I am asked how I make sense of my dreams as people often feel their night visions don’t mean anything at all. They have trouble figuring out how their dreams actually relate to their waking lives, much less how they can be translated and understood to be revelatory messages from the Lord.

I want to share with you the special method I use for organizing my dream work, and I encourage you to use the same technique. It is very useful in helping us zero in on the key elements without getting distracted by all the details. Once these core aspects are clear, the meaning and interpretation of the dream will shift into focus.

We call this daisy-chain format the DAESI Dream Work Method and we simply record the Dream, Action, Emotion, Setting, and Interpretation. It looks like this.

Dream – Summary (Reader’s Digest version) of the dream.

Action – In the dream, what was I doing? (Running from something? Ministering? Fighting?) That is the key action.

Emotion – In the dream, how was I feeling? (Excited? Disappointed? Loved?) That is the key emotion.

Setting – In waking life, what issues is my heart processing? (What did I do that day? What was I thinking about when I went to bed and praying for as I fell asleep?) That is the setting.

Interpretation – We match up the dream’s action and emotion with similar actions and emotions in our waking life which show us what area of our life the dream is speaking to, and we journal out God’s message to us through the dream.

Breaking It Down

First we write down or type up a short summary of the dream. Then we zero in on the main action of the dream as well as the strongest feeling the dream evoked within us. Next we look at the setting and what we were processing in waking life when we had the dream. Often this is enough to give us at least a preliminary understanding of the interpretation.

However, we don’t want to stop with just what we think the dream means; we always want to know everything God is speaking so we make sure to ask Him through journaling and record what He tells us, too. It is essential that we hear directly from Him what He wants to say to us because the interpretation of dreams belongs to God (see Genesis 40:8).

You can find an example of a powerful interpretation utilizing the DAESI Dream Work Method here. To learn more, download the first chapter free on Hearing God Through Your Dreams – Understanding the Language God Speaks at Night.