I am almost always reluctant to talk about receiving divine guidance, especially when it appears to have come in a dream. It’s such a personal subject, and best kept that way. But I’ll avoid indulging in magic talk as I share something that happened a while ago. Any mystical tendency I have to view dreams as signs or prophecies I attribute either to my Celtic ancestry or my American Indian blood. Messages that come in dreams fascinate many cultures. The Urantia Book (The UB) makes the nature of dream guidance sound very straightforward in this passage:

“During the slumber season the Adjuster attempts to achieve only that which the will of the indwelt personality has previously fully approved by the decisions and choosings which were made during times of fully wakeful consciousness, and which have thereby become lodged in the realms of the supermind, the liaison domain of human and divine interrelationship.” (110:5.3)

In the recent dream I refer to, I encountered an old friend from my past. In real life, I hadn’t seen Bob in decades. And there he was sitting next to me in the car as we waited at a stop light. He was being my navigator. How appropriate! Bob was the first friend I met in Northern California after I’d traveled there many miles driving from Canada via a short stopover in the Los Angeles area. He was living in an old church converted to a house in the Redwood forest north of San Francisco with his wife who was pregnant and his best friend. Bob was my first guide, met in a foreign country at the end of a long journey.

In the dream, he turned to ask me, “Where do we go next?”

“How about home?” I replied. The light changed and the waves of traffic parted in front of us like the Red Sea, dividing to allow us an easy move forward onto the freeway onramp.

“Mind is your ship, the Adjuster is your pilot, the human will is captain. The master of the mortal vessel should have the wisdom to trust the divine pilot to guide the ascending soul into the morontia harbors of eternal survival.” (111:1.9)

I woke up wondering if Bob, my navigator on this journey, represented my relationship with God. Was it possible that my Adjuster had attempted contact to confirm our partnership in “the will and the way of God,” (118:7.8) all done through the person of Bob the hippie from the California redwoods?

In the dream it seemed I made a decision to go home with God, or as The UB would put it, confirmed a decision I’d already made while fully conscious. This is a tool of communication that your spirit guide can or might use but we must be careful not to overstep ourselves. In another paragraph of the same Paper 111, the writer cautions, “A human being would do better to err in rejecting an Adjuster's expression through believing it to be a purely human experience than to blunder into exalting a reaction of the mortal mind to the sphere of divine dignity.” (110:5.5) 

In the weeks that followed, more decisions were made following upon the event of the dream that reinforced the guidance as I saw it, a process I find The UB describes clearly:

“The keys of the kingdom of heaven are: sincerity, more sincerity, and more sincerity. All men have these keys. Men use them—advance in spirit status—by decisions, by more decisions, and by more decisions.” (39:4.14)

Speaking more sincerely now, I recognize that there are many other ways we are given help and direction. In moments of cosmic loneliness when I find I’ve wandered too far off course, and I get depressed to find myself so alienated, I have been able to recognize the need to be re-aligned with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness “the qualities of divinity” in oneself. I made another decision in favor of God to align myself firmly with those ideals.

Any confirmation or guidance we receive in our spiritual life should be helping us to take some faltering plan that we’ve made, perhaps only half-heartedly, more seriously and whole-heartedly. In my case, the “guidance” or the nudge I received solidified my intentions to carry out God’s plan for my life.

“You can consciously augment Adjuster harmony by … choosing to respond to divine leading; sincerely basing the human life on the highest consciousness of truth, beauty, and goodness and then co-ordinating these qualities of divinity through wisdom, worship, faith, and love.” (110:3.6-7)

This is a very appealing road map for the soul, a map I now keep in the glove box, ready to pull out and consult whenever I need some helpful guidance on my travels.