Making du'a in a dream

Ibn Umar's famous dream has a supplication on each side of it. As a young man living in the Prophet's mosque, he lay down one night and said: O Allah, if You know any good in me, show me a good dream. In the dream two angels with iron maces were taking him toward Hell, and he was between them, calling out: O Allah, I seek refuge with You from Hell. The next thing he met was a third angel, who told him not to be afraid and said he would be an excellent man if only he prayed more (Bukhari 7029).

When the dream reached the Prophet ﷺ through Hafsa, his comment was short: Abdullah is a good man. And Nafi' adds that from then on Ibn Umar prayed much at night. We know of no other report in which the dreamer himself calls on Allah inside the dream, so this one carries most of the weight below. Nothing else in the Sunnah says what a supplication made in sleep means.

What came after the cry for refuge

Look at the order of events in that report. Ibn Umar asked, in waking life, for a good dream. He got a frightening one. Inside it he did what a believer does when afraid, and the next thing in the dream was a voice telling him not to be afraid, followed by a condition that sounds like an invitation: pray more. The dream gives no verdict, and its last movement is away from the pit: the angels turn him to the right. What it leaves him with is a task, and he took it up.

We would be careful about how far to carry that. The hadith does not say the cry caused the reassurance, and it does not say that every dreamer who calls on Allah will hear the same. What it shows is a frightening dream that the Prophet answered with a good word about the dreamer, not with a rule to dismiss it, and a dreamer who stayed with his du'a through it. For the dream's other half, the sight of Hell, see Hell in a dream.

What the Qur'an says a call is

The Qur'an makes calling on Allah a relationship before it makes it a technique. When His servants ask about Him, He is near, and He responds to the supplicant when he calls (Qur'an 2:186). He tells them to call and He will respond, and the ones who disdain His worship are warned (Qur'an 40:60). The Prophet connected the two ideas in a hadith that all the listed graders call sahih or hasan sahih: du'a is itself the worship (Tirmidhi 2969).

Then come the callers. Zakariya calls on his Lord in secret and says he has never been unhappy in his supplication to Him (Qur'an 19:3-4). Yunus calls out from within the darknesses, "There is no deity except You", and Allah responds and saves him from the distress (Qur'an 21:87-88). The Qur'an also asks: who responds to the desperate one when he calls and removes evil (Qur'an 27:62)? A dream in which you call on Allah from a bad place has these as its precedents, though none is a dream, and a reading by analogy is as far as we can honestly take it.

Asking for a dream, and what istikhara does not ask for

Ibn Umar asked for a dream, and the Prophet received the result kindly, but no hadith we know of tells anyone to ask for one. It is a Companion's practice that was met with approval. It should not be mistaken for a method.

The method people most often confuse with it is istikhara. The Prophet taught it to his Companions the way he taught them surahs: a 2 rak'a prayer, then a du'a asking Allah for what is good in one's religion and livelihood and the end of the matter, and then the person names his need (Bukhari 1166). Read the whole text and you will find no sleeping and no dream in it. Whatever you may see that night is a dream like any other, and the first step with it is still the sorting in the three kinds of dreams. The guide to istikhara covers the prayer and the du'a in full.

One more text belongs under this heading: words for waking afraid. Tirmidhi 3528 gives what to say when one of you is frightened in sleep, a seeking of refuge in Allah's perfect words from His anger, from the evil of His servants and from the whisperings of the devils, "for verily they shall not harm him". Three of the four graders listed with it call it hasan and one calls it weak.

When the voice will not come

Many people dream that they are praying or calling and cannot make a sound. No text interprets it, and we will not make one up. But the texts about voice are a comfort here. Zakariya's call was private (Qur'an 19:3). The Qur'an tells the believer to call in humility and privately (Qur'an 7:55) and to remember his Lord within himself, without being apparent in speech (Qur'an 7:205).

Then there is the day on a journey when the Companions raised their voices with takbir at every height, and the Prophet said: be merciful to yourselves, you are not calling a deaf or an absent one, but One who hears and is very near. The same report goes on to describe how he came to Abu Musa, who had been saying "la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah" in his heart, and told him to say that very phrase, a treasure of Paradise (Bukhari 7386). A du'a does not need sound to arrive.