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A Message from Taiwan

REM sleep can therefore be considered as a state characterized by strong activation in visual, motor, emotional and autobiographical memory regions of the brain, yet a relative deactivation in regions that control rational thought.

—Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep

At 2:41 p.m. on Friday, March 25, an email arrived in my inbox. I was at the eye clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital at the time and did not see it until I arrived home in the evening. The email had come to me via my website. I am used to getting emails by that means from people I do not know. So I was not surprised that I did not recognize the name: Li, HsiuYu. (Li is her family name, which in Chinese names precedes the personal name.) It turned out, however, to be the name of someone I had met in 2017 but had not been in contact with since then. I will quote part of the email:

This is a message from Taiwan and I am the person who told you about a dream about a Taiwanese Professor who also studied under Prof. Moltmann on the Saturday night when you stayed overnight at an elder’s house. That night when you walked into the church I was conducting the church choir. Anyway, I am writing this message because few days ago the word “Cambridge” appeared in my dream, and I do not know why. My only connection with “Cambridge” is to know you are living at Cambridge and a young missionary who was from Cambridge, but died in Taiwan in 1993, Jonathan Sturtridge. . . . So, I checked the website you gave to me and write this message to you. . . . Since I dreamed about you I remember you in my prayer and may God protect you in this worldly pandemic time.

Pastor Li (as I remembered her) is a pastor in the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan. I met her in 2017 when I went to Taiwan to give the keynote lectures at a conference on the care of creation for Christian leaders and Christians involved in ecological projects in East Asia. Before the conference, the Taiwanese Christian organization that was hosting it had arranged for me to preach and lecture at a church in Koupi, in the southwest of Taiwan, in the area of one of the indigenous people of the island, the Siraya. The church was without a pastor at the time, and so I was hosted by one of the elders, Mr. Hsiau. I stayed Saturday night at his home, a big house surrounded by thick forest. At breakfast on Sunday I met Pastor Li, who (as she says in her email) was there to conduct the church choir at the morning service. I don’t recall what we talked about at breakfast, but I met her again later in Taipei. She associated me with Jürgen Moltmann because, although I did not in fact study with him, I had written books about his theology.

I found the conference a hugely encouraging event and learned a lot from other speakers, especially those involved in practical local projects. They seemed to find the theological approaches to ecological matters that I was providing really helpful for their work. After the conference I was scheduled to make a visit to a church in Haulien on the east coast of Taiwan, again to preach and lecture on ecological themes. But Typhoon Nesat was approaching from the east, and it was thought inadvisable for me to make the trip. So I remained in Taipei for three nights before flying on to Japan. I stayed in the YMCA Hotel, which I expected to be rather basic accommodation. In fact, I had a very comfortable and well-equipped room. I was able to rest and also to do some sightseeing in and around the city. I still wear the baseball cap emblazoned with a Chinese dragon that I bought in Taipei.

The typhoon caused a lot of flooding in parts of Taiwan. Thousands of people had to be evacuated from their homes, but none died and only a few were injured. In Taipei there were very high winds and heavy rain. From my hotel window I watched some people clinging to railings and lampposts as they made their way to shelter. But the following morning all was quiet, and when I took a walk, I could see very little damage. What there was had no doubt been efficiently cleared away by a populace very used to such wild weather. It was the closest I have come to a typhoon. But the experience brought home to me how very vulnerable Taiwan and other places on the eastern rim of Asia are, increasingly so as extreme weather becomes more frequent. The typhoon that hit Japan a few weeks earlier was more destructive than this one.

Pastor Li wanted to talk with me, and on Sunday afternoon we went to Starbucks, where I had a coffee but she did not. (During this visit to Taiwan I discovered that most Chinese people do not drink coffee much and find it odd that Western people need several cups of it to get through the day.) This conversation, rather than the one we had in Koupi, was the one I remembered, whereas she remembered the latter. That’s how memories work.

I seem to remember that we stayed at Starbucks until it closed and continued talking in the hotel lobby. By her own admission, Pastor Li is a talkative person. She is also highly intelligent. She has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and other degrees from the Pacific School of Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Fuller Theological Seminary in the United States. For several years she worked in China, teaching in the churches in an undercover manner. (She had to terminate this ministry in 2019, as Covid began to spread through China.)

Pastor Li believes she has a spiritual gift of dreams and dream interpretation. She receives messages from God in dreams, which are typically meant for other people, to whom she communicates them once she has divined their meaning. I cannot recall the dreams she told me about when we met in Taipei. I recall not being very convinced that they were genuinely messages from God, but I consciously withheld judgment. I was not in a position to tell.

I will give one example, of which she told me quite recently. (She may have told me about it in Taipei, but I can’t remember.) I choose it partly because it concerns someone I knew: John O’Neill, who was professor of New Testament at New College, Edinburgh, and who died in 2003. When Pastor Li was working for her PhD at New College, John was living in retirement in Edinburgh. She met him because they went to the same church. Here is a slightly edited version of her own account:

Then I heard that Prof. O’Neill was hospitalized again. I went to the hospital to visit him and afterward I had the second dream. I saw a woman sitting on a bed knitting. Even though I did not know what disease he had, I guessed the dream was telling me that Prof. O’Neill was “knitting a dream that he can get well.” But on my second visit, I dared not tell him this, even though he told me, “Your dream is real.” I only told him I had had a dream gift since I was at Fuller Seminary in USA. In my third dream, a hospital-type bed was upended against the wall. Someone took us to the counter to check out. I knew the dream was telling me that Prof. O’Neill was “checking out”—not in a good sense but checking out from the world. Again, I dared not tell him the dream.

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I have to admit I tend to be somewhat skeptical about messages in dreams or about any claims (such as those of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysts of his persuasion) to find significance in dreams. As far as I understand it, the science now tells us that dreams are produced by the brain’s activity of organizing our memories while we sleep, selecting from the memories of the day which to store permanently and where to file them in the brain’s extremely complex filing system. This is why, when we remember dreams, they frequently relate—though often in bizarre ways—to events and thoughts of the preceding day. The fact that our memory of dreams is usually very fleeting, quickly lost after we wake, is surely related to the lack of meaning for us. If we remembered much of the hours of dreams we have every night, our minds would be encumbered with a lot of useless and meaningless junk. The practice of keeping dream notebooks to record dreams before they are forgotten seems to me pointless. Most of what we dream is a mere by-product of the important work the brain can do only when we are asleep and is of no significance in itself.

I rarely remember much from dreams. Those that do stick in my mind at least a little while after waking often seem to be dreams that have affected me emotionally for some reason. A few fragments of dreams I remember because I woke from them with a feeling of deep happiness. Sometimes I wake from bad dreams, but I rarely have nightmares and certainly not the recurring nightmares that afflict some people. I can’t recall that I have ever dreamed about God or angels or heaven. Since God is so often in my waking consciousness, it seems odd that he never seems to be in my dreams. I cannot explain that. I remember a dream in which a friend I knew to be a strong believer revealed that he didn’t actually believe anything at all. That was a horribly disturbing dream, even though I didn’t for a moment, once awake, think it was true. Of course, some dreams are memorable because they are so absurd. I once dreamed that a group of people was having a picnic on top of the West Gate in St. Andrews. The fact that I told one or two people about that dream may be a reason I have remembered it. My brain filed my remembering it somewhere.

Sometimes dreams seem to pick up elements of dreams I have had in previous nights. There are several houses that I own only in dreams and seem to visit or think about in successive dreams on numerous nights. They are connected with geographical locations that are partly reminiscent of places I know but partly extend those locations in fictional ways that again sometimes perdure from dream to dream. I do not know why this happens, but I have yet to find any significance in it. People in my dreams, on the other hand, seem not to have this characteristic. People I know appear in my dreams frequently but entirely randomly as far as I have noticed. I remember them from real life, not from previous dreams, and that, I think, is a good thing. But I must stress that I have not attempted to study my dreams. I remember mere fragments of them and rarely take much notice of them.

Extremely rarely I have had a vivid dream that stuck with me and later seemed prophetic. I once had a dream in which, near the house or flat where I lived, there was a gate into a park. At the time there was no gate into a park anywhere I was familiar with. But for some reason the phrase “the gate into the park” stuck in my mind. It was somehow connected with attractive prospects beyond the gate. Other features of that dream I also remembered but have since largely forgotten. But many years later I found myself living not far from a gate into a park. I was scarcely aware of it when I bought the house, but sometime later I realized I had found “the gate into the park.” The park into which it led was unremarkable. I rarely visited it for its own sake. But across the park was the way to the countryside. Almost immediately beyond the park were fields and woods. I walked that way habitually. It was, as I think back on it, a hugely important aspect of my environment at that time. (There was another route to the countryside that I also took, but less often.) “The gate into the park,” with its connotations of attractions beyond it, seemed to deserve its status as a fragment I remembered from a dream. When such things happen, they naturally seem significant, perhaps more to me than to some more pragmatic people. But I readily concede that the link I saw between the dream and the much later reality could easily be purely coincidental.

I certainly do not wish to deny that God may speak to people in dreams.1 Occasionally, it happens in Scripture. In the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible there seems to be no clear distinction between dreams and visions. Daniel had revelatory visions while dreaming in the nighttime (Dan. 7:1–2). In some cases God speaks quite clearly in dreams, as he did to Solomon (1 Kings 3:5–15), but often dreams are obscure until interpreted, like those that Joseph was fortunately able to explain (Gen. 40:1–41:36).

In the book of Job, Elihu, the youngest of the comforters, who speaks last, is determined to break down what he considers Job’s arrogance and to coax Job into admitting the sins he is sure Job must have committed. This is one attempt:

God speaks first in one way,

and then in another, although we do not realize it.

In dreams and in night visions,

when slumber has settled on humanity and people are asleep in bed,

he speaks in someone’s ear,

frightens a person with apparitions

to turn that person away from some action

and to curb pride.

And thus he preserves the soul from the abyss,

that life from passing down the Canal. (Job 33:14–18 RNJB)

We must assume this missed its mark because Job had no such nightmares. The idea that nightmares may terrify sinners into repenting is an unusual one, but it may be what the rich man in Jesus’s parable had in mind when he asked for Lazarus to warn his brothers of the postmortem fate that awaited them unless they repented (Luke 16:27–31).

One of the most significant dreams in the New Testament is the vision that persuaded Paul to revise his mission plans and cross from Asia into Europe. Luke calls it a “vision” that Paul had “during the night” (Acts 16:9). Probably, like Daniel’s night visions, it happened in a dream. Paul saw “a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us’” (16:9). I guess most readers assume that this is all that Paul saw and that its message was clear. It must have been clear enough to convince Paul that this was the direction God now wished his missionary travels to go. But if this “vision” occurred in a dream, it can only have been one brief episode in the usual very rapid succession of weirdly connected events and changes of scenes that are the substance of all dreams. Presumably what happened was that this episode survived the process of forgetting most of a dream that occurs on waking. It seemed to be important and to mean something. Since he was in Troas and some other directions of travel had already been barred to him by divine guidance, the idea of taking ship to Macedonia must have occurred to him already as at least one possibility. The dream was picking up, as dreams do, something that had been in his mind the preceding day. But it came to him with the authority of a divinely given message. So perhaps this is how a message from God can be received in a dream. Just as “the gate into the park,” for reasons I cannot comprehend, emerged from a dream of mine as a powerful image in my memory, so, I imagine, the man pleading with Paul to come over and help the people in Macedonia stuck vividly in his mind. He had been seeking God’s will for the future direction of his ministry, had perhaps already wondered whether this was it, and the vision spoke directly to his need for guidance. Since Paul was a man who lived closely with God and sincerely sought to go where God directed him, we should assume that this vision was truly a message from God.

I have never knowingly received a message from God in a dream. When fragments from dreams have stuck in my memory, it has never occurred to me to understand them as messages from God. In retrospect I cannot think of any that would make sense as such a message, but perhaps I might have thought otherwise had I been expecting such a means of communication to be used by God. This lengthy reflection on dreams is designed to explain why, in late March 2022, I was not likely to be easily convinced that God was saying something to me in a very obscure way through someone else’s dream.

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In Pastor Li’s dream, the word Cambridge, repeated, apparently came out of the blue. (She seems to have seen it, not heard it.) She was not aware of any reason why it would have occurred to her. Of course, the complexities of the brain’s filing system are such that this doesn’t necessarily require any special explanation. What impressed me about her communication was the timing. Her email reached my inbox at 2:41, which must be exactly or nearly exactly when I was getting my eye scanned at the eye clinic for the first time. The dream itself occurred “a few days ago”—which was when I was becoming aware of this serious problem in the eyesight of my left eye. If I am somewhat skeptical about messages in dreams, I believe strongly that God is often at work in “coincidences.” So in my reply to Pastor Li the following day, I wrote:

When I later thought about why God should have chosen this apparently odd way to give me such an assurance, it occurred to me that for me to be convinced of the reality of such a message, it needed to come from an unlikely source (someone who knew nothing about my particular need at that time) and, by a striking coincidence, at the right time. If a friend who knew all about the situation had received a message assuring me of God’s love and concern, I might not have taken it seriously as a specific communication from God. It was what such a person would readily suppose God would say to me at such a time. Pastor Li’s dream was something I had to take seriously. I think it is important that she did not attempt to interpret the dream herself. She did not know it was for me before she contacted me to find out if it was, and she did not tell me what she thought it meant. It proved relevant to me in a way she did not know.

Looking back now, I see no reason to take it less seriously than my conviction that God had given the three blessings I received in Alnmouth. Through a surprising means, a very obscure dream in Taiwan, God was continuing to provide for me what I would need to get me through this crisis. The value this message had for me can be seen in this reflection that I wrote in my journal on March 28:

God has got me through some very difficult times in my life. He will get me through this—and the message from Taiwan was a wonderful assurance of that. He will be with me whatever. In his strength I can have vigorous faith (as in St. Patrick’s Breastplate).

Subsequently, Pastor Li told me of additional dreams that she thought applied to me, but I was not convinced. They were dreams in which professors better known to her appeared, and she took these figures to be symbols standing in for me. That seemed an arbitrary way of interpreting the dreams. (On the other hand, she says, “To understand the possible meaning of dreams takes gifts, training in literature and language, professional knowledge in dreams and experience in dreaming.” So perhaps I should be more cautious about rejecting her interpretations. But I cannot help forming an opinion on whether a dream refers to me.) But my doubts about these later dreams do not seem to be a reason for doubting the relevance of the “Cambridge” dream that spoke to me a message of God’s concern for me at the right time.

  

1. G. Scott Sparrow, I Am with You Always: True Stories of Encounters with Jesus (London: BCA [Macmillan], 1995), collects many reports of dreams in which Jesus appears and speaks to the person dreaming. Most of them seem to me easily explicable as quite ordinary dreams rather than divinely given ones. Jesus says just the sorts of things people might expect him to say, often in familiar scriptural language.