The Dreamworld

"The world that we experience during dreams is a world of imagination. In dreaming, the soul perceives images. These images are neither the soul itself nor other than the soul, and they are neither the things that are perceived nor other than the things that are perceived. The whole domain is one of ambiguity and wonder.

Are dream images embodiments of the spiritual, or spiritualizations of the bodily? They may be either, or both, depending on how we look at them. Inasmuch as they are embodiments of your own awareness, the spiritual has become bodily. But inasmuch as your mind has taken perceived images from the outside world, they are spiritualizations of the bodily.

Both the Qur'an and the Hadith make a close connection between death and sleep. Muslims have traditionally understood sleep and death as two manifestations of a single reality. In both cases, direct awareness of the outside world is cut off, but in both cases, the self-awareness of the soul continues. The basic difference, according to the Qur'an (39:42), is that after sleep, God puts the soul back in control of the body.

How do we understand dreaming? Anyone who has reflected on his or her own dreams knows that they are normally confused and confusing. In Islam, dream interpretation has been considered a gift that is given to the prophets. The most famous example is provided by the story of Joseph and his imprisonment in Egypt, which is retold in Chapter 12 of the Qur'an as "the most beautiful story." Joseph's whole adventure began because he dreamed that the sun, the moon, and eleven stars prostrated themselves before him. When he was finally released from prison in Egypt, it was because he was able to interpret the dream of the king. And only then, once he had saved Egypt from famine and rescued his own family, did God make clear to him the meaning of his own dream: His parents and his eleven brothers prostrated themselves before him in gratitude.

Many ahadeeth tells of Prophet Muhammad's expertise at dream interpretation. His companions would come to him and tell them their dreams, and he in turn would explain the meaning of the dreams to them...

This is not the place to continue expanding on the Islamic understanding of dreams. It is sufficient to grasp that all Muslims knew that dreams were not to be taken at face value. Dreams had to be understood in terms of some appropriate correspondence between the image and the meaning that had become embodied through the image. And everyone also knew that sleep and death were somehow similar in their characteristics. Hence, to many Muslim thinkers, it was self-evident that we can throw light on the nature of experience after death by investigating the nature of dreams and the correspondences that exist between the perceived images and the meanings that appear in the images."

... The Vision of Islam, Sachiko Murata and William C Chittick