Dreams—thethreekinds,andwhattodowithone

A person wakes shaken and asks what the dream meant. Taken first, that question assumes the answer to a prior one: whether the dream was the kind of thing that means anything at all.

The Prophet ﷺ divided dreams into three, and that division is the foundation of everything else on the subject.

The three kinds

A dreamEvery dream is one of three things. Two of them carry no message to be uncovered.

• A true dreamruʾyāGlad tidings from Allah. The rare one.
• A distressing dreamḥulmFrom the shayṭān. Causing the distress was its purpose.
• The speech of the selfḥadīth an-nafsWhat you were already turning over while awake. The commonest by far.

Two of those three carry nothing to be interpreted. The distressing dream’s purpose was the distress itself; reading it for content is the response it was designed to produce. The speech of the self is the preoccupations of waking life appearing again in sleep, the commonest of the three by a wide margin and the least remarked upon. That is the first thing a person should know about their own dreams, and it settles most of what follows.

Which kind was yours?

• DistressingWhat to do with a bad dreamSpit dryly to your left three times, seek refuge in Allah, tell nobody, turn over. Fifteen seconds, and nothing in it involves working out what the dream meant.
• GoodWhat to do with a good dreamPraise Allah for what was shown, and tell it only to somebody who loves you.

What to do with a bad dream

There is a prescribed response, it takes about fifteen seconds, and nothing in it involves working out what the dream meant.

• Spit dryly to your left, three times: the soft expulsion of breath the sources call nafth, carrying no saliva.
• Seek refuge in Allah from the shayṭān, three times.
• Tell nobody what you saw.
• Turn over onto the side you were not lying on.

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

The instruction to keep it to yourself is the one people skip, and it is doing more work 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 and adding somebody else’s alarm to it. Keeping silent refuses to feed it.

What to do with a good dream

Praise Allah for what was shown, and tell it only to somebody who loves you.

The restriction is the substance of it. Somebody who loves you, hearing that you dreamt something good, is glad for you. Somebody who does not may be something else. A person announcing a wonderful dream widely is doing what our pages on the evil eye warn against in its plainest form: displaying a blessing in front of people he has not chosen.

The rule that governs all three

No ruling of the Sharī‘ah is built upon a dream. A dream cannot make a thing lawful or unlawful, confirm a diagnosis, name a person or instruct you, which means the dream you cannot stop turning over requires nothing of you. The full treatment is on no ruling is built on a dream.

Where to go from here

• If the same frightening dream keeps coming, several nights a week over weeks, read recurring frightening dreams, and take it to your GP as a sleep problem too. Neither replaces the response above.
• If you woke unable to move, with a weight on your chest and a sense of someone in the room, that has a name in the sources (al-jāthūm), and the six kinds of mass covers it.
• If you want a dream interpreted, interpretation is permitted and it is a real discipline. Read who may interpret a dream, and then choosing who interprets a dream, which is the part that decides whether you get anything of value.
• If you have been handed a symbol dictionary, read the dream dictionary attributed to Ibn Sirin first.
• If somebody has told you what your dream means about you (an affliction, a person, a course of treatment), read no ruling is built on a dream, and then dreams used as leverage.
• If you are waiting for a dream after praying istikhāra, no dream is a condition of it — see istikhāra does not need a dream.
• And the response itself, in full, with the good-dream half beside it: what to do with a dream.

And if you never have them

Some people go years without a dream they would call good, and quietly wonder what that indicates about their standing.

It indicates nothing. The three kinds are not a measure of a person, and a life containing few remarkable dreams is not a life containing less of Allah’s favour. The Prophet ﷺ told us what dreams are. He did not instruct anybody to assess themselves by how many they had.