Muslim civilization has shown considerable concern for dreams, which have influenced the spiritual life of Islam from its very beginning. Islam is fundamentally a prophetic religion based on a series of divine revelations given to the prophet Muhammad through an angel during the latter part of his life, around 610 to 632 c.e., and contained in the Qur'an.
The Islamic creed presupposes a cosmology that includes an invisible world, consisting of heaven and hell, as well as the visible one, populated by humans and other life-forms. According to Islam, a purposeful force created and governs both worlds and will ultimately judge them. This force is only knowable through human intermediaries, the prophets.
Muslim prophecy distinguishes the prophets according to degree of visionary perception, from the sights and sounds of a dream to the supra-sensible perception in the waking state. According to this classification, which is probably derived from criteria suggested in Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament), there is the simple prophet, who sees or hears an angel in a dream. Then there is the envoy-to a more or less numerous group-who sees the angel while awake. Finally, among the envoys there are the six great prophets who were charged to reveal the new law and who received the dictation of the law from an angel while in a waking state. These six prophets are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets, meaning that his revelation closes the cycle of the six periods of prophecy.
No distinction between the dream while asleep and the vision while awake was made at the time of Muhammad, who received spiritual instruction while in both states. Dreams played an important role in the life of Muhammad, who received his first revelation and became conscious of his vocation in a dream. His great dream of initiation into the mysteries of the cosmos, known as the "Night Journey", began when the angel Gabriel appeared to him while he was sleeping between the hills of Safa and Meeva. Riding Elboraq, a half-human silver mare, Muhammad arrived in Jerusalem, the center of the world, where he conversed and prayed with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Then he passed through the seven celestial spheres, each infused with its own color, to reach across the ocean of white light and, finally, to approach God. According to some versions of the "Night Journey", Muhammad also descended to the depths of the Earth, thus encompassing all of human experience.
Muhammad experienced other dreams prior to the revelations given to him and recorded in the Qur'an. These dreams appeared in the form of isolated luminous and sonorous impressions that the prophet was unable to translate, and are placed at the beginning of many chapters of the Qur'an as isolated letters.
The Qur'an inherited several dreams from the Old Testament. For instance, although some details are different, the account of Joseph's dream reported in the Bible is very similar to the account in the Qur'an. It is often possible to find in the Qur'an the evidence of revelations announced in dreams, like the revelation to Moses' mother to give her son to the pharaoh's sister to nurse.
In Islam, it is believed that the angel Gabriel brings true dreams, whereas demons bring false ones. The validity of a dream is determined by the time it occurs, and it is believed that early morning dreams are true dreams. True dreams are generally believed to be those in which God, the prophet Muhammad, angels, or good Muslims appear, whereas dreams in which demons appear cannot be true, nor can those coming from desires and mental preoccupations, nor those resulting from the tricks of magicians.
According to Islam, it is possible for djinn (spirits inhabiting the earth) and Satan to give diabolic inspiration through dreams. Since Islam prohibits all representations of God, an image of the Deity can occur only in a false dream, as well as the image of an angel playing, or of the sky collapsing.
It is said that the ordinary person receives visions of portent only in dreams, whereas the mystic receives them in the waking state also or in an intermediate state between waking and sleep. Also, some particular dreams that occur naturally are believed to be a form of divine grace through which an individual can have a temporary taste of states above the material level.
Since it is difficult to distinguish between true and false dreams, dream interpretation is necessary in Islam, and it is often a very sophisticated process. Muslim dream codes give priority to the dreams of men, and among women to the dreams of married women who are considered chaste and dignified.
In late medieval Islam, dream interpretation was an accepted theological discipline. Muslim mystics of that period, who secluded themselves in gloomy cells to receive inspiration, believed there was a world situated between the material world and the world of intellect. This doctrine of a "realm of images" arose from the Muslim mystics' attempts to establish a morphology (structure or form) for their prophetic revelations in order to establish the reality of their spiritual experiences in dreams and visions. According to this doctrine, the world of images can be approached only through a highly trained imagination. Once an individual has reached a sufficient level of spiritual development, and provided the person's soul is pure and strong enough, he or she can visit and explore this world by means of a heightened spiritual understanding.
The Dream Encyclopedia. 1995 ©Visible Ink Press (VisibleInkPress.com). All rights reserved.
