ThedreamdictionaryattributedtoIbnSirin

The book people actually own

It is thick, alphabetical, and available everywhere: Ibn Sirin's Dictionary of Dream Interpretation. Look up a snake, a fish, a tooth falling out, and it will tell you what the dream means.

Muhammad ibn Sirin did not write it.

What the bibliographers record

Ibn Sirin was a Successor, of the generation after the Companions, and he genuinely was known for interpreting dreams; Ibn al-Nadīm records a work on interpretation attributed to him.

The book people buy is not that work. The alphabetical volume in circulation is Muntakhab al-Kalām fī Tafsīr al-Aḥlām, and the bibliographic answer on the question is that it belongs to the Shāfiʿī jurist and preacher Abū Saʿd al-Wāʿiẓ al-Kharkūshī al-Naysābūrī, who died in 407 of the Hijrah — roughly three centuries after Ibn Sirin. His name does not appear on the cover, because Ibn Sirin's name is what sells the book.

Why the attribution matters

Because of the use the book is put to. A frightened person opens it at two in the morning, finds the entry, and receives a meaning delivered with the authority of a great early figure. That authority is doing the work; the same sentence in a paperback by an unknown author would carry a fraction of the weight.

There is a further problem, and it is larger than the attribution. As the previous pages set out, Ibn ʿUthaymīn holds that there are no fixed rules in interpretation, because identical images mean different things for different people in different circumstances. A book that assigns one meaning to each symbol is doing precisely the thing the discipline says cannot be done — whoever its author turns out to be.

What this is not saying

Al-Kharkūshī was not a fraud. He was a jurist and a preacher, his book is a real work of its period, and the interpretation literature is a genuine genre with serious figures in it.

The point is narrower: a book is sold under a name that is not its author's, the borrowed name is what lends its verdicts their force, and a person consulting it in the middle of the night is entitled to know that.

If you own a copy there is no need to destroy it. There is a need to stop consulting it at night. The response to a dream that frightened you is set out on another page of this site, it takes about fifteen seconds, and it does not require anybody to know what a snake means.