A dog in a dream

A man was walking when thirst overcame him, so he climbed down a well and drank. Coming out, he saw a dog panting and eating mud from thirst. He thought the dog was suffering what he had just suffered, so he went down again, filled his shoe with water, held it in his teeth to climb out and gave the dog a drink, and Allah forgave him. When the Companions asked if there was reward for them in kindness to animals, the answer was that there is reward in every living creature (Bukhari 2363).

The same Sunnah also tells us that angels do not enter a house with a dog in it (Bukhari 3322). Mercy at the well and distance at the door: that is the dog in the sources, and it explains why the dream books never settled on one reading.

Contempt and companionship in the Qur'an

The Qur'an speaks of dogs in three ways, and they have little in common. In the first, the dog is a figure of speech. Of a man who was given knowledge of Allah's signs but clung to the earth and followed his own desire, the verse says his likeness is that of a dog: chase it and it pants, leave it and it pants (Qur'an 7:176). The comparison is aimed at the man's restlessness, not at the animal's nature, but it is a sharp one, and "dog" is still a common Arabic insult for a base or grasping person.

In the second, the dog is a presence. While the sleepers of the Cave lie turned to the right and to the left, "their dog" lies with its forelegs stretched at the entrance (Qur'an 18:18). A few verses on, people argue over how many the sleepers were, and each guess counts the dog: "the fourth of them being their dog", and so on (Qur'an 18:22). A dog that keeps the door while its people sleep is, for a dream entry, a striking thing to find.

The third is honest work. The verse that permits what trained hunting animals catch for you (Qur'an 5:4) calls the trainers مكلبين, a word built on the root of كلب, dog. Contempt, companionship and a day's work: all 3 are in the book.

What the Sunnah allows, rewards and keeps out

The hadith are more specific, and they sort dogs by their role in the same way the dream books later do. Keeping a dog costs a person a daily portion of reward, except a dog kept to guard livestock or crops or to hunt (Bukhari 2322). Hunting dogs get their own rulings on what you may eat of the catch (Bukhari 175). The angels' exclusion is shown in a story: Gabriel was late for an appointment, and when the Prophet ﷺ looked he found a puppy under his cot, which had to be put out before Gabriel came (Muslim 2104a).

Mercy is in the same collection. A prostitute was forgiven because she saw a dog dying of thirst by a well and drew water for it in her shoe (Bukhari 3321). And the Prophet used the animal as an image of ugliness when he said that someone who takes back a gift is like a dog swallowing its vomit, adding that this bad example was not for believers (Bukhari 6975).

None of this is about dreams, and we want to be plain about that. What the texts give us is the animal's range in Arabic usage: a figure of shameful behaviour, a creature owed kindness, a worker with a job. The dictionaries' readings, which sort a dog by what it does, are at least built from the same range, though the books never say they took it from these texts.

Reading a dog by its job

These are the conventions that recur in popular compilations, with what each rests on:

The dreamer matters too. Someone who keeps working dogs, or who was bitten as a child, may be dreaming about nothing but that, and the method asks about the dreamer's life before reaching for a table. A dog that you recognise as a neighbour's, or that behaves in a way that reminds you of someone, is the sort of detail an interpreter would ask about. We offer that as the method's habit, not as a rule from a text.

For the wild cousin of this dream, see the wolf, and for the other household animal, the cat.