Dana Coverstone
Several questions have crossed my desk about the prophetic dreams of Kentucky Pastor Dana Coverstone. Short answer, I believe his dreams are genuine prophetic. Long answer, I believe he is making a bunch of rookie mistakes. In this post I give the long answer and walk through the problems so you can understand better how prophetic dreams work and why, so if they happen to you, you will know what to do.
Prophecy Club Interview
Since there is so much material on Coverstone, both his own, and commentary, and interviews, I need to narrow this discussion to one example. If you are not familiar with Coverstone himself, this will also get you some introduction. My commentary follows below.
An Unorganized Mess
One of the things I always deal with when someone starts having prophetic dreams is organization. Dreams need to be written down, and dated, as quickly as possible. Memory of dreams fades with time, so only a quickly produced account of the dream remains trustworthy. The exact date can also carry serious meaning, even if you don't understand it at the time. Some day, Joshua willing, I will put the tools for solving dates online.
I much prefer a written form because the process of writing triggers an iterative process to check to make sure everything was written down. Video diary clips are possible, but video has a problem that it looses authority when it gets edited, and editing is going to be needed when the material is serious.
Coverstone seems to be making this rookie mistake. His work is not particularly well organized especially as he moves his dream accounts onto the Internet. Even if Coverstone does not want to make everything public, the online form should be taken directly from a private diary.
Where is Coverstone's online form of his diary? Apparently nowhere. This is another rookie mistake. Let me explain.
The Internet
The internet makes the problem of organization much worse. Some of his material is on Facebook, some on Youtube. He does not appear to be managing it himself, nor treating it as a serious thing, which it is.
Social platforms have many more problems as a 'single point of truth.'
I recommend a book by Mark Jeftovic and Charles Hugh Smith called 'Unassailable.' That book explains carefully how social platforms eventually ban anyone speaking truth to power. It also explains what to do about it. Genuine prophetic, like Coverstone's, eventually falls into this category.
Coverstone's public presentation of his dreams should be on a website he controls, and backed up somewhere even free of his phone. Coverstone can expect to be banned eventually. Anyone sharing it can expect their social media posts to be shadow banned. Social platforms are only safely used to draw traffic to a website.
Tech titans are never your friend, they have no qualms about banning Members of Congress and the President, why would they not do the same to you? They ignore you only when you are wrong.
Prophecy Club Interview
In the video I linked above, Coverstone was interviewed by Stan Johnson of the Prophecy Club. Because of Stan's general experience I chose this interview as my example. Johnson has been active in this space since 1993.
If you notice the date on the video, you'll see it was recorded in June of 2020. We take Youtube's posting date as a type of escrow, and trust a typical user could not forge that date. So we can look forward from that date to see what happened. (We could use the Internet Archive to the same ends if this was on his own website.)
One of the things detailed in Coverstone's dream was an empty Oval Office, as well as lines of people near a hospital.
Note that happened at the very end of September, 2020, when President Trump left the Oval Office and spent 3 days at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington DC. Trump returned to the Whitehouse on Sunday, October 4, 2020, after Trump supporters gathered around the hospital to show support for his quick recovery.
Coverstone has seen many other things, but this is a good example of the precision that comes with these sorts of dreams. Normally, as an outsider to someone with this sort of prophetic, you look for the best 'hard to guess' example from a prophetic word in order to gauge the quality of the rest of the word. This empty Oval Office is a good example, showing how the other parts of his prophetic should be trusted.
If you listened to the interview above, and listen to the part dealing with the Oval Office, you can also see a problem, another rookie mistake. This problem involves Coverstone's use of voice. Let me explain.
Voice
Someone operating in genuinely prophetic dreams or visions has a general problem of handling two different voices. His own, and the voice of the Holy Spirit that is coming through them. These 2 different voices both express themselves through the single mouth of the prophet.
In order to not confuse listeners, the prophet must be very careful to distinguish between these different voices. Coverstone rarely, clearly, distinguishes between these two very different voices. This is partly because he is a professional pastor, and makes his living giving commentary on things religious.
So, if you listen to him, you will have a very difficult time telling what is the Holy Spirit given dream and what is Coverstone's interpretation of the same dream. Recall, in written form, prophetic words are not interpreted in their own writing. This textual principle applies to prophetic voices too.
Coverstone should be limiting as much as possible any interpretation. Though of course he can point at a headline and say something like 'there it is.'
Both Coverstone and Johnson put their spin on what might happen for the Oval Office to go empty. Neither guessed the issue being a case of Covid, a main topic of earlier dreams, nor that Trump's case would only be 3 days, and land him in the hospital for 72 hours.
Note how these very different voices carried seriously different weight. The dream happened, as given, the interpretation did not.
There are various reasons why someone would do this, but in young prophets the issue is doubt of their own prophetic word. So by adding words to the prophetic they hedge possible fulfillments, usually softening and broadening the word so that the field of possible fulfillment is larger.
The only way to handle this problem is through keeping an accurate diary. Reading the diary back to an audience later is a very clean way to keep the 2 voices independent of each other. It also keeps the dream from changing with time.
Rookie prophets make another mistake, usually caused by poor theological training. The future is not completely written until it happens. Let me explain.
Conditional Futures
Young prophets usually want the prophetic word that they receive to fulfill as they saw it. You can imagine the problem. If the prophetic vision does not happen as they describe, then the prophet gets labeled as false.
Johnson is still partly trapped in this problem too, as you can hear in the interview. He wants the prophetic to happen just as was shown to the prophet so that the prophet, and the various ministries involved, including Johnson's, and even their religion are validated through the process.
The problem with this is that prophetic words are almost always conditional. If a tragedy of some sort is seen in visions like this, then the job of the prophet is to explain this will happen unless there is a change.
If you don't get this, go reread the story of the prophet Jonah. He was sent to give a word of soon destruction to the Ninevites. It was a valid prophetic word, they would be soon destroyed.
But, the Ninevites responded in faith and were spared the doom headed their way. Their response turned the word of doom around. Curiously, they became military victors later, conquering Jonah's own hometown, because Jonah's own neighbors did not listen to Jonah as a prophet.
The Ninevites are held up as an example in Joshua's day. If the people of Jerusalem had listened to Joshua, at least to treating him as a prophet in their day, the 70 AD destruction would have been avoided, as it was with Nineveh.
These Jonah related stories in the text always inform modern prophetic words involving national disasters.
So, everything that Coverstone is seeing needs to be understood as conditional. The various tragedies that he is being shown will happen unless it is stopped by human action of some sort, just like Nineveh.
Another rookie mistake is the failure to recognize and unpack the symbols found in prophetic dreams and visions. Let me explain.
Symbols
Prophetic visions and dreams often involve symbols from the text of scripture. There are various reasons for this, but often the problem is the prophetic is targeted at people in the audience itself, or to get around the actions of some in the audience. These people won't usually be able to identify themselves when symbols are being used.
Sometimes prophetic symbols are used to protect the prophet himself. This happens because giving a prophetic word as Coverstone is doing can be dangerous to the prophet. There are killers in the world, after all.
In the interview above there is one symbolic example, wolves. A pack of wolves are loosed. By context we should understand this is not actual wolves. This is not a prophetic word about Yellowstone Park, were packs of wolves can be seen by tourists.
Wolves are of course killers, they survive by killing, not by eating grass. So this is a symbol that stretches to the safety of the prophet. But, this does not unpack that scene in the dream.
To unpack symbols like this usually involves a word search on the text. Sometimes the tense, or the exact vocabulary word, is not exactly correct for a search, so several tries are needed. In this case a word search on wolf quickly finds Genesis 48:27 as defining the symbol wolf as the lost tribe of Benjamin.
In this specific example, wolves are Benjaminites. This identifies who are being dispatched to cause trouble.
Since we are still using social media even for our email distribution of this list we cannot explain exactly what this means. Someone trained in person would know immediately who has been dispatched.
A final rookie mistake involves the audience, us, when we hear about these sorts of prophetic words. We have some responsibility in our handling of these sorts of words. Let me explain.
NOT ON MY WATCH
The Coverstone catalog of dream material spans out at least through the end of 2020, perhaps longer if they continue. These dreams are dealing with politics and covers the election. If you haven't figured it out yet, masks and lockdowns are political events, just like the election. This is all 1 big story.
Coverstone's dreams are overlaying some of the Noah's Flood 2020 material, and by the nature of dreams they can be more specific than the timeline. (Dreams are less able to interpret what is going on, this is where the timeline shines.)
As intercessors, we should always have an attitude towards prophetic words and dreams that involve tragedy. That attitude is captured in an expression, NOT ON MY WATCH.
If you are following Coverstone closely, or intersect his material incidentally, pray over each specific detail. Pray that no tragic detail that Coverstone has been shown will actually come to pass. This is the heart for why he has been given these dreams. By praying about these dreams we give Joshua authority to change the natural outcome.
This is also why his dreams are being distributed. Nobody close seems to get how this works. They are all rookies. They speak of them as though they are a done deal, set in stone. They are not.
Joshua limits his dominion in the world. At certain times he will step in only when someone asks him. So ask, maybe he will listen to you.
Don't worry that Coverstone may seem like a false prophet if prayer averts some disaster. That is Coverstone's problem and he will grow out of it with time.
More Later,
Phil