Clouds in a dream

Everyone else was glad to see the cloud. Aisha noticed that the Prophet ﷺ was not. When he saw one in the sky, she said, he would pace, going out and coming in, and the colour of his face would change, and only when rain fell did he relax. What troubled him, he said, was that for all he knew it might be like the cloud in the Qur'an that a people welcomed as rain, and that carried their punishment inside it (Bukhari 3206, Muslim 899c).

That is the cloud as the Qur'an and the Sunnah handle it: not a symbol with one meaning, but something you read by what it is carrying. We carry the same caution into dreams, and the single cloud dream in the hadith shows what reading by contents looks like when it is done in front of the Prophet himself.

The cloud with two faces

The Qur'an uses one word for a gift and for a threat, and it is careful to show both. Allah shaded the Children of Israel with clouds in the wilderness and gave them manna and quails (Qur'an 2:57). He drives clouds along, joins them, stacks them, and the rain comes out from between them (Qur'an 24:43). He sends the winds that carry heavy rainclouds toward dead land (Qur'an 7:57). Against that stands the people of 'Ad, who saw a cloud heading for their valleys and said it was bringing them rain, when it was a wind bearing a painful punishment (Qur'an 46:24). In Surah ash-Shu'ara, a people are seized by the punishment of the day of the black cloud (Qur'an 26:189).

Look at what 'Ad got wrong. They read the cloud by its appearance, and nothing in its appearance told them. Its contents did. That is the one rule that carries cleanly into a dream, and it is why a cloud has no single meaning in this tradition: the question is never "what does a cloud mean?" but "what was it carrying, where was it going, and how did you feel when it came?" The last part matters because 'Ad's own feeling, relief, was part of the mistake.

The canopy that dripped butter and honey

The one cloud dream the Prophet ﷺ is recorded hearing is not quite about a cloud, and it was not his own. A man came to him and said he had seen in sleep a ظُلَّة dripping butter and honey, with people holding out their hands to catch it, some getting much and some little, and a rope joining earth and sky. He saw the Prophet take hold of the rope and rise, then a second man, then a third, then a fourth whose hold broke and was joined again (Bukhari 7046, Muslim 2269a).

The Arabic word means a canopy, anything that throws shade. Bukhari's English says "a cloud having shade" and Muslim's says "a canopy", and both are fair. It is the same word the Qur'an uses for the "day of the shade" that seized the people of Shu'ayb (Qur'an 26:189) and for the mountain held over Israel as if it were a canopy (Qur'an 7:171). The word covers both shelter and threat. In this dream it carried honey.

Abu Bakr asked leave to interpret it. The canopy, he said, was Islam; the butter and honey the sweetness of the Qur'an, with some people taking a great deal of it and some a little; and the rope was the truth the Prophet followed, by which Allah would raise him, and then others after him, the last of whom would have the hold break and be joined again. Was he right? The Prophet answered that he was right in some of it and wrong in some. Abu Bakr pressed him to say which, and the Prophet said only: do not swear.

We tell it whole because of what it teaches about the craft. The interpreter was Abu Bakr, he spoke in front of the Prophet himself, and he was still told that part of his reading was wrong, without being told which. We take that as a reason for humility: a reading is an attempt. The longer account is Abu Bakr and the cloud of butter and honey.

Reading a cloud by what it carries

For cloud dreams that are not that one, the only honest method is the one 'Ad failed at and Abu Bakr practised. A cloud that shades, in the Qur'an's picture (Qur'an 2:57), is protection, and in Abu Bakr's reading, itself partly corrected, the shade was Islam. A cloud heavy with water is mercy, as in Qur'an 7:57. A dark cloud with wind in it is a warning, and the Prophet's own unease at one (Bukhari 3206) is the best reason not to dismiss it. Those are extensions of the texts, and we mark them as such.

One more cloud appears in a prophetic dream, and it comes with a caution. In the long dream he told his Companions one morning, he looked up and saw a palace "like a white cloud", and the two angels with him said it was his place (Bukhari 7047). The cloud there is a comparison for a palace, not the thing shown, so we would not build a reading on it. We mention it because it is the only other cloud in a prophetic dream, and it is a gentle one. The dream itself has its own page, the longest dream in the Sunnah.