SID: Now my guest tells me she gets angry because it’s the devil that is causing insomnia to stop God’s people from hearing God, seeing God so clearly in their dreams. Insomnia is a big problem.
LAURA: It is. And it’s not just God’s people that the enemy doesn’t want sleeping. Remember, Jesus can reveal himself to people, and this is happening a lot in Muslim nations right now. He can reveal himself to people in their sleep. So you know, be comforted by that. That family member that you have thinks they’re an atheist by day or they think they’re an agnostic by day. We are made of three parts in God’s image. And so there’s that portion of us that does not sleep, just like there’s that portion of God that does not sleep. Our body and our mind sleep at night, but our spirit is awake. And so that person who says by day, I’m agnostic, listen, they go to bed at night and their spirit is the Lord’s, so the enemy doesn’t want them sleeping either. Insomnia and other sleep disorders—
SID: But Laura told me, this is so exciting, is when she has friends that are non-believers, agnostics, atheists, another religion, she’s got a captive audience to pray for them while they’re sleeping, because the Bible says that God neither slumbers nor sleeps and the human neither slumbers nor sleeps. But tell me a bit about what you learned about insomnia.
LAURA: Yeah. Well there’s 40 million people in the world who struggle with insomnia, chronically, another 20 million who just have it periodically. There’s always times for each of us, maybe we can’t sleep. But yes, I believe it is attack of the enemy to come against that period of the day. Listen, the moon and the stars, and the nighttime, those were not an afterthought when the Lord created those. That is a sacred time and it is a time for you to be able to receive information from the Lord when your busy mind is turned off. And I sat next to, on a plane one time, a person who was really into Sigmund Freud, okay, and they had a lot of psychologists in their family. You know, Freud was Jewish by birth and atheist by choice.
SID: Unfortunately.
LAURA: Right. But his, can you imagine having those roots and ignoring them? But his whole take on dreams was that it was a psychological. I’m like, it’s so much more than that. We can receive in our spirit from the Lord as we sleep. So yes, the enemy does not want us to sleep and that’s the place where I get excited about praying for people.
SID: Now you actually had a dream before my staff called you, that told you what was going to happen.
LAURA: I’m so thankful. I woke up one morning, so it was a waking dream, and yes, there was a dream. And I saw a—
SID: Excuse me, what is a waking dream?
LAURA: Well it’s exactly what it sounds like. You wake up to this dream.
SID: Just as you would in the middle of the night.
LAURA: Yes. It can be in the middle of the night if that dream wakes you up.
SID: I see.
LAURA: This one was in the morning and I saw a hand. It was knocking on a door. It wasn’t my hand. It was a hand knocking on my door and that was it. Then I heard, “opportunity knocks”. So I waited. Well the morning before that I had a dream that I was big and pregnant. Okay. So I’ve had six children, so that was analogy that the Lord knew I would understand. I was expectant. You know, you’re expecting, when you’re pregnant. So I put those two together in my mind and I thought, something big is about to knock at my door. I’m full and here comes the opportunity for, you know, delivery. And hours later, we got the email from your executive producer.
SID: You know, that is exciting to have this knowledge before it happens, that it really is God knocking at your door. But also, you can have what you explained, warning dreams. Explain a little bit more.
LAURA: Can I give an example of one?
SID: Please
LAURA: Because it’s sort of self-explanatory. But I love this example. It was a warning waking dream, and waking dreams you just have a hard time shaking. I woke up one morning, it was a Sunday morning, and I saw myself standing in front of my church. My husband and I pastor in church in Nashville. And there was a huge wrecking ball, and it was coming towards the church. Now I’m standing in between, you know, it, so I see it coming at me. And I woke up, and I knew immediate danger—
SID: That’s dangerous.
LAURA: It was, it was, not just because I saw it coming to me at my church, but it was staring me in the face at a rapid beat. And so I got up, I got out of bed. I knew that the early morning prayer team, the pre-service intercessors would be there praying. And so I must have barged in there like a bull in a china closet. I gathered every elder I could find, I gathered every pastor, the music pastor, everybody. And I said, “Listen, there’s something that is about to happen. I’m not sure, but if we’ll pray with this, I believe we can thwart it.” So sure enough, that week we had two of our key families, a feud broke out between them that could have been really divisive. It could have split the church. But because we had already been praying, we had fondued the whole situation in prayer. We had gotten prepared to clear our schedules if need be. We did. We had some mediation meetings. And you know, love won. Prayer won. They—
SID: If you had not had that warning dream—
LAURA: Exactly.
SID: What would have happened?
LAURA: Exactly. Well who knows? I mean, the enemy, he was after more than just our family, he was after our church. These were two very key families. So you know, I say it’s like those DVDs that you can watch. You have the alternate ending, you can choose which ending you want. That to me is what a warning dream is about. It’s not fate, it’s not set in stone. Many people mistake them for nightmares because what they actually are is they’re information like intelligence being given to you by God to pray to change a situation.
SID: You know, a lot of people miss that. They see a warning dream and they say, oh no, something awful is going to happen. Oh no, you’re to pray so something awful doesn’t happen. Well Laura, you researched 1000 symbols, if you will, from the Bible, and when you did this, what did you find as far as opening your understanding of your dreams?
LAURA: It was so important. It was difficult to write a dictionary. I wasn’t quite sure, you know, what I was biting off at first. But I did it because I wanted people to be able to understand what they were dreaming and not to just rely on, oh my goodness, the secular websites that are out there or New Age interpreting books on symbols. I went to a secular website and dreamed or saw that if you dream about biscuits, it said you’re a woman who’s ambitious in your career. And I was like, what does that have to do with anything?
SID: Toss that stuff out. I like the biblical understanding.
LAURA: Exactly.
SID: I’ll tell you what, when we come back, I’m going to have Laura pray for you. She’s prayed for people with insomnia that have been able to sleep. She’s prayed for people that don’t remember their dreams. They start remembering their dreams. I’m going to have her pray whatever the spirit of God wants her to. Be right back.
