There is currently a motion picture streaming on Netflix called A House of Dynamite. The movie is being advertised as a political thriller that covers an 18–20 minute period of an ordinary day. As the show begins, China is having military exercises, Iran is actively sending coded messages to its proxies, and North Korea has gone dark. A lone ICBM is headed towards the U.S. from the direction of the western Pacific. It is first noticed by early detection radar off the coast of Alaska, and the trajectory is guiding the missile to the general area of Chicago, IL. Command centers in Nebraska, the Situation Room in the White House, and the Pentagon are quickly notified. What is this? Is it a false target, a computer glitch? One by one, different explanations are ruled out until everyone decides that it is a missile likely carrying nuclear warheads. But also, one by one, our missile defenses fail to destroy it. Meanwhile, they cannot locate the President, nor can they tell which country was responsible for launching it. The movie ends moments before the missile lands. The movie gives the viewer insight into crisis management when the stakes cannot possibly be higher. It also shows how nothing is foolproof, how people behave when they think their families are moments away from death and they cannot be warned, and it shows the vital need for information when information is not available on which to base sound decisions.
Are these the “end times”?
How do we describe the violence and chaos in the world today that this generation faces? Apocalyptic? Eschatological? These terms are often used to describe the times St. John witnessed in his book of Revelation. But these words are not accurate. We want a term that describes a bus or train, perhaps populated with children, people or crash test dummies, traveling at 125 MPH (201 KPH) towards a ten-foot-thick concrete wall reinforced with rebar. This is the point where an irresistible force meets the proverbial unmovable object. In biblical Greek, the term that first crosses one’s mind is Τὸ Τέλος (To Telos). This refers to the last moment, like a buzzer in a basketball game when the clock has run out. Game over. But the term that describes the moment immediately before, when on the bus or train the passengers see the wall blocking their way and they know the end is imminent, is Κατάληψις (Katalēpsis). This means “to grasp,” as in grasping or realizing with absolute certainty exactly what lies ahead.
In the meantime, we wonder what the world faces. If the future can be measured and monitored — whether the end of a serious operation, the emergency landing of an aircraft, or the safe recovery of a lost child — we must part the veil that keeps us from seeing the future. This parting of the veil is called Ἀποκάλυψις (Apokalypsis). This data, however, is not often given to us by God because His Word is in most cases sufficient for our daily needs. Or, perhaps God does provide vital information in dreams or visions but it is overlooked, ignored or misunderstood, like the Jews in the time of Jesus misunderstood the prophecies of Isaiah concerning the Messiah or as Pilate ignored the frantic efforts of his wife Claudia Procula in Matthew 27:19 to leave Jesus alone.
In today’s world, when knowledge or time-tested algorithmic projections of the stock market, or the sagacious counseling of high school graduates on whether to attend
college or not, trying to determine the tipping point of environmental collapse, matters of war and peace or feast or famine are more elusive than at perhaps any other time in centuries, people long for missing data as much as the crisis managers in the White House Situation Room needed it in the scenario above.
Why I have created this post
More and more people today are calling themselves prophets in order to go viral on their website, stroke their ego, or just make a buck. Others, though are looking for comfort and providing advice gained from supernatural sources. These self-styled prophets are publishing more and more claims of data and directions received from beyond the veil.
Are these “prophets” deluding themselves? Or are they instead deluding us? So, the question is whether this data is accurate and whether it comes from God. That there is some spiritual agency involved is not the question. The question is from whence these spirits come. And this is why St. John bids us to test the spirits, and to that end, I have published this post.
Questions persist even in the minds of believers as far as what dreams and visions are. Of course, we all know what a dream is, but how is a vision different from a dream? And because mentally ill people have visions as well as people in good mental health, then how can we tell which visions are legitimate and which are products of a broken or twisted mind. Since some people believe dreams to be prophetic, and in some cases such as in the case of Joseph in prison described in Genesis, chapter 40 they actually were I wanted to include them in this post, thus bracketing the topic of visions with supranatural phenomena on either side.
Dreams
UC San Diego, UC Irvine, and other university centers are advancing our understanding of the neuroscience and imagery of dreams. While there are numerous theories of why people dream, I want to focus on dreams that are interpreted as particularly meaningful or requiring some sort of purposeful and urgent action in the person’s waking state.
Your brain records and stores much more information than you are consciously aware of. You may see thieves making an escape in a getaway car. Consciously, you are not even sure whether the car had two doors or four doors, while unconsciously your brain has actually stored the license plate number. So, on an everyday basis — dealing with family, friends, colleagues at work, and people you encounter while out and about — your brain is collecting a vast amount of verbal and nonverbal cues that could be released while you are asleep. A person talking on a phone near you might mention that so-and-so has cancer. You did not consciously register this, but your brain recorded it. Following that, you might develop a hunch that this person is not well, based on a dream you later had — a dream rooted in a comment you are certain you never heard.
While everyone has dreams, and while dreams may appear to be predictive, dreamers with more education will tend to be dismissive of them, while people with less formal education will take their dreams at face value. Educated people more often attribute dreams to some coincidental process. Women are also more prone to seeing some precognitive value in dreams than men. People with insomnia or those taking sleep medications are more prone to these sorts of dreams.
As much as 60% of people believe they have had a prophetic dream that has allowed them to take action to avoid a dangerous situation or benefit from an opportunity. Without the dream, they would not have known what to do.
Joel 2:28 in the Bible says:
I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.
The Pentecostal and charismatic traditions associate this prophecy with the “last days,” which to some Christians started at Pentecost right after Jesus had ascended into Heaven and could extend all the way until He returns. Thus, while dreams have always been explored throughout the ages for portentous warnings, today they are examined as closely as ever. This passage of Scripture suggests that dreams will be a hallmark of the times.
So, why is it that old men are the dreamers and not the young? There are several possible answers, but the one I find more convincing is that dreams depend on life experiences for their imagery — notably places one has visited, animals, objects, and landscapes one has seen over the course of a lifetime — and this provides a greater file or bank of images and circumstances from which to draw.
As far as we know, virtually everyone has dreams, though some people do not remember them. As much as 80% of people dream in color. Even people blind from birth dream, though their dreams focus on sounds, smells, and touch. Otherwise, blind people who once had normal vision dream as ordinary people do. When people dream, normally their limbs are flaccid, lest they act out their dreams. Some people train themselves to dream lucidly, which allows them to realize that they are dreaming and direct the course of their dream.
Prophetic dreams
Besides the Bible, history offers us examples of dreams that forecast the future. One was a dream that Abraham Lincoln had which I recount below. This is what Lincoln said at a gathering of friends and family two weeks before his death.
About 10 days ago I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Think I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.
A-B-E-R-F-A-N.
The ground was still wet from all the rain that Friday in Aberfan, a coal mining town of approximately 5,000 souls in the southern part of Wales. Most of the men, women, and children were involved directly or indirectly with the mine. And the children… their parents had made the choice, forced by economic circumstances or otherwise, to cast their lot with the mine. This day, this choice would have deadly consequences for the children.
By 9:00 a.m. the children had begun their lessons for the day at Pantglas Junior School. Often children enjoy Fridays in school as they anticipate the approaching weekend. But this day, October 21, 1966, saw a number of children nervous and apprehensive. They had been having nightmares recently. Within twenty minutes’ time, in fact, 116 of them would be dead, some with their nocturnal fears confirmed in the last few seconds of life. Of these, 109 of the dead were in the schoolhouse when it was buried. Another 28 adults in the area would not survive the impending catastrophe either. From the mountainside above the village, a pile of coal waste over 100 feet high had been liquefying in the recent rains and the natural spring beneath it, and at 9:15 that morning it rushed at unbelievable speed down the slope and covered the school with thirty feet of sludge — compared by some to a mudslide in terms of its viscosity, and by others to wet concrete in terms of its weight.
But there had been warnings. Not citations because the mine was unsound. Not because the sludge had been a problem in the past. The warnings had been appearing in recent dreams of the children, to the alarm of their families.
“I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.”
This from Eryl Mai Jones, a 10-year-old girl, on the morning of the disaster. A short time later she would die, buried in the black, tarry rubble of her school. She tried to tell her mother earlier, but her mother was preoccupied. The girl insisted. “Mummy, let me tell you about my dream last night. No, Mummy, you must listen. I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.”
Altogether, 36 people, including Eryl Mai Jones, had dreams about the event before it happened. Twenty-two of these people had family, friends, or associates who confirmed they had been told of the dream before the event occurred. The accounts differ somewhat in terms of detail. One account by Mary Hennessy describes what may be trapped children gathered in a room, trying to squeeze themselves between some stacked impediments in an attempt to escape.
A man from Kent walked into his office at 9 a.m. on October 21 and told his co-worker: “Today is the day it is going to happen.” The disaster occurred some three hundred miles away, fifteen minutes later.
The night before the disaster, an elderly man hundreds of miles away, had a dream. He dreamed he saw, spelled out in brilliant light, the letters: A-B-E-R-F-A-N. The word meant nothing to him, as he had never heard of the village. Later that day, he heard a radio broadcast mention the town of Aberfan.
As far as I could discern, there are no documented instances of children at Aberfan who had frightful dreams and persuaded their parents to keep them home that day. Those children or adults who had dreams but either could not interpret them clearly or discounted the warning and went to school did so at their own peril. Some may have paid the price with their lives. I think it is reasonably safe to conclude that we should not glibly dismiss nocturnal warnings in dreams.
Visions (in the context of Christianity)
People around the world have visions. These are people from many different races, cultures, and religions. In some cases, drugs might be used to initiate or potentiate a vision, much as the Pueblo tribes and other Southwestern indigenous peoples used mescaline. The Oracle of Delphi would inhale ethylene fumes that undoubtedly allowed her to enter an ecstatic or trance-like state that facilitated visions. Rather than go too far afield, I want to focus on a religion and a context that I am most familiar with, and this is Western Christianity.
Much of the Bible is based on visions. The patriarchs Jacob and Moses received visions. The prophet Samuel received visions from God concerning King Saul and Israel’s sins. The prophet Daniel did likewise regarding the Last Days, and Ezekiel also had visions concerning the restoration of Israel. The Apostles Paul and John likewise had visions, to name just a few. And there were others.
Those who are credited with having visions include many canonized saints in the Catholic Church, such as Augustine (354–430), Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), and John of the Cross (1542–1591). Outside the Catholic tradition, the mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and the evangelical pastor A.W. Tozer (1897–1963) also described profound visionary experiences. As I have personally encountered people who have had visions, there are likely thousands of people in the West who have visions each year, but I cannot vouch for their character or the veracity of their messages. Indeed, some Pentacostal churches or charismatic groups might report half a dozen parishioners per week who have had visions. But I tend to discount prophetic words when the visionary reports God using worth like “DemoRat”, “Libtard”, or other pejorative terms you might hear on conservative webinars or websites.
I am aware of hundreds of people in the developing world who are Muslim and are having visions that feature Jesus. These visions often direct the person receiving them to seek out someone at a certain address — usually a missionary or a fellow Muslim who has converted. I plan to devote a separate post to this topic later this year, after working through some books and field reports on the phenonena.
I’ve added a table with a comparative taxonomy between dreams, visions and hallucinations that can establish what is expected or common place with visions. There are two visions that I want to discuss, and I’ve refer you to William Jame’s Varieties of Religious Experiences if you want to learn more,
Blaise Pascal and his vision
Blaise Pascal still receives honorable mention in textbooks dealing with mathematics, physics, and engineering even today. In a relatively short life (he died at the age of 39), he made his mark in many different areas as an inventor, a Christian apologist following his conversion, and as a logical thinker. He had a vision on the night of November 23, 1654, when he was 31 years old. It was for him life changing. But rather than publish it, he carefully wrote it down on paper, folded it, and had it stitched into the lining of his coat, meaning he carried it with him wherever he went. It was discovered after he died, and it exists to this day. Called the Memorial, it is written in his native French, with some parts in Latin for emphasis. But it begins with the singular word “Fire.”
Because Pascal did not discuss his vision with anyone, we cannot know with certainty what he meant by that one word. We do know that fire is a common motif in Scripture. Hebrews 12:29 says that “God is a consuming fire,” as if to warn us that our sinful nature would be the cause of our annihilation if we got too close to God. God was present in the burning bush during those long sessions with Moses. The Holy Spirit appeared to the apostles on Pentecost Sunday as tongues of fire. Fire is a component of the visions in Revelation. Perhaps Pascal felt spiritually ablaze, and the rest of what he witnessed and wrote about was an explanation of the opening minutes — or more — of his experience.
But one caveat before I continue. Christians are blessed in some cases with encounters such as what Pascal experienced, but our theology and our relationship with God in Christ is based much more on the immutable Word of God than on subjective experiences. One believer who has visions is not more of a Christian or holier than another who does not share such occurrences.
The appearance of fire in Pascal’s vision sets it off from psychotic hallucinations because it is normal for fire to go hand-in-hand with God. The association was therefore comforting in Pascal’s mind. It would have no meaning to a schizophrenic, and would serve no other purpose than to terrorize him with whatever other bizarre imagery might catch his attention.
In the two hundred or so words that Pascal uses, it is clear that he is struggling to describe his vision. Some words like “certainty” were perhaps selected and repeated because Pascal was a mathematician and part or all of his vision a sort of mathematical proof to him. But the fire that he encoutered in his vision guided his steps for the remaining years of his life.
My personal vision
I consider myself to be just a garden-variety Christian. I try to “walk the walk,” though I stumble as we all do. Prayer is not something that just rolls sweetly and fluently off my tongue. I don’t have a great track record when it comes to sick people recovering when I’ve prayed for their healing, but my struggle to be a good Christian is probably no worse than most of us. Yet for almost sixty years I’ve been convinced that God is real and Jesus lives in my heart.
Eight years ago, I had almost given up on God however. My sick wife Cathy was once again in intensive care and getting worse and worse. I was complaining to God again about God not doing anything to make her better. I had almost decided that God was not fundamentally good.
One morning, while alone in the house complaining to myself, I was abruptly overwhelmed by an event. I heard, and simultaneously saw as if on a brilliant billboard the following message:
"When Cathy was born, she was granted sixty-five years of life. For the sake of the prayers that were offered for her, she was given several extra years of life."
She died after her sixty-eighth birthday. I have the exact quote written somewhere, but this is pretty much what I received. I received it on Epiphany, 2018, about three weeks before Cathy died. This “event” lasted perhaps only a few seconds. The words I “heard” matched the ones I saw on the screen. The screen was white, though I don’t recall the color of the lettering. It was as overwhelming and overpowering as I imagine a heart attack would be. In those few seconds, every drop of anger and bitterness I had stored up inside towards God disappeared, because I understood in that moment the root of her problems.
She started off with heart failure in the early 1980s. From there she progressed to cancer: breast cancer, kidney cancer, thyroid cancer. From there she developed pulmonary hypertension, chronic ascites, and kidney failure, requiring dialysis three times a week without fail. Had she died at sixty-five, she would never have had to receive dialysis, would never have needed me to remove a liter of fluid from her abdomen day after day. Her friends and relatives prayed to God for years to grant her life (which He did), but the tradeoff was that in this extra time, her body had continued opportunities to wear her down. Yet, she loved those last three or four years and would likely choose to go through it all once again if offered a chance. So, this is the only vision that I ever had. I was likely shaking after it ended (it was that moving).
I was wide awake and dressed when it occurred. I was aware of my surroundings throughout. The event had a clear beginning and ending, and while the message was personalized, it was entirely consistent with my theology. I am a determinist to the point that I feel that God knows in advance when we will die, but that God also on occasion grants prayer requests, even and especially in seemingly hopeless situations. I don’t know why He did so in the case of my wife. There was nothing special about us. We weren’t the fruits of some exalted births. We were just ordinary Christians who might just as easily sleep in on a Sunday morning as go to Church. But I do give God the credit and my thanks for this dispensation on my late wife’s behalf.
I want to include an important transition between visions from God granted to people of sound mind and the hallucinations that psychotic individuals experience. This is because, unfortunately, there are some Christians who are bipolar and they might experience sights and sounds others do not, and mistakenly attribute these hallucinations as messages from God. If, within mainstream Protestantism and even within Catholicism, you report to your pastor or priest that you have received a vision, you may find them less than enthusiastic. They understand that were it not for people ages ago who claimed to hear God’s voice and who had seen heavenly things, there might be no Bible today. Still, they find it concerning when it happens today, and some Reformed denominations categorically refuse to accept that authentic visions occur today. Also unfortunate is the fact that Christians are all too eager to follow mesmerizing but crazy cult leaders into the wilderness (e.g., Jonestown) never to be heard from again. This is why it is important to test the spirits from whom these apparitions come, to be sure that one is not being led astray.
So, as an example, I want to mention the so-called desert fathers of the third and fourth centuries, most of whom took up residence in the Judean or Sinai deserts, or Egypt and the surrounding environs. Each of these places can easily reach the century mark on a thermometer, so mirages and feverish manifestations are not uncommon, especially to someone fasting or with limited hydration. These places were chosen specifically because they were part and parcel of the founding drama of God and His people. Moses in the wilderness. Elijah in the wilderness. John the Baptist and Jesus in the wilderness, and so on. The desert fathers denounced any hint of comfort, mortifying their bodies to degrees as extreme as the mercury was. So, is it any surprise that they saw and were attacked by wolves and hyenas, serpents, dragons, demons, fauns, and centaurs?
So, it came as no surprise (at least, to me) when I came across something that St Jerome had written about St Anthony (251 A.D. -356 A.D.) Here is the reference I have in mind from The Life of Paulus, the First Hermit:
Before long, in a small, rocky valley shut in on all sides, he sees a mannikin with hooked snout, horned forehead, and extremities like goat’s feet. When he saw this, Anthony, like a good soldier, seized the shield of faith and the helmet of hope: The creature, nonetheless, began to offer him the fruit of the palm tree to support him on his journey and as it were, pledges of peace. Anthony, perceiving this, stopped and asked who he was. The answer he received from him was this: ‘I am a mortal being and one of the inhabitants of the Desert whom the Gentiles deluded by various forms of error worship under the names of Fauns, Satyrs, and Incubi. I am sent to represent my tribe. We pray you in [Sic] our behalf to entreat the favour of your Lord, and ours, who, we have learnt, came once to save the world and whose sound has gone forth into all the earth.'
A few of these souls reported to their confessors that they could not distinguish the difference between their reality and the reality common to everyone. This is certainly something that would earn you an involuntary commitment if you presented thus to an emergency department today. These monks saw themselves perhaps as “prayer warriors” who battled demons that today only people going through withdrawal encounter, though demons do exist according to Scripture. These hermits understood the need to test the spirits perhaps more so than Christians today do, and they came up with a process to assess their experiences that involved other brethren who had not shared the same experience.
Psychotic hallucinations (e.g. paranoid or undifferentiate schizophrenia)
The onset of schizophrenia is typically in late adolescence, though much younger children do develop schizophrenia but rarely. A child on a trajectory to inevitable schizophrenia later in life will have certain warning signs, such as intolerance to lights, noises, and textures that other people are perfectly comfortable with. They may see fleeting movement out of the corners of their eyes or have unfamiliar or disturbing thoughts that are not audible, but they believe they arise from the surroundings rather than from their own mind. They may feel that laughter and odd looks from other people are directed at them. To some extent, every child has experienced these experiences and suspicions as part of their normal development, but with children at risk for schizophrenia, the disturbances are much more frequent and intense.
Schizophrenia is graded on the basis of 0–4, where zero is asymptomatic and four represents a disorder that defies therapeutic intervention and pharmacological treatment. There are several subtypes of schizophrenia including paranoid, hebephrenic, and catatonic schizophrenia, to mention just three examples.
In her own words
Elyn Saks, an American legal scholar who is an associate dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences. She graduated summa cum laude from Vabderbuilt University, her Masters of Letters from Oxford and her JD from Yale. This Marshall scholar learned Greek in order to better appreciate the writings of Aristotle. Troubled by mental health issues since childhood, she published a very personal and riveting account of her experience with schizophrenia in her book The Center Cannot Hold (2007). Reaching back to her time in high school when the disorder began, she recounts one experience:
I suddenly decided that I needed to get up, leave school, and walk home. Home was three miles away. As I walked along, I began to notice that the colors and shapes of everything around me were becoming very intense. And at some point, I began to realize that the houses I was passing were sending messages to me: Look closely. You are special. You are especially bad. Look closely and ye shall find. There are many things you must see. I didn't hear these words as literal sounds, as though the houses were talking and I were hearing them; instead, the words just came into my head-they were ideas I was having. Yet I instinctively knew they were not my ideas. They belonged to the houses, and the houses had put them in my head
Why are some schizophrenics so persuasive?
I was conned briefly once by a schizophrenic patient. I had clinical rotation with a class of my students and we were working med/surg that day. The previous day as I was leaving the hospital, I saw a sixty-something patient on a gurney taken to the Cardiac Care unit on the same floor as med/surg. Today, after report and making assignments, this patient was walking down the hallway towards me. He was in a gown and hooked up to telemetry and shuffling slowly down the hall. I waited for him patiently because I thought he might need something. When he got to me, he asked me if these were my students. I replied that they were, and he said, “I have a special treat for them. At lunchtime today, Air Force One will be landing for an hour, and I can get you and your students out to see the President land.” I asked him how he knew this, because I had not heard that the President was coming this way, and he winked and said that it was his job to know and don’t ask questions. As I was trying to process this, some nurse came for him and told him it was time to take his meds because they were about to transfer him to the psych floor. It turns out, he was a schizophrenic patient but because I identified him as a cardiac patient, I took what he said literally.
As a matter of fact, schizophrenic patients, especially the paranoid variety, can be very persuasive. They can promise grandiose outcomes, whether investment returns if you trust them with your money, running for elective office, or even marriage, but if you just scratch the surface a bit, you’ll discover the promises are based on false premises. Jim Jones was able to lead one thousand people to Guyana in South America in 1978 based on false premises. Most of them committed suicide, and the rest were shot by those followers who did not drink the poisoned punch.
Schizophrenics are often persuasive because they appear to speak with absolute certainty, a quality that many audiences admire. They have no doubt that they are right, and they dismiss or ridicule the more careful souls who counsel caution and promote prudence. The schizophrenic is basically shouting out extravagant claims to the people around him because the voices he hears are shouting at him.
Finally, a schizophrenic person’s “souped up” brain sometimes picks up patterns or vibes from a crowd that a normal speaker would miss. The psychiatric patient’s brain can then use these vibes to fuel some sort of prediction or course of action that sounds prophetic to people aroiund him. Because the patient speaks with what soulnd like a voice of authority, it is not unusual that some think of him as a bonafide prophet.
Out-of-bounds behavior
An affective disorder is a mood disorder, such as depression or bipolar disorder. Psychotic disorders deal primarily with how a person perceives and interprets the world (i.e. reality) around him or her. I’m not a mental health provider and likely you are not either, so probably the most we can do is observe our loved ones, friends and colleagues, especially if they indicate that they might be a threat to themselves or others. Obviously we cannot diagnose someone with a disorder and there is a wide range of “odd” behaviors or eccentricities that people have (e.g., people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, etc.). People in some professions such as physicians, mental health counselors, teachers, gun dealers, employers and perhaps clergy have a duty to warn authorities if someone, mentally ill or not, poses a threat. People in special relationships with a potentially unstable person may also have a duty to warn (for example, a parent who suspects that their reclusive but angry child may be considering some violent act).
As far as the mannerisms of the person in question go, listen to how they talk. Do they “flitter” from topic to topic as a butterfly moves from flower to flower without any central point as a context? Again, some normal but untrained people may do this because they are just disorganized in how they express things, so by itself this loose association, as it is called, may not be revealing. When you ask them a question, do they start off with a relevant answer but then get sidetracked? Do they invent words you never heard of, assuming the words are not technical jargon? Do they speak very rapidly making it difficult or impossible for you to interrupt them?
In other regards, sometimes they say that they feel special. A national leader who survives an assassination attempt might take that to be a sign that they are under divine protection for some special purpose. Or they believe people are following them around or they’ve been chosen for some great task. Occasionally, people falsely believe that a song performed by a well-known singer was written with them in mind. Or people around them are using ordinary speech which to the person suggests a hidden code. The point of this is to help you evaluate the plausibility of something astonishing that someone might say, particularly if it involves some hidden knowledge or prediction of something yet to come.
Testing the spirit
A spiritual “examination” of the person in question is particularly important. 1 John 4:1 in the Bible says,
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
The word John uses for “test” is δοκιμάζετε (dokimazete). This word is actually very interesting. It was used to describe the vetting process in Athens to evaluate the suitability of a candidate for public office. Questions included:
Who is your father, and what deme is he from (Deme refers to township or village if not a city.
“Who is your father’s father”?
“Who is your mother, and who is her father”?
“Do you have a family tomb, and where is it”?
“Do you treat your parents well”?
“Do you pay your taxes”?
“Have you performed your military service”?
Notice they didn’t certify any person who claimed they were interested in running for office, or that serving on the council was their destiny, or that the gods chose that person and if the authorities did not approve and support him, then there would be hell to pay. The ancient physician Galen used forms of this word to describe how he would prescribe a drug and then observe and document whether it worked or not.
The early church fathers warned that testing the spirits was a process involving specific criteria:
- Christological — full confession of the incarnation in real flesh;
- Traditional — conformity to apostolic teaching as preserved in the churches;
- Behavioral/fruit — the prophet’s life matches the Spirit’s character.<BR>
When St. John writes that you should test the spirit — the entity giving the self-described prophet knowledge — he does not mean you or me personally. It’s not a matter of whether you or I have a hunch or “gut feeling” that what a person says is from God. The verb for “test” in the verse (dokimazete) is second person plural, not second person singular. So, there must be a consensus between the audience or congregation.
Differences Between Dreams, Visions and Schizophrenic Hallucinations
Cite: “Contrasting Dreams, Visions and Schizophrenic Hallucinations” Claude-sonnet-4-6, Anthropic, 16 April 2026.
Table notes (errata):
Liminal: A boundary between two states.
REM: (Rapid Eye Movement). REM sleep is associated with dreams.
Metacognition: Awareness of one’s thought process at the moment.
Inverted metacognition: Describes how schizophrenics attribute their thoughts to outside influences. See also source attribution.
Narratively plastic: Normally, thinking involves certain rules. Effect follows cause, time runs forward and not backwards, etc. In dream states, these rules can be violated.
Propositionally serious: This refers to information that is given (a charge or command, an explanation) that coincides with what the vision is portraying.
Affective valence: When the person’s emotions are affected, positively or negatively, by the content of the dream, vision, or hallucination.
Intersubjective trace: The impact of the experience on others who are present while the experience occurs.
Reality testing (post episode): In the case of dreams and psychosis, once the experience has concluded, once the person has returned to ordinary waking consciousness, what capacity do they have to evaluate what just happened? In the case of a vision, the visionary encounters something completely unexpected which in some sense is disruptive or disturbing, yet it is consistent with their theology. For an example, see my personal experience with a vision (below).
Typical (but simulated) artwork by someone with schizophrenia. Portraits (including self portraits) take on grotesque and distorted qualities. Red is a common color choice and may suggest a disturbing response by the artist.
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was diagnosed with schizophrenia His painting “The Scream” is quite well known. Note that the person is not screaming, but instead the environment is. The subject’s hands are attempting to block out the sound.
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