A road in a dream

The clearest Sunnah dream about roads has the dreamer nearly taking the wrong one. 'Abdullah ibn Salam, asleep, is told to stand and is led by the hand. He finds paths on his left and is about to set out on them, when his guide stops him: those are the paths of the people of the left, who are the people of the Fire. Then paths appear on the right, and he is told to take those (Muslim 2484c). The Prophet ﷺ then read them for him: the left ones belong to the people of Hell and the right ones to the people of Paradise.

What makes this useful is not the left and right, which are not a rule, but the method. A path is read by whose it is.

Paths with owners: the Prophet's reading of a road dream

The rest of the dream is better known. A hill that the dreamer cannot climb, and falls back from after several attempts. A pillar rising to the sky with a handhold at the top, which he is lifted up to and holds until he wakes (Muslim 2484c). The Prophet ﷺ read the hill as the station of the martyrs, which the dreamer would not reach, and the pillar and the handhold as Islam, which he would hold to until death. Our article on the firm handhold is about the pillar. What matters for this entry is the first part.

The way Muslim records it, the dream comes with a small scene. When people said that anyone who wished to see a man of Paradise should look at him, 'Abdullah ibn Salam would not accept it. It is Allah who knows best about the people of Paradise, he said, and he told a man who had followed him home why they said it (Muslim 2484c). The dream, in other words, is a reading of paths and of a lifelong steadiness, and the man who had it would not turn it into a verdict on himself. We would ask the same restraint of anyone applying this to their own road.

Two questions come out of the text: whose path is this, and who is leading you? We would put them before "left or right".

The Qur'an's words for a road

Arabic has several, and the Qur'an uses them differently. The straight way the Fatiha asks to be guided to, the path of those whom Allah has favoured (Qur'an 1:6-7), is الصراط, singular, and elsewhere Allah calls it His own path, which is straight, and warns against following the other السبل, the many ways, which will separate you from it (Qur'an 6:153). The jinn who listened to the Qur'an told their people it guides to the truth and to a straight طريق, the ordinary word for a road (Qur'an 46:29-30). And Qur'an 90:10 speaks of the two نجدين, the two ways that Allah has shown a person, followed by a steep pass whose steps are freeing a slave, feeding on a day of hunger an orphan who is a relative or a needy person, and being among those who urge each other to patience and compassion, who are the companions of the right (Qur'an 90:10-18).

The dictionary's own word, طريق, is the one the Qur'an uses for a road you can walk and for a way of living. Its best-known appearance is the dry road that Musa was told to strike through the sea, with the promise that he need not fear being overtaken or drowning (Qur'an 20:77). Elsewhere it is the way a people stay on or leave. If they had remained straight on the way, Allah says, He would have given them abundant water (Qur'an 72:16, where the Arabic word is ماء though our translation renders it as provision).

The Sunnah adds the waking road as a place of conduct. The Prophet ﷺ told people not to sit on the roads and, when they said they had nowhere else, gave the rights of the way: lowering the gaze, not harming people, returning greetings, and enjoining good and forbidding evil (Bukhari 2465). In another report, a man who removed a thorny branch from the road pleased Allah and was forgiven (Bukhari 652). And Hudhayfa, a Companion, told the reciters to follow the straight path, for if they turned right or left they would go far astray (Bukhari 7282). That last is a Companion's saying and not the Prophet's. In all of these the road is a place where conduct is tested.

A road in an ordinary dream

The broad convention in popular compilations reads a road as the way a person is going in life, and reads its condition as the condition of that way. The table puts that beside the texts above, and marks which rows are tradition and which are our reasoning.

The sources' own questions apply here as they do to every dream: who was with you, who was leading, and how did you feel. A road that you walked calmly with someone you trust is different from one you could not find your way off.

A bridge is a kind of road with a gap in it, and traveling and being lost have their own entries. Before reading any of them, the three kinds of dreams is the first question.