Te online transcription of this diary entry places the words


of Jesus in quotation marks, but in the diary, White used no quotation marks. So, she can be said to have used the words from Mirror to convey the gist of what she heard during her dream. On some occasions, in reporting the words of a divine guide, White only said, “I will give in substance a few things that were said.” But in reporting this 1887 dream, she seems to be quoting word for word. White may have had another ordinary dream back in 1881. In


that dream her husband, James, appeared and conversed with her, even though he had died about a month earlier. One can see this as a dream that arose from the “common things of life.” In her waking life at the time, she was grieving the loss of her husband and puzzling over the very topic James addressed in her dream. She said it “seemed so real,” implying that she knew it had not happened in her waking life, but rather, during a dream.


Genuineness In her comments on the different types of visions and dreams, White says that dreams from the Lord are “as truly the fruits of the spirit of prophecy as visions. Such dreams, taking into account the persons who have them and the circumstances under which they are given, contain their own proofs of their genuineness.” But if this 1887 dream in Germany was given by the Lord,


where is proof of its genuineness? Some may say the evidence of the dream’s genuineness as a divinely inspired revelation lies in the insightful spiritual truths it conveys, regardless of whether parts of the dream narrative were constructed using Mirror of the Soul. But one could just as well argue that this particular dream contains proof of its “ordinariness.” Aſter all, for Ellen White, reading books about spiritual matters and thinking about such topics were the “common things of life,” which she says gives rise to the majority of dreams. In the end, that reasoning offers no objective way to distinguish between her “ordinary” dreams and those that might have been divinely inspired. More than 40 years ago, I published an article about White’s


descriptions of revelatory experiences where she used the term “I saw” but then proceeded to quote from earthly sources. In that article, I did not consider the possibility that some of those experiences may have been ordinary dreams. I did, however, cite one that could fit in either category: divine revelation or common dream.


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When Ellen White was in New Zealand, she read a newspaper


article about four young men who were caught in an undertow at the beach, and only one was saved. Tat night she dreamed she was in much the same scene, only this time her son Edson was the one caught in the surf. He seemed heedless of the warnings she shouted to him. She wrote to him of the experience, and that letter persuaded him of his own spiritual danger. He renewed his faith and went on to build the riverboat Morning Star and launch his mission to African-Americans in Mississippi. Te report of White’s 1887 dream about a stranger’s speech,


which included material from a book with which she was very familiar, raises the question of whether her use of sources in describing earlier visions might also have arisen from her familiarity with those sources prior to experiencing a vision on the topic. William C. White, in a 1934 letter to L. E. Froom, claimed that in his mother’s visions, “the main outlines were made very clear and plain to her” but “she was leſt to study ... history to get dates and geographical relations.” Her account of this dream suggests that even in her visions, she may have already had the “main outlines” from previous reading and then been able to go back to those earthly sources to describe her visions. Some might question my implied presupposition that God’s


contribution is only to be seen in the extraordinary and never in the ordinary. Very well. We must notice that the complete title of the Christian Lady’s book is Mirror of the Soul; or, Spiritual Tings Discerned, an allusion to 1 Corinthians 2:14, which says the things of God are “spiritually discerned.” Although that particular author may not have experienced


any visions, she believed she had been led by the Spirit as she wrote her insightful book about the Christian life. Could it be that Jesus would be speaking to us in our own dreams if the “common things” of our daily lives, like Ellen White’s, included whole nights spent in prayer and a “thoughtful hour each day in contemplation of the life of Christ”?1 1 Ellen G. White, Te Desire of Ages (1898), p. 83.


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