Whattodowithabaddream

The response

A person who sees in sleep what they dislike is told to do four things, and none of them takes any time.

1. 1

   They spit dryly to their left, three times: the soft expulsion of breath the sources describe as nafth, carrying no saliva.

2. 2

   They seek refuge in Allah from the shayṭān, three times.

3. 3

   They do not tell anybody what they saw.

4. 4

   They turn over onto the side they were not lying on.

Some of the reports add that they may get up and pray two rak‘ahs, and the scholars treat that as commended rather than required.

Nothing further is prescribed. There is no fifth step in which the dream is examined, no requirement to remember it accurately, and no instruction to work out who was in it or what is coming.

Telling nobody

The instruction to keep it to yourself is the one people skip, and it does more than it appears to.

A frightening dream described aloud becomes a thing in the world. Told to a wife, a mother and a friend, it has been rehearsed four times over, each telling fixing it more firmly in the memory and adding somebody else’s alarm to it. What began as a few minutes of unpleasant sleep has, within a week, become a family’s shared conviction about something none of them witnessed.

Keeping silent is refusing to feed it, and the sources are direct about the alternative: al-Munajjid’s fatwa site records that a person who tells his bad dream is exposing himself to harm from it.

What the Companions said it did for them

The most persuasive thing in the material is a description. Ibn ‘Uthaymīn cites the Companions’ own account: they used to fall ill from dreams until the Prophet ﷺ taught them this, and then they found relief.

That is a report of symptom relief. It describes people who had been made unwell by their own nights, given something short to do, and finding that it worked, which is a very different claim from the one usually made about dream practices, and a more modest one.

What it is not

The number three is not a mechanism. The act is seeking refuge, in a form that was taught, and it settles a person because the matter has been handed over and put down, which is what seeking refuge means.

When they keep coming

Frightening dreams several nights a week over a period of weeks are worth two things beyond the response itself.

The first is the daily adhkār, morning and evening, kept properly rather than remembered occasionally, together with Āyat al-Kursī before sleep, the ordinary fortification this site is built on, which most people have let slip.

The second is a doctor, if the dreams are wrecking your sleep. Nightmare disorder is a recognised and treatable condition, and being frightened at night is not automatically a matter for a raqi. Neither of those replaces the response above, which costs fifteen seconds and should be done every time regardless.