Prostration in a dream

A man once told the Prophet ﷺ that in his sleep he had been praying behind a tree. He recited a verse of prostration and went down, and the tree went down with him, and he heard it ask Allah to record a reward for it, to take a burden away by it, to store it with Him, and to accept it as He had accepted it from His servant Dawud. The Prophet's answer, as Ibn Abbas reports it, was not an interpretation. He recited a verse of prostration, prostrated, and Ibn Abbas heard him say the same words the tree had said (Tirmidhi 579).

That is the only report we found of a Companion's dream of prostration, and the reply is an action. The Qur'an has a prostration dream of its own, and the two sit at opposite ends: in one the dreamer goes down and creation goes down with him, in the other the sun, the moon and the stars go down before the dreamer. Between them they say most of what the sources say.

Yusuf's sun and moon, and the verse that explains them

The Qur'an itself explains a prostration dream, which is more than most images in this dictionary can claim. Yusuf tells his father he has seen eleven stars, the sun and the moon prostrating to him (Qur'an 12:4). Later his family has come to Egypt, he has raised his parents upon the throne, and they bow to him in prostration. He says: this is the explanation of my vision of before (Qur'an 12:100). The image meant what it showed, once it was seen from the far side of the story: the people closest to him bowing before the position Allah had given him (Qur'an 12:101). We read that as honour arriving through events, and nothing in the verse suggests worship.

One boundary has to stay in place. The same Qur'an tells people not to prostrate to the sun or the moon but to Allah who created them (Qur'an 41:37), and the angels prostrate to Adam at Allah's word (Qur'an 2:34). In waking life prostration belongs to Allah. So a dream of others bowing to you is read, if at all, by Yusuf's case, as a picture of standing among people and not as any claim on their worship.

Nearest to the Lord: what the act itself carries

For the act, the Sunnah is plain. The nearest a servant comes to his Lord is when he is prostrating, so make supplication there (Muslim 482). The Qur'an's instruction to the Prophet at the end of Surah al-Alaq is the same thought in two words: prostrate and draw near (Qur'an 96:19). When Rabi'a ibn Ka'b asked for the Prophet's company in Paradise, he was told to help him by prostrating often (Muslim 489). And the Qur'an describes the Prophet's companions by the trace of prostration on their faces (Qur'an 48:29), and the servants of the Most Merciful as those who spend the night prostrating and standing (Qur'an 25:64).

By analogy, a dream of prostrating reads as nearness and lowliness before Allah. We say by analogy because none of these texts is about a dream. Muslim 482 also adds something a dream cannot do: an invitation to ask for what you need while you are down. That is an instruction for waking prostration, and for the habit of asking itself you may want making du'a in a dream.

Trees, shadows and stars that go down

The tree in the Companion's dream is less strange than it sounds. The Qur'an says that to Allah prostrate those in the heavens and on the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees and the moving creatures (Qur'an 22:18), that the stars and the trees prostrate (Qur'an 55:6), and that shadows incline to the right and to the left in prostration (Qur'an 16:48). A dreamer who sees a tree or a shadow going down is seeing what the Qur'an says creation does, and the Companion's dream joins it to a request, in the tree's own voice, for a reward, a lighter burden and acceptance.

Tirmidhi 579 is called hasan by every grader listed with it, though one of them says only that its chain is hasan. We use it as the report it is. It records no rebuke and no reading, only the Prophet's action, and we will not invent a meaning to fill the gap. The row in the table is a description of what happened, not a code for what it signifies.