A door in a dream

"She closed the doors and said, 'Come, you'" (Qur'an 12:23). It is a good place to start with doors, because Yusuf's first move is not to run. Every door is shut, and he says he seeks refuge in Allah, that the master of the house has treated him well, and that wrongdoers do not succeed. When the Qur'an wants to show a person at a crossing, it sometimes puts a door there, and what the person says or does at the door is the point.

Four doors, and what each person did at them

Surah Yusuf and the story of Musa's people between them give 4 doors with 4 different postures. At Yusuf's shut doors the answer is refuge, as above. Two verses later the scene has narrowed to a single door: both race to it, and a shirt is torn from behind (Qur'an 12:25). The surah offers no comment on the doors themselves, only on what each person did at them.

Much later Yaqub, sending his sons off, tells them not to enter from one gate but from different gates, and adds in the same breath that this cannot avail them against Allah at all, since the decision is only His (Qur'an 12:67). It is a precaution and a surrender in one sentence. Then there are Musa's people, told to enter the Holy Land and answering that a tyrannical people is inside. Two men who feared Allah say: enter upon them through the gate, and when you have entered, you will be predominant, and rely on Allah (Qur'an 5:23). A door there means a step that has to be taken.

Put together, the 4 doors suggest that a door in these stories is rarely just a door. It is where a person acts and trusts in the same moment. That is a pattern we notice, not a reading anyone handed down, and it is why we would start a door dream with a question about what you were about to do.

Doors that deeds open

The Sunnah's doors are mostly in the next world, and they open by what people did. Paradise has a gate called Ar-Rayyan, entered only by those who fasted, and closed behind them (Bukhari 1896). Anyone who spent a pair of something in Allah's cause is called from the gate that matches his deed, the gate of prayer, of charity, of fasting, and Abu Bakr asked whether anyone would be called from all of them; the Prophet ﷺ said yes, and that he hoped it would be him (Bukhari 3666). The Qur'an says the same of Paradise's gates: they are already open for those who feared their Lord, and its keepers say peace (Qur'an 39:73).

Closer to our life is the Prophet's own metaphor. Mu'adh asked for an action that would take him into Paradise, and after the pillars of Islam the Prophet ﷺ offered to guide him to the doors of good: fasting as a shield, charity that puts out sins as water puts out fire, and prayer in the depth of the night (Tirmidhi 2616). So the Sunnah itself calls deeds doors. That is a hint, no more, about how a door might be read.

There is also a scene from the other side of the Qur'an. A wall with a door is set between the believers and the hypocrites on the Day, with mercy within and torment outside (Qur'an 57:13). We would not read a dreamed door as that. The verse only shows that a door can divide as well as admit.

Then the dreams themselves. In the long dream of Samura, the Prophet ﷺ and the two figures guiding him reached the gate of a city built of gold and silver bricks and asked for it to be opened, and it was opened for them (Bukhari 7047). The same dream is told in full in the longest dream in the Sunnah. The city behind that gate is, in the dream's own words, Eden, and nothing in it tells us how to read any other door.

Opened, shut, or the wrong one

An open door can be a gift or a trap, and the Qur'an is blunt about it. Allah opens the doors of every good thing for people who forgot what they were reminded of, until they rejoice, and then He seizes them suddenly (Qur'an 6:44). So the reading turns on what is behind the door and how you felt going toward it: relief, curiosity, dread.

The Qur'an also has a very plain rule about doors in waking life. The Ansar used to enter their houses from the back after Hajj, until a man entered by the door and was taunted for it, and the verse came down that righteousness is not in entering houses from the back, and that houses should be entered by their doors (Qur'an 2:189, Bukhari 1803). The verse is about a waking custom, and applying it to a dream, as in the last row of the table, is our extension.

For what opens a door, see a key, and for the place it belongs to, a house. A door with no way through has a relative in a wall.