Oyin screamed as she awoke violently from sleep. Her scream immediately woke up her husband, Kayode who was shocked by the look on the face of his wife of 16 years. She looked extremely frightened and very scared. Kayode was alarmed and tried to calm her down. The frightened look did not go away, but she became less-agitated. It was obvious she had experienced a bad dream, a very bad dream or more accurately, a nightmare!

Kayode gently patted her and continued to calm her down. He held her in his arms and asked her to tell him what she had seen in her dream and slowly she began to explain…

Kayode and Oyin were in a room at the prayer camp of a popular deliverance ministry on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. The ministry was not their regular church, but they had both decided to embark on a weekend deliverance programme to address spiritual concerns they agreed they were experiencing. The programme was demanding and intense. They had both had their last meals since Thursday evening and had arrived the camp on Friday evening. Since that Friday evening, they had both had neither food nor water throughout Friday and Saturday, and had gone to bed around 2.00am on Saturday night, actually Sunday morning. They had attended prayer sessions on Friday night, and throughout Saturday, including another night vigil service before going to bed.

In a way, Kayode should not have been surprised given their location and the spiritual activities they were engaged in that his wife had experienced something mysterious that night. The reason they had agreed to proceed on the deliverance programme was precisely to hear from God regarding the issues they were experiencing. Kayode had experienced dreams and revelations of his own, even before the programme. He had his serious concerns, and he had shared them all with his wife, and he was curious, but happy that she had some dream that he hoped might offer some illumination…except that this had evidently been a very scary dream that his wife had experienced. What had she seen? Why was she so afraid, so frightened?

Now they were both wide awake, as Oyin began to share details of her dream…Apparently, she had two dreams in fact, rolled into one…her first dream was very clear and she recollected it in every detail. She had been accosted by a group of women, led by a particular known person-a lady who was a pastor and medical doctor, and who was the wife of a pastor and banker. Until recently, Kayode and Oyin had worshipped in the Church pastored by the lady and her husband. The women were chanting “Shame on you” as they confronted and threatened Oyin …and Kayode wondered whether there might have been aspects of the dream or the context that his wife did not recount to him…

The probable meaning of the dream was very clear to Kayode as the dream was very consistent with the dreams and the concerns that he had experienced, all of which he had shared with his wife. The second dream appeared to centre around Oyin’s family and ancestry, and she herself was able to discern the interpretation of that second dream…

It was clear that Oyin had major spiritual battles, or indeed wars to fight…