Rain in a dream

On a Friday in Madinah a man interrupted the sermon to say that the livestock were dying and the roads were cut, and the Prophet ﷺ raised his hands and prayed for rain. It fell for a week. The next Friday a man came again, this time to say that houses had collapsed and the livestock were being destroyed, so he prayed again, now asking for rain on the hilltops, the valleys and the places where trees grow. The clouds drew off Madinah the way a garment is taken off (Bukhari 1019). In the telling of Bukhari 1013 his words were "around us and not on us".

Rain asked for and rain endured were the same rain. That scene is the best preparation we know for a rain dream, because it changes the question from "is rain good?" to "where is it falling, and what is it doing there?" Nearly everything below is an answer to that second question.

Matar and ghayth: the Qur'an keeps two kinds of rain

Everyday Arabic says مطر for rain. The Qur'an is more careful with that word. For the rain people wait and hope for, it prefers غيث: "He sends down the rain after they had despaired and spreads His mercy" (Qur'an 42:28). The root of matar turns up in 9 verses, and we checked them one by one. Of those, 8 concern stones or punishment: the rain of stones on the people of Lot (Qur'an 7:84, Qur'an 11:82), a town "showered with a rain of evil" (Qur'an 25:40), unbelievers daring Allah to rain stones on them (Qur'an 8:32), and the people of 'Ad, who saw a cloud and said "this is a cloud bringing us rain" when it was a wind carrying a painful punishment (Qur'an 46:24). The last is a passing permission for soldiers to put their arms down if rain troubles them (Qur'an 4:102).

This is an observation about vocabulary, not a rule any dream book states, and nobody should read a punishment into ordinary rain because of a root. What it does show is that the Qur'an holds two pictures of rain at once: the one that revives, and the one that is the form a judgement takes. The difference lies in what falls and on whom. A single word for downpour covers both outcomes in Qur'an 2:264-265, where it strikes a dusty stone and leaves it bare, and strikes a garden on high ground and doubles its fruit. Same sky, different ground.

One rain, different kinds of ground

The Prophet ﷺ made that contrast explicit himself. He compared the guidance and knowledge he was sent with to abundant rain on the earth (Bukhari 79). Some of the land was good soil that took the water and grew plants and grass in abundance. Some was hard ground that held the water, so that people drank from it, watered their animals and irrigated their crops. And some was barren flat ground that neither held water nor grew anything. He applied the contrast to people: the one who understands the religion, benefits and teaches it; and the one who never lifts his head to it.

That was a simile about a real message, said awake, and it is not a dream rule. But it explains the move the dictionaries make when they ask about the dreamer: the rain is constant, and the ground decides. The Qur'an adds the receiver's side. When rain reaches those He wills, "immediately they rejoice" (Qur'an 30:48), so the feeling in the dream, welcome or dreaded, is part of the evidence. That last step is ours, drawn from the verse. No text says it about dreams.

The nearest thing to a rain dream in the Sunnah

The hadith record no rain dream as such, but they record something close. A man told the Prophet ﷺ he had seen a cloud giving shade, with butter and honey dripping from it and people holding out their hands to catch it, some taking much and some little (Bukhari 7046). Abu Bakr asked to interpret it: the shade was Islam, the dripping sweetness was the Qur'an, and the many and the few were those who learned much of it or little. The Prophet told him he was right in part and wrong in part, and when Abu Bakr begged to be told which part, he answered "Do not swear".

Two things follow. First, a precedent: in the Prophet's lifetime, something coming down from a cloud in a dream was read as the Qur'an arriving, and Bukhari 79 reads real rain the same way. That is the footing for taking rain as knowledge or guidance, and it is an extension, since the dripping was honey and not water. We cannot even say that Abu Bakr's reading of the dripping was among the parts he got right, because the Prophet did not say which parts were wrong. Second, even Abu Bakr, with the Prophet in front of him, was corrected on some of it. The longer story is told in Abu Bakr and the cloud of butter and honey.

Rain read by its effects

Put together, the sources support a short table. The third column matters more than the second.