“Jesus went to sleep in my dreamscape,” my participant reported.

“Okay,” I responded. “That means you’ve taken care of what he needed you to do for now, and our session is over for today.”

When this happens, participants usually can’t wake him up. And even if they manage to, Jesus typically reacts like any of us do when someone wakes us up.

The first time this obvious metaphor became clear to me was right after we cast out a demon we had been working on for months, and Jesus went to sleep. I kept pestering my participant to wake up Jesus and ask if we had removed all the demons, and he wouldn’t answer. When I had finally asked enough times, the participant saw him wake up and say, “Just take the win,” and then go back to sleep. We both laughed and the lesson was learned.

Well—mostly learned. Recently Jesus went to sleep in another participant’s dreamscape, but we hadn’t even started the session yet. This particular participant had celebrated quite a few wins in their healing journey throughout the week, and I sensed that the Holy Spirit was communicating that now wasn’t the time to do deeper work. But because we had created this time to meet, I had them press Jesus several times to ensure we weren’t supposed to do anything. By the fourth time, he made it clear that he didn’t appreciate being woken up, and we laughed and adjourned.

The Holy Spirit sometimes communicates that it’s time to end a session in ways like this. Sometimes Jesus will walk away with a smile, or the participant’s dreamscape will become fairly unresponsive or shut down entirely. One of my favorite signals was when a participant heard the credit music to their favorite video game start playing.

These are always great moments to remind the participants that we are daydreaming with the Holy Spirit and not making everything up ourselves. If you’re making everything up, why don’t you have more control over what Jesus says? Why can’t you wake him up and make him say whatever you want? Why is he walking away, and you can’t do anything to turn him around? That’s not how the imagination works.

So take your cues while dreamscaping with the Holy Spirit. If a good counselor knows that you can only handle so much inner healing in one session, then, of course, the wonderful counselor knows you have limits.