A horse in a dream

In the afternoon the racehorses were paraded before Sulayman, standing poised. Then he said that he had preferred the love of good things to the remembrance of his Lord until the sun disappeared behind its veil, and he called for the horses to be brought back to him (Qur'an 38:31-33). It is the Qur'an's own horse story, and it is not about the animal. It is about attachment.

That is the tension to carry into a dream. In the sources the horse is power, beauty and benefit, and also the thing a person can love too much. The dictionaries lean toward the first three, as you would expect of an animal that carried every army. What follows separates what the texts say from what the books added.

Beautiful, useful and easy to love too much

The Qur'an speaks of horses three ways. As a gift, they were created for riding and for adornment (Qur'an 16:8). As a duty, believers are told to prepare whatever strength they can, including steeds of war, so that the enemy is deterred (Qur'an 8:60). As a temptation, "fine branded horses" are named among the things people are made to love, along with women, sons and heaped-up gold and silver, and the verse adds at once that the best return is with Allah (Qur'an 3:14).

Surah al-Adiyat sets the tension out in a single breath. It opens with an oath by panting racers that strike sparks and charge at dawn, stirring up dust (Qur'an 100:1-5). The verses name no animal. The common view is that war-horses are meant, though a few commentators took camels. The surah then turns to people: mankind is ungrateful to his Lord, and is intense in love of wealth (Qur'an 100:6-8). The oath is by the racers and the rebuke is on us, and Sulayman's afternoon is the same lesson told as a story.

For a dream, that gives the horse two edges before any dictionary is opened. It stands for strength put to use, and the same strength can pull the person who has it off course.

Khayl and khayr: the pun in the Prophet's saying

The Sunnah's horse is a happier one. The Prophet ﷺ said that good is tied to the forelocks of horses until the Day of Resurrection (Bukhari 2849), and in another narration the good is named as reward and spoils (Bukhari 2852). The saying is about real horses and not about dreams, and it contains a pun worth seeing. The Arabic word for horses is الخيل and the word for good is الخير, one letter apart, and the saying ties them together.

That small piece of wordplay runs further than it first looks. The word الخير is the one Sulayman uses in his confession, "the love of good things" (Qur'an 38:32), and in Surah al-Adiyat it is the "wealth" that people love so intensely (Qur'an 100:8). The commentators generally take Sulayman's "good things" to mean the horses before him. So the same word for good turns up beside horses in the Qur'an's story, in its oath-surah and in the Prophet's saying, sometimes as a blessing and sometimes as an object of too much love.

The root of the word for horses carries a second thread. The Arabic for the conceited and boastful, the person Allah does not like, comes from the same three letters as الخيل (Qur'an 31:18). We offer this as a feature of Arabic, not as a dream rule. But anyone who reads a horse as honour or rank is working with a word whose own family includes both dignity and swagger.

Reading a horse by how it carries you

We cannot find a verse or hadith that interprets a horse in sleep. What the dictionaries do, by analogy, is read a horse as the standing a person carries, and then read the dream by how the rider fares. These are the conventions that recur in popular compilations, with an honest note on each:

The method asks who is riding. Someone weighing a post or a purchase hears "standing" in the dream differently from a person with nothing at stake, and the dictionaries treat that situation as part of the reading. The same riding logic is the starting point for modern vehicles, as a car in a dream explains, and for other mounts, such as the camel and the donkey.

If the dream left you uneasy rather than glad, the three kinds of dreams is the first page to read, and a king in a dream covers the rank a horse so often stands for.