A well in a dream

The Arabic word for a well, bi'r, appears in the Qur'an exactly once, and the well it names is abandoned: "how many an abandoned well and lofty palace" left empty after their people did wrong (Qur'an 22:45). Yet most of the wells people remember from scripture are lived-in places where someone is drawing water or being rescued. The Qur'an gives those other names, and the Prophet ﷺ saw a well in his sleep that is neither ruined nor named in the verses at all.

That gap between the word and the scenes is a fair summary of how a well is read: the reading depends less on the hole in the ground than on who is at it and whether it is still in use.

Wells the Qur'an calls something else

In Qur'an 12:10 one of Yusuf's brothers proposes throwing him "into the bottom of the well" so that travelers might find him, and the word there is jubb, a pit or cistern. The verse that has them carrying it out skips the fall itself and goes straight to what Allah told him down there: you will surely inform them of this affair of theirs while they do not perceive you (Qur'an 12:15). Later a caravan sends its water-drawer, who lowers his bucket and calls out "Good news! Here is a boy" (Qur'an 12:19). So the same well is the lowest point in the story and the first place the promise is spoken, and strangers' hands do the pulling up.

The second well sits at Madyan. The verse says Moses came to "the water of Madyan", which translators and commentators picture as a well, and found shepherds watering and two women holding their flock back (Qur'an 28:23). He watered for them, withdrew to the shade, and said that he was in need of whatever good Allah would send down to him (Qur'an 28:24). The women's father then invited him and proposed a marriage on condition of years of service (Qur'an 28:25-28). In both wells someone does a service at the water, and something unexpected arrives from it.

What the Prophet drew

The third well is the Prophet's own, and it is a place of work. He ﷺ said that in his sleep he saw himself standing at a well with a bucket and drew from it as much as Allah wished; then Abu Bakr took the bucket, drew a bucket or two with weakness in his pulling, and Allah forgave him; then the bucket turned huge and Umar took it, and he had never seen anyone draw as he did, until the people had drunk to their fill and their camels sat down by the water (Bukhari 7021, and the same vision with the people gathered in Bukhari 3633).

Set this beside a spring. The flowing spring that Umm al-'Ala saw for 'Uthman ibn Maz'un runs of its own accord, and the Prophet read it as his deeds running on (Bukhari 7018, and see water). A well does not run. Someone has to let down the bucket and pull, and every scene above has the water going to other people: the caravan, the flocks, the people and their camels. We read that as a pattern in the sources, not a rule that any hadith states. The hadith record no interpretation of the vision in their own words. The commentators read the order of drawers as the order of the leaders after him, and we treat that as theirs; the story is told in the well, the bucket, Abu Bakr and Umar.

The abandoned well and the well-shaped Fire

Two wells in the sources carry a warning. The first is the abandoned one of Qur'an 22:45, listed among ruined towns, and it is the footing, by extension, for reading a dry or neglected well as a warning: a source that once gave, now unused.

The second is a use of the word for a shape, not a symbol. 'Abdullah ibn Umar, a young man sleeping in the mosque who wanted a dream to bring to the Prophet, saw two angels take him to the Fire, built round like a lined well, with two posts in it and people he knew inside. He cried out for refuge, another angel told him not to be afraid, and when the dream reached the Prophet by way of Hafsa his reply was that Abdullah was a good man, and would be better if he prayed at night (Bukhari 1122). From then on he slept very little at night. The well in that dream is only the shape of the Fire, and the Prophet's answer was a nudge, not a threat. We would not read any well-like pit in a frightening dream as a verdict on a person.