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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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