A wall in a dream

The Qur'an says a wall wanted to fall. The Arabic is exact: Musa and his companion found in the town a wall يريد أن ينقض, one that "wants" to collapse, and the companion set it upright, unasked and unpaid (Qur'an 18:77). It is the one wall in the Book whose purpose is spelled out afterwards, and the explanation is introduced with the word the Qur'an uses elsewhere for the interpretation of dreams.

That makes it a good place to begin, though not because the verse is about dreams. It is not. It shows how the Qur'an itself treats a wall: as something whose meaning is not on its surface.

The wall that wanted to fall, and what lay under it

The scene is short. Musa and his companion reached a town, asked for food and were refused hospitality. Then the companion restored a wall that was about to fall, and Musa objected that he could at least have taken payment (Qur'an 18:77). When he was ready to part from Musa, the companion said he would inform him of the تأويل, the interpretation, of what Musa had not had patience to bear (Qur'an 18:78). The wall, he said, belonged to two orphan boys of the town. Beneath it was a treasure for them, their father had been righteous, and their Lord intended that they reach maturity and bring out the treasure, as a mercy from Him (Qur'an 18:82).

Two things stand out. First, an act that looked pointless, repairing a wall for people who had refused them a meal, had a reason nobody on the road could see. Second, the word. Yusuf uses تأويل of the dream he saw as a boy, when years later his parents bow to him: this, he says, is the تأويل of his earlier vision (Qur'an 12:100), and his father had told him Allah would teach him the تأويل of narratives (Qur'an 12:6). The wall is explained in the vocabulary of dream interpretation.

We take one cautious point from that. In the Qur'an's one explained wall, what mattered was what lay under it, and the reason for mending it was not the one that first occurs to you. That is our reading of the verses, not a rule from any text.

Walls that divide, shield and hold back

The Qur'an's other walls do three jobs. They divide: on the Last Day a wall with a door is set between the hypocrites and the believers, with mercy inside it and torment on its outer side (Qur'an 57:13). They shelter the fearful: a people who will not fight in the open, only inside fortified towns or from behind walls, whose hearts are divided though they look united (Qur'an 59:14). And they hold back harm. Dhu al-Qarnayn, asked for a barrier against Gog and Magog, built one of iron sheets and molten copper that they could neither climb nor pierce, and said it was a mercy from his Lord that would be levelled when His promise came (Qur'an 18:94-98). The Prophet ﷺ is reported to have come to Zaynab bint Jahsh in alarm, saying an opening had been made in that barrier, as wide as a ring made with thumb and finger (Bukhari 3346).

The Sunnah also uses building as a picture of community, again outside dreams. A believer to a believer is like a structure whose parts hold each other up (the translation we check says "the bricks of a wall"), and he interlaced his fingers as he said it (Bukhari 481). In another saying he compares himself and the earlier prophets to a man who built a house well except for the place of one brick, and says he is that brick (Bukhari 3535). In both, it is the individual brick that carries the meaning.

Reading a wall: shield, obstacle or secret

No verse or hadith interprets a wall that someone sees in sleep, so the dictionary reading is built, like many of them, from what a wall does when you are awake: it protects, it blocks, it hides what is behind it. The table says which readings are convention and which are our reasoning from the verses above.

What the dreamer is living through decides between these more than the table can. A wall in a dream after moving house, a fight with a neighbour or a stretch of feeling shut out has a plain explanation, the mind going over its own concerns, which is the third of the three kinds the Prophet ﷺ named (Muslim 2263a).

A wall that has a way through also belongs with a door in a dream, and a wall that shuts someone in is the subject of a prison in a dream. For the house a wall belongs to, see a house in a dream.