Dreamsofthedead,anddreamsoftheProphetﷺ

Dreams of the dead

Somebody who has died appears and speaks. Sometimes they ask for something — a debt paid, a charity given, a grave visited, a wrong put right. Sometimes they say that they are suffering. A person who has such a dream about a parent does not sleep afterwards.

Two things have to be held together here.

The first is that this is among the commonest dreams there is, and that grief is among the strongest producers of dreams there is. The mind returns to what it has lost, repeatedly, for a long time. That is ḥadīth an-nafs, and it is not a message from anywhere.

The second is the principle that governs all of them: a dream establishes nothing. A dead relative appearing and asking for something has not created an obligation that a person acquired in their sleep.

There is a qualification worth making carefully. If such a dream moves somebody to pay a debt that was genuinely owed, to give charity on the dead person's behalf, or to pray for them, those are good things in themselves and no dream was required to justify them. Do them because they are good rather than because they were instructed. The distinction sounds slight and it is the whole distinction between worship and obedience to a dream.

Where somebody claims that a dead person told them something about you — that you are afflicted, that you owe money, that you must act — that is a claim about the unseen, and there is no clearer example of a dream being used as leverage.

Dreams of the Prophet ﷺ

There is a sound narration that whoever sees the Prophet ﷺ in a dream has truly seen him, because the shayṭān cannot take his form. The narration is authentic, and it is also the most misused hadith in this subject.

Two constraints are placed on it by scholars who affirm it fully.

The first is that seeing him and knowing that you saw him are different things. A person may see a figure he believes to be the Prophet ﷺ; whether that figure was in fact him is precisely the question at issue, and the dreamer's certainty is not evidence. One who does not know his described appearance has no means of identifying him.

The second is that it establishes nothing in the religion. Revelation ended. Even a genuine vision cannot add to the sharia, subtract from it, appoint anybody to anything, or require of a person what the religion has not required.

That second constraint is why the claim gets made at all. He came to me and told me to lead. He told me you are afflicted. He confirmed my treatment. Anybody who accepts that such a claim settles a matter has handed over everything, and there is no way back from it.

If somebody tells you they were shown something about you in a dream of the Prophet ﷺ, it is possible to be entirely respectful and still say that it establishes nothing and that you will not act on it.