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.

A true dream — ruʾyā. Glad tidings from Allah. The sources treat it as the rare one.

A distressing dream — ḥulm. From the shayṭān. It carries no message to be uncovered; causing the distress was its purpose, and reading it for content is the response it was designed to produce.

The speech of the self — ḥadīth an-nafs. A dream made of what a person was already telling himself — the preoccupations of waking life appearing again in sleep. This is the commonest of the three by a wide margin, and the least remarked upon.

Two of those three carry nothing to be interpreted. That is the first thing a person should know about their own dreams, and it settles most of what follows.

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 rakʿahs, 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 is not pretending it did not happen. It is refusing 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 — and 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 sharia is built upon a dream.

It rules out more than people expect. A dream cannot make a thing lawful or unlawful. It cannot confirm a diagnosis, including when it matches every item on a symptom list. It cannot name a person — seeing a relative in a dream about harm is evidence that you were thinking about that relative, and nothing further. And it cannot instruct, even where the dream is a good one.

The line is drawn firmly because the alternative has no floor beneath it. If a dream could establish anything, then anybody's dream could establish anything, and there would be no way to weigh one against another — and anybody wishing to move you would need only to describe a dream, since the account of a dream cannot be checked by anyone.

That is usually presented as a restriction, and it is better understood as a permission. The dream you cannot stop turning over requires nothing of you. There is no action to take, no decision to reach, nobody to confront, and no part of your life to rearrange around it. For somebody who has carried one for months, that is not a technicality.

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.