From Alex, any suggestions on how to combat when we are attacked in our dreams?
The Lord spoke to Daniel, Joseph in Egypt and Joseph, the foster father of our Lord through dreams. And the demons can also tempt us in our dreams. They never get to the point of being able to control our will. You know, dreams are to our soul kind of what skin is to our body.
It’s there, but it’s still on the outside. It never gets into the nous – the inner chamber of the heart where you can make your ultimate choices for God. But how to combat that is to, first of all is call down the blood of Jesus Christ upon your mind and your heart, and use this prayer for its purification:
I call down the blood of Jesus Christ upon my mind. And I cast from my mind and heart any adverse powers, and I place them at the foot of the cross through the prayers of St. Joseph, Prince of Egypt, and Joseph, terror of demons, the stepfather of our Lord Jesus Christ. So, pray that prayer. These are men who use dreams for the work of salvation.
And you want to invoke their – and the Prophet Daniel, too – you want to invoke their heavenly aid for the renewal of your mind and the protection of your mind and heart against any points of entry that the evil one may use to exploit for a life of sin.
And I just want to put it out there because I know what guys are going to say, “I missed that prayer. Where can I find that prayer?” Well, this video will be posted so you can go back and then you can find this part in the conversation and put it on pause and write that prayer down because that is a powerful prayer.
Thank you, Father. Yeah. Could I just jump in really quick on this? So, Father, the other thing I would just pull out is something you mentioned earlier. You know, kind of channeling negative energy for positives. Dreams are something that I am very affected by personally, you know, after a bad dream or a dark dream or where I uncover something and I’m just like, what was that?!
I mean, really, where did that come from? It can take me like a day to recover. And I even like the next day, I’m always a little bit like, all right. Let’s take it easy today until I’m really back on my footing. I had some time to pray through it. And one of the things that I have found helpful is not to run, but to see what is the opportunity here? You know, is there something in this dream that I really do need to address, that I need to see that, you know, for whatever reason, I don’t let my mind enter into when I’m conscious, you know, awake and engaged. And to be honest with you, I found that to be very helpful in moving forward from a bad dream in a way that I, and, and actually before I started to really enter into them.
And when I used to just run from things that scared me in my dreams, they’d just come back, you know, and sometimes in spades. And so one of the things I say to our team a lot, it’s like, hey . . . don’t run from your burdens, run towards them. And, if you can do that with grace and, and with trusted guides, a spiritual director,you know, for example, you’ll find that there’s something here for you in the providence of our good father.
So yeah, that’s an excellent point. And as you were speaking there, Jamie, it reminded me of something about the spirituality of dreams: that often the devil is probing your defenses. You know, in war enemies will probe, you know, it doesn’t mean he’s going to attack on the Southern flank, but he’ll probe and see if there’s weaknesses there, if there’s pushback, then he doesn’t go.
Lenin said this – not John Lennon, but Vladimir Lenin – is just keep probing until you find a weak spot and then push. And that’s what the devil does. The devil and communism, they have the same marching orders. And it’s the same here, is that the devil is looking for weaknesses.
So if you’ve discovered in a dream that, let’s say it’s of a sexual nature or something of a particular girl, then there’s a woundedness there. And the devil is just probing that weakness. So you want to ask yourself, “why am I afraid of this?”
Why is this particular person associated with this weakness? What does that represent? And if you have, as Jamie said, a spiritual director, take that there and you’re using the devil’s negative energy in a positive way. Ah, that’s a weakness of mine and it’s connected to this person. And it goes back to what happened to me when I was 12 years old.
Let’s bring the grace of Christ into this and you end up discovering you need to go to confession over something, you know? So thank you, devil. You just made me into a better saint.
That’s that jujitsu model again, right?
