When did the Divine stop speaking?

Something that keeps me up at night, aside from vivid dreaming of course, is the pervasive idea that the Divine, the Dead, and any other non-material entity has said about all there is to say when it comes to spiritual revelation.

Revelation is usually dismissed as “subconscious noise” among the practical.

People often distance themselves from the voice of the Divine by believing that everything worthy of revelation has already been written. They convince themselves that prophecy ended when the ink dried on animal skin paper anywhere from 400 to 6000+ years ago. Any fresh insight, any word received in the night or through intuition, vision, or trance, must therefore be a by-product of stress, auto-suggestion, or an overactive mind.

That assumption is both false and spiritually stifling. It mutes communion with the very intelligences our ancestors understood as the living court of spirit. Communication evolves just as we do; evolution never stopped. One of those forms, I would like to highlight is dreams. Hell, even modern research is beginning to catch up with what ancient traditions and esoteric lineages already knew to be the case: the dream state is an active field of communication between human consciousness and the unseen world.

A 2023 multi-national qualitative survey on dreams and the spiritual life reported that participants across diverse cultures frequently described dreams as a genuine source of spiritual instruction and relational contact with the Divine.1 In occult terms, this is the psyche functioning as a temple gate: the perimeter creates a entrance, and beings with their own agency, ethics, and agendas step through.

From an African Diaspora perspective, dream activity is rarely individualistic. It functions as a social and metaphysical network: messages that are received can span subjects for the self as well as for family or community, to correct imbalances or warn of danger.23Dreams can be diagnostic, divinatory, or punitive, carrying notices from Ancestors, Divine entities, and other forces about vows broken, offerings owed, events to come, or paths that need to be taken and/or closed.45Traditional priests, seers, and prophets historically served as interpreters of these dream communications, confirming the messages’ authenticity through oracular means—whether through themselves or a physical tool.6 In this worldview, to disregard such a vision is to disrespect the hierarchy of beings through which order is maintained.

Consider just a few famous Seers whose visions and trance communications helped change the course of Black and global spirituality:

- Mother Leafy Anderson, African American medium and founder within the Black Spiritual churches of New Orleans, whose work with spirit guides and trance became a living system of mediumship, dreamwork, and healing altars.7

- Bishop Charles Harrison Mason, Pentecostal leader whose emphasis on Spirit-baptism normalized prophetic dreams, glossolalia, and visions as signs of a current, not a closed canon.8

- Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita Nsimba, Kongo mystic who, possessed by St. Anthony, received visions that fused Christian symbols with Kongo cosmology and nearly reconfigured an entire kingdom’s spiritual order.910

- Mother Catherine Seals, Spiritualist Mother of the Temple of the Innocent Blood, whose trance, healing rites, and vision of the “Manger” turned New Orleans land into charged ritual territory.1112

They, among many others, only strengthen the point. The Divine did not stop talking; people just came up with reasons to stop listening.

Indigenous and Afrocentric theorists describe dreams as “transcendental meetings”—spaces where the human spirit convenes with divine entities, ancestors, and guiding intelligences. In African and diaspora frameworks, the dream body travels, receives instructions, is corrected, blessed, and sometimes marked, returning with assignments that become new doctrines, healing practices, and reforms inside living traditions.

When someone receives a message inside a dream, a ritual, or a crystallized moment of intuition, and then dismisses it as “subconscious gibberish,” they effectively place a muzzle on the mouths of their spirits. The dialogue does not stop; it only slips deeper into the underworld of the psyche, resurfacing as disquiet, misalignment, repeating omens, or creative frustration.13

To re-enter relationship with the Divine is to unlearn that dismissal. Revelation did not cease; people simply agreed to a contract of uninterest, treating older religious or spiritual systems as vaulted sigils that disconnect man from the spiritual realm for the rest of time.

I remember I once heard a Hindu devotee say “As many people there are in the world, there is an equal or greater number of religions, because everyone has their own interpretation of the teachings they come across.” So basically no matter how much one attempts to explain a doctrine, their mind fills in the gaps of what that doctrine is suppose to convey in their specific circumstance and creates something new.

I said all that to say, dreams remain one of the oldest, most democratic mediums of divine speech. Your spirit court may still speak through this language each time you lay down to rest, and provided you have the wherewithal to take their words seriously, record them, and subject them to divinatory confirmation.

Divine communication is dynamic, ongoing, and only silenced when human belief demands finality.

Y’all be blessed,

Lolu