Dreams of prophecy can portend great positives or seem ominous. There’s a theory that every one or thing in a dream is an aspect of self. That we’re playing out a tableau with the parts of our selves that don’t use linear logic or simple subject-verb-object sentences. Dreams are run by our higher selves, our guides, and also by trickster energies. Their styles vary but their goals are similar: get us out of our comfort zones and our habituated ways of perceiving. It’s the ambiguous, silly, or scary stuff that’s especially designed to get our attention.

There’s certainly times you’ll wake and wonder, where did that or who come from? Others when a dream’s meaning seems like a neon arrow in a dark sky. A favorite movie image comes from a Steve Martin film. He’s in a ruined old castle on a dark and stormy night. Lightning’s flashing, thunder pounding. The pictures and the fireplace are spinning, and he’s standing there shaking his fist at the sky, saying over and over, Give me a sign! Give me a sign!

Would that dreams were so clear.

This week Joseph is rescued from prison to interpret Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cows swallowed by seven lean ones. He predicts seven years of famine after seven years of plenty, and is then put in charge of resource planning. As famine spreads, the brothers who sold him into slavery come looking for food; he has to deal with his feelings about them and what they’ve done to him. Topics for another day.

Themes of food security run through the Bible. People move often because of famine. When the Jews wander in the desert they’re told to gather only the manna they need for the day, or it’ll rot, and that more will be provided. Later instructions about leaving fields fallow for a year also require planning and eeek, trust. One name for HaShem is El Shaddai, the Source of Sufficiency.

In personal growth and development it’s hard to tackle deep tough core material without a nurturing, strong, and loving sense of self-esteem as a base. If you spent seven years really making yourself happy, self-aware, and able to cope with surface stresses, you’d be much readier to wrestle with deep and intractable issues. When your crap comes to the surface, as it will, in dreams and/or reality, you’ll need storehouses of inner good-will to cope well, and to decipher the healing messages you’re being offered.

But that means doing your emotional and spiritual homework all along. Saving some of your seed corn and not devouring it as popcorn in front of a DVD, munching away blindly ignorant of your future. If you want to make it through the hard times, you’ll need the insights and foresight that dreaming can point you towards.

Exercise: If your now self could tell your younger self something that might’ve seemed like prophecy if it were fulfilled, what would it be? Can you put that same process in motion now, moving forward?