The Symbolism of Dreams

What is going on with Joseph and dreams? Dreams appear all through his story. God could have spoken plainly without dreams, or communicated through another person. Why use dreams at all?

Joseph’s narrative opens with dreams of his brothers and family bowing down to him. When we run into an element in scripture that seems puzzling, the reason is often that we have overlooked something that happened earlier in the text. To grasp the significance of Joseph’s dreams, we have to ask: where have dreams appeared before in Genesis?

Prior to Joseph, Genesis records only one other dream: Jacob’s dream at Bethel. After Jacob deceived his brother, he had to flee the land of Canaan to his uncle Laban because Esau wanted to kill him. Suspended on the road between his father’s house and his distant destination, Jacob lay down and dreamed. In that dream, God reaffirmed the core promise:

And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

At first glance, that might sound like a routine renewal of the covenant promise. But consider the immediate context. God gave this great promise to Jacob’s family, and promptly the family fractured through betrayal and fratricidal threats. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to assume God’s plan had collapsed, or was at least suspended. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Even as Jacob fled for his life because of his own deceit, God met him to say, I am still with you; the plan remains in motion.

We see a parallel with Adam in the garden. God commissioned Adam to subdue and rule the earth, and one might imagine Adam preparing to venture out and cultivate the broader world. Yet before anything like that could begin, a serpent entered the garden and deceived his wife. When reading the story, you might expect Adam to leave the garden, encounter a lion, tame it, and build stately steps up Mount Eden. Instead, crisis struck at home. God’s purpose moved forward through unexpected adversity.

Liminal Space and the Nature of Dreams

Jacob’s dream occurred amid bitter division between brothers, and it occurred in liminal space—the “in-between” space between his former home and his destination. It was not merely physical liminal space, but social liminal space as well, situated between his immediate family and the unknown relatives to whom he was traveling.

This setting mirrors the intrinsic nature of sleep itself. A dream occupies the liminal threshold between waking life and the silence of death—between the familiarity of conscious life and the unknown.

Why does God choose to speak in these transitional thresholds? Because transitions are precisely when we are prone to lose our bearings and forget our calling. It would have been natural for Jacob to abandon hope in the promise. God met him in that in-between space to remind him of what mattered most.

When Joseph first dreams, he is still living at home and has not yet suffered direct violence from his brothers. Yet the dreams themselves carry the symbolic weight and foreshadowing of Jacob’s earlier experience. Joseph did not yet realize that he too would face murderous hostility from his brothers and be cast out of his homeland into an unknown country. Yet, like Jacob, his journey into exile would ultimately lead to a household and the eventual reconciliation of his brothers.

Transitions and in-between spaces demand our close attention. It is often precisely in those unsettled thresholds that God speaks to remind us of promises we are tempted to forget.

And that, my friends, is why the Bible is art.

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