There are nights I close my eyes and find myself walking into classrooms I left behind years ago. Sometimes it’s my high school desk with wooden drawers scribbled by restless students. Other times, it’s a university hallway with echoes of exams, lectures, and chalk dust. The teachers vary. The classmates are rarely familiar. And more often than not, I wake up with a sense of holy disturbance, not fear, not shame, but a quiet prompting in my spirit that God is saying something.
At first, I dismissed it.
After all, who hasn’t had a “back to school” dream at some point? It’s almost cliché. Most people laugh it off: “Oh, maybe my brain is sorting memories.” But I knew better. When the Holy Spirit marks a dream, it lingers. It stirs. It calls for interpretation.
And the more I prayed, the clearer it became: God was not taking me back to school in a dream to revisit the past. He was summoning me to the classroom of the Spirit, to relearn, to be refined, to be re-equipped for a new dimension.
One morning after such a dream, I fell on my knees and opened my Bible. The Lord led me straight to Proverbs 9:9 (NKJV): “Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; Teach a just man, and he will increase in learning.” It was there the Holy Spirit began to open the scroll of understanding. That dream was not just about school, it was about training, transition, and testing.
Let me explain.
There’s a divine pattern where God takes His chosen ones back into places of preparation, not to humiliate them, but to prepare them for something greater. Think of Moses. He was raised in Pharaoh’s palace, educated in all the wisdom of Egypt. But when his calling stirred prematurely, he killed a man and ran. For forty years, God took him into the wilderness—His divine school of humility and obedience.
Moses didn’t attend lectures, but he enrolled in the curriculum of the desert. His teacher was the voice from the burning bush. His syllabus? Deliverance, intercession, and obedience. And when his schooling was done, he didn’t just graduate—he became a deliverer.
In my dreams, I was always struggling to find the right classroom or arriving late to class. Once, I was taking a test and realized I didn’t study. In another, I sat before a teacher I could not recognize, yet they glowed with a strange authority, as if from another world.
That’s when the Lord whispered to me: “Victoria, the dreams are not about academics. They are about alignment. I am bringing you back to foundational truths I want you to master before I reveal your next assignment.”
You see, many believers are dreaming of being in school again because the Spirit of God is calling His people back to the place of discipleship. The modern church has many preachers but few students. Many want platforms, but few want process. And so, the Lord uses dreams to enroll us back into His hidden classroom. To teach us the lessons we neglected, forgot, or skipped in haste.
Jeremiah 33:3 (NKJV) says, “Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.” That verse is a divine invitation into spiritual education. When you dream of school, it could mean God is trying to reveal a mystery, a hidden truth that cannot be learned in the flesh. It must be caught in the Spirit.
And these dreams come with patterns.
Sometimes, you’ll dream of failing a test or being unprepared. Spiritually, that points to a season of spiritual immaturity or negligence. Perhaps you’ve been skipping your prayer altar. Perhaps you’ve avoided obeying that still small voice. God, in His mercy, gives you a warning wrapped in a dream, not to shame you, but to prepare you for the test ahead.
Other times, you dream of excelling in an exam or teaching others. That’s a prophetic sign of promotion. God is elevating your spiritual authority because you’ve passed certain hidden trials. Just like David, who was trained with lions and bears before facing Goliath, some of our greatest qualifications are earned in secret. And when it’s time to move from the wilderness to the throne room, God confirms it with prophetic dreams of spiritual advancement.
One night, I dreamt I was back in school, but this time I wasn’t a student—I was teaching. Yet I felt unworthy. I asked the principal (a figure I now know was Christ Himself), “Why me?” He looked at me and said, “Because you stayed in the wilderness when others ran to the spotlight. Now you will feed my sheep.”
That dream broke me.
I woke up weeping, humbled by the mercy of a God who never stops educating us, even in our sleep. That’s what Job meant when he said, “For God may speak in one way, or in another, yet man does not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night… He opens the ears of men, and seals their instruction” (Job 33:14–16 NKJV).
Dreams of school, therefore, are more than dreams. They are divine summons. They are heavenly lessons. They are prophetic messages calling us to either prepare, repent, or rise.
If you’ve been dreaming of being back in school, I urge you to stop dismissing it. Go into fasting. Ask the Holy Spirit, “Lord, what lesson are You trying to teach me? What test have I avoided? What truth have I forgotten?”
For some, God is calling you back to the basics, prayer, fasting, holiness, forgiveness. For others, He is teaching advanced mysteries, prophetic discernment, spiritual warfare, kingdom administration. And for a rare few, He is preparing you to become a teacher in His house. But you must first pass through His hidden curriculum.
That’s the thing about God. He is not just a Savior, He is a Rabbi. Jesus spent more time teaching than performing miracles because the kingdom is not built on wonders alone. It is built on revelation.
So when next you find yourself dreaming of school, don’t panic. Don’t joke. And certainly don’t run. Instead, do what Mary did. Ponder these things in your heart. Then, sit at the feet of the Master and say, “Lord, teach me.”
Because in this classroom of the Spirit, your destiny is the graduation prize.
And oh, how glorious it is to hear the words: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
