Lightning in a dream

The Qur'an says one thing about lightning twice, and both times in the same four Arabic words, يُرِيكُمُ الْبَرْقَ خَوْفًا وَطَمَعًا: Allah shows you the lightning, fear and hope (Qur'an 13:12, Qur'an 30:24). The other places where the Book mentions lightning (Qur'an 2:19-20, Qur'an 24:43) fit inside that pairing, and so does any sensible reading of lightning in a dream.

What the pairing does not say matters as much. Neither verse calls the flash an omen, and neither ties it to punishment. We will go through what the texts do say, then through the three different words the Qur'an uses where dream readers tend to use one.

Fear and hope, and where the rain comes in

Check what follows the phrase each time. In Qur'an 13:12 it is the raising of the heavy clouds. In Qur'an 30:24 it is rain sent down from the sky to bring the dead earth back to life, which the verse calls a sign for people who use reason. So the hope in "fear and hope" is the rain, and the fear is what a storm might also bring. Qur'an 24:43 fills in the picture: clouds driven together and stacked up, rain coming out of the middle, hail within, and a flash whose brightness almost takes away the eyesight. Read together, the three verses describe an ordinary storm as seen by someone who depends on it and is wary of it too, a traveller or a farmer who is glad and alarmed at once.

The dictionary readings stay close to that: lightning as a sudden event with a warning in it and the hope of relief behind it. No verse or hadith interprets lightning in a dream, though, and we want to be plain that this is a reading from the dictionary tradition, built on the Qur'an's words and not on any report. What we would insist on is the other side. Because the Qur'an puts the fear and the hope into one flash, a reading that keeps only the fear has gone beyond the verse.

A light that comes and goes

The one place where lightning is something a person acts on is a parable (Qur'an 2:19-20). A rainstorm with darkness, thunder and lightning; people press their fingers into their ears against the thunderclaps for dread of death; the flash almost snatches their sight; every time it lights the way they walk in it, and when the dark comes over them again they stand still. The picture is of light that arrives in bursts and leaves people frozen when it stops.

That gives the flash one more possible reading in a dream, and it is our inference from the parable and not a received rule: a moment of clarity that shows the way for as long as it lasts, and that the dreamer cannot count on to go on lighting the road. The Sunnah adds a second quality, speed. Describing how people will cross the Path on the Day of Judgment, the Prophet ﷺ said the first would pass like lightning, and when he was asked what that is like, he answered: have you not seen how it passes and returns within the twinkling of an eye (Muslim 195)? In his usage lightning is the measure of the swiftest crossing, which is a good one. So the same image carries brevity, speed and a light that cannot be held, and which of them applies depends on how it felt.

Flash, thunder and thunderbolt are three words

Dream readers often run lightning and thunderbolt together, and the Qur'an does not. The flash is بَرْق, and it appears only in the verses above. Thunder, رَعْد, is praise: it exalts Allah, and the angels do so from fear of Him (Qur'an 13:13). The strike is a third word, صَاعِقَة, the thunderbolt that took the people who demanded to see Allah openly (Qur'an 2:55), that was set up as the warning example of 'Ad and Thamud (Qur'an 41:13), and that seized Thamud (Qur'an 41:17). Where the Qur'an tells of a people struck from the sky by something of this kind, the word is the thunderbolt, and the word for the flash is not used for it.

In a hadith that the graders our source lists put at sound or good, the Jews asked the Prophet ﷺ what thunder is, and he said it is an angel in charge of the clouds who drives them where Allah wills, and that the noise we hear is the angel striking the clouds as he drives them on (Tirmidhi 3117). We cite it as support for the Qur'an's picture and not as a foundation, since it is outside the two Sahih books. It makes thunder the sound of work being done, which is a long way from the sound of a sentence being passed.

A strike falling on a person, a house or a field is therefore its own image, and the only texts about it are about waking punishments on earlier peoples. That is not a reason to read a dream as a verdict, and we keep it as its own row below.