Journal Reading #4  

How are dreams used in the narrative?

In Matthew dreams are being used as a God’s way to communicate with humans. For example, in Chapter 1 (verse #6) says “But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying Joseph thou son of David, fear not to take Mary thy wife”. In this evidence, we clearly see how God uses dreams to communicate with Joseph to clarify his doubts about Mary pregnancy. Dreams are commonly generated by our anxieties and emotions that we have during the day, therefore, during a dream all our thoughts and anxieties are reflected in a dream. Most of the time people uses dreams to predict things that might happen in the future. Dreams can be a warning or a prediction about something that can happen. For example, some people dream about being in hell and heaven, and they have a vivid image about all the things that can happen in hell and heaven. These people spread this experience with the world, in order to warn society, one of the person that shared a testimony like this was a girl called Angelica Zambrano, she made a video in which she explained with details the horrible things that you can experience in hell. We can see a parallelism between this experiences and Joseph dream because the dreams are being used to communicate something important and crucial that God wants to share with humanity, for us to reflect about our actions. Moreover, another evidence that represents the purpose of the dreams in Matthew is in Chapter 2 (Verse #13) states “And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou were until I bring thee word.” In this evidence we can see the effectiveness that dreams must communicate. Joseph is taking into consideration every dream and following the order that God commanded in order to be safe. These dreams are also a protection from God to humans. Despite that we can see that God is more distance from humans in the New Testament because he is using dreams to communicate with humans and the angel are the ones that appeared in the dream informing and warning the humans. Therefore, we can infer that the relationship between God and humans still distant since the SIN that Adam and Eve committed.