got off that path. And he stayed married to his first wife until he was 93 years of age, when he died a year or two ago.
SID: Now I have to tell you that if you can understand the symbolism, and we’re going to get into that, you can understand the heavenly communication you’re receiving. You had a reoccurring dream. Tell me about that.
MARK: I did. It reoccurred for about 15 years and it started when I was a child. When I was a child, about eight to 10 or so, my grandfather died instantaneously and my impression was it was a stroke. It wasn’t quite true, but that was my childhood impression. I picked up a fear, I was traumatized and the demon, basically of fear of stroke, entered me and I didn’t know that, but I would wake up in the morning feeling I had a stroke. My head was paralyzed, my arms were paralyzed, I could barely move, and I would shake the whole thing off and I’d be fine. I woke up probably five days a week for years that way. And finally when we got involved in the deliverance ministry, I had the elders and my wife pray for me, and as they commanded a demon come out, that sensation came over me of being paralyzed, my head, my arms, and the demon left me. The demon of fear of stroke left, and I’ve never had that dream since then. So what it was, it was a scream of an unhealed heart saying, I’m wounded down here, I’m bleeding, I’m hurting, would you please come and give some prayer focus here.
SID: But why does this have to happen at night? Why can’t you just find this out during the day, Mark?
MARK: Well the Bible says dreams are dark sands. It’s my unconscious, my heart, my inner man talking to my conscious part of me and trying to paint pictures and get messages on up to the surface so I can wrestle with them. It’s things that I’m not ready to face with my cognitive mind necessarily. So my heart is offering them to me in a picture format saying, you can take off this platter anything you’re willing to face right now, anything you’re willing to work with. And so instead of forcing things on to me, it’s offering things to me to deal with.
SID ROTH: Well I want to find out how he does this, especially, you see, I’ve interviewed people that have books and books of symbols, and this is what the symbol means. But Mark says different symbols mean different things to different people. So how can you go on a book? There’s got to be a better way. We’ll talk about that when we come back. Don’t go away.
Tags: It's Supernatural, Sid Roth