A prisoner saw a vision.

In the early church, Saturday was still the Sabbath, and Sunday was the Lord's Day, the day Christ arose. It was on a Sunday that John, in prison, was meditating. He was "in the spirit."

Most people these days don't meditate, so we'll spend some time now trying to help you understand some things about being in the spirit. Those of you who do meditate can skip, but you may find that this explanation helps you be in touch with the Revelation in a new kind of way.

To an observer, those who are meditating appear to be doing nothing. A few, such as dervishes, use motion to be in the spirit, but most are simply sitting or lying very still. Their eyes may be closed or open and staring. In either case, they seem to be asleep or unconscious.

They are not asleep.

Well, speaking personally, sometimes when I am tired (shouldn't meditate when you are tired) I fall asleep while meditating. If you were watching me, you would know when that happens. My breathing changes from deep and silent to heavy and (often) snoring.

What is the difference between sleep and ordinary wakefulness? Two or three things come to mind. My experiences while asleep have little or nothing to do with what is going on around me at the present moment, with the exception of noises that get incorporated into a dream, and things like that. Wakefulness is centered on what is happening in the here and now. If we dwell on the past or daydream of a future or alternate reality, we are not said to be fully awake.

Further, my waking experiences follow one another in time and space, with no major breaks from one experience to a totally different one. Such major breaks happen in dreams all the time. At least those which we can remember. That is the second difference.

And our ability to remember is the third and most important difference between waking and sleeping, when it comes to understanding Revelation. Even those who remember dreams in great detail are only remembering a very small percentage of their dreams. What we call wakefulness involves memory of most of what has happened to us, on some level or another.

People in deep meditation, in the spirit, are neither asleep or what we call normally awake. In one way of thinking, they are beyond awake, much more conscious and aware than we are in our normal waking state. In another way of considering, it can be said that a person who is in the spirit has combined the states of sleep and wakefulness, but that doesn't mean "groggy." It means that one can "know" as we do when asleep, but in a conscious, controlled and remembered way.

How do we "know" while sleeping?

Here is a common experience. Perhaps you have had it. You wake up and remember a dream in which one or more people in it were people you had never met. You remember in the dream that you did know them - knew everything about them, as though you had been lifelong friends. You were, depending upon the dream, usually very comfortable around them, and felt at home with them. Sometimes upon awaking, you may have felt a great sense of loss because you no longer remembered all about them, you just remembered that in the dream, you did!

That sense of how completely we KNEW is what we are after here. From your own experience, or at least from experience very common to many whom you know, we can get a glimpse of prophetic knowing, or vision.

So, when a person, John for example, says that he saw a vision, it is much, much more than a picture of something. It is a complete knowing of something. And since this experience was not a dream, he did not have to "wake up." His experience of the vision was continuous with his other surroundings, and in sequence with his other waking experiences. In short, after the vision, HE DID NOT FORGET IT.

Now that we know a little about John, who he was and what some of his abilities and responsibilities were; and now that we know something of what it meant that he "saw a vision," we can take a look at what the vision was, and the information that came along with it.

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