"Our heart oft times wakes when we sleep, and God can speak to that, either by words, by proverbs, by signs and similitudes, as well as if one was awake"
About this Quote
Sleep, for Bunyan, is not an off-switch; its a back door. The body powers down, the will loosens its grip, and the heart - that volatile mix of conscience, desire, and spiritual hunger - comes online. In a culture obsessed with vigilance and self-scrutiny, this is a sly reversal: the most honest part of you may surface precisely when you stop performing.
Bunyan writes as a clergyman shaped by persecution, imprisonment, and the Puritan conviction that inner life is the real battleground. Dreams and nighttime stirrings were not just psychological noise; they were potential channels for instruction, warning, or comfort. His phrasing, "oft times", keeps him from sounding credulous. He is not promising nightly prophecies. He is arguing for attentiveness to the odd, half-symbolic content of sleep because it may reveal what waking pride conceals.
The line also quietly democratizes revelation. God does not require literacy, church access, or even full consciousness. He can speak in "proverbs" and "similitudes" - compressed, vernacular forms that meet people where they are. Thats pastoral strategy: keep the door open for grace to reach the anxious and the uneducated, and keep the spiritually complacent from assuming they are in control.
Subtext: your defenses are not your faith. If God can address you asleep, then religious life is less about mastery and more about receptivity - a discomforting thought for anyone who treats piety as a daytime performance.
Bunyan writes as a clergyman shaped by persecution, imprisonment, and the Puritan conviction that inner life is the real battleground. Dreams and nighttime stirrings were not just psychological noise; they were potential channels for instruction, warning, or comfort. His phrasing, "oft times", keeps him from sounding credulous. He is not promising nightly prophecies. He is arguing for attentiveness to the odd, half-symbolic content of sleep because it may reveal what waking pride conceals.
The line also quietly democratizes revelation. God does not require literacy, church access, or even full consciousness. He can speak in "proverbs" and "similitudes" - compressed, vernacular forms that meet people where they are. Thats pastoral strategy: keep the door open for grace to reach the anxious and the uneducated, and keep the spiritually complacent from assuming they are in control.
Subtext: your defenses are not your faith. If God can address you asleep, then religious life is less about mastery and more about receptivity - a discomforting thought for anyone who treats piety as a daytime performance.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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