Crying in a dream

Of everyone who weeps in the Qur'an, Yaqub is the one people remember. When more bad news came about his sons, he turned away and said, "Oh, my sorrow over Joseph," and "his eyes became white from grief" (Qur'an 12:84). Read on to the end of that verse: he was one who held his grief in. When his sons told him he would wear himself to death over it, his reply has been quoted ever since: "I only complain of my suffering and my grief to Allah" (Qur'an 12:85-86).

The ending matters as well. When the bearer of good news arrived and Yusuf's shirt was cast over his face, "he returned seeing" (Qur'an 12:96). That arc, grief held quietly and later undone, is a better preface to dreams of crying than most lists of meanings, because the sources care less that a person cries than how and why. And no verse or hadith interprets a dreamed cry. So below we set out what the texts say about waking tears, then what the dictionaries do with them in sleep.

Four reasons for tears, and who is doing the weeping

The Qur'an and the Sunnah name 4 occasions for tears, and every one has a person doing something. The first is grief, as in Yaqub. A close cousin of it is the grief of men turned away from a campaign because there were no mounts for them: they left "while their eyes overflowed with tears" because they had nothing to give (Qur'an 9:92). The second is recognition, when people hear the revelation and their eyes fill because they know the truth in it (Qur'an 5:83). The third is awe at recitation: believers fall on their faces weeping (Qur'an 17:109), and so did the prophets (Qur'an 19:58).

The fourth comes from the Sunnah, and it is solitude. Among the 7 whom Allah will shade on the day when there is no shade but His is a man who remembered Allah when alone and whose eyes flooded (Bukhari 660).

Notice that in all these the praise goes to the reason, and not to the water. A reader who knows that will put the first question to a crying dream the same way: what was the weeping about?

Tears are mercy; wailing is another thing

The Sunnah draws a sharp line inside weeping. When the Prophet ﷺ sat with his son Ibrahim in his last breaths, his eyes shed tears, and when Abd ar-Rahman ibn Awf asked whether even he wept, he answered that it was mercy. Then he said the eyes weep and the heart grieves, and "we will not say except what pleases our Lord" (Bukhari 1303).

On the other side, the Prophet said that whoever slaps his cheeks, tears his clothes and calls with the call of the Days of Ignorance is not one of us (Bukhari 1294). One report permits tears and grief; the other condemns a set of acts that go with loud mourning. They are not about dreams.

Still, the line is useful to know, because the dream books draw a very similar one. The compilations commonly separate quiet weeping from weeping with wailing, shouting or striking the face. We cannot show that the compilers took the distinction from these hadith, and we will not claim it. But when you meet it in a dictionary, you should know the Sunnah drew the same line for waking life first.

What the books do with dreamed tears

Most rows come from the dictionary tradition, with the waking texts as parallels, and 2 rest on the Sunnah's 3 kinds of dream. We mark each row so you can see which is which.

The dreamer's situation changes which row applies. Someone bereaved last month who cries in sleep is most likely carrying the loss, and the table adds little. Someone whose life is steady and who wakes in a calm after quiet tears is closer to the "relief" reading.

For the dream you may have had just before or after, laughing is the matching entry, since the Qur'an says it is Allah who makes one laugh and weep (Qur'an 53:43). Seeing the deceased covers the case where tears were for someone who has died.