Sleep and dreams in the Qur'an: where each word appears

Take the Arabic noun منام manam. In Qur'an 30:23 it means your sleep, listed among the signs of Allah. In Qur'an 8:43 it is where the Prophet was shown the enemy as few, and in Qur'an 37:102 it is where Ibrahim saw what he saw about his son. English gives "sleep" for the first and "dream" for the other two, but the Arabic is one noun, built on the same root as نوم nawm, the plain word for sleep. In those two verses a dream is simply what is seen "in sleep", and the rest of the Qur'an's vocabulary is stricter than English about what kind of seeing it was.

Sleep as a sign, a covering and a rest

Before the dream words come the sleep words. The Qur'an treats sleep as something Allah makes, and it uses several nouns for it.

Three small observations follow from the table. First, the verses that call sleep a sign end differently: Qur'an 30:23 says the signs are for people who listen, while Qur'an 39:42 says they are for people who think. Second, not every mention is gentle. Qur'an 7:97 and Qur'an 68:19 use "while they were asleep" for the hour when punishment arrives, and we read that as sleep being the state in which nobody can defend himself. Third, drowsiness (nu'as) is a separate word from sleep, and it is the one chosen when sleep comes as protection. The verb that covers the believers with it in Qur'an 8:11 shares its root with the one Abu Talha uses of Uhud, where slumber kept making his sword fall from his hand (Bukhari 4562). Qur'an 3:154 speaks of the same security after distress, and commentators place it at Uhud.

The soul taken by night

Two verses speak of a taking. Qur'an 39:42 says, in our paraphrase, that Allah takes the souls when they die and also those that have not died, in their sleep. He then keeps the ones for which death is decreed and sends the others back until a set term. Qur'an 6:60 says He takes you by night, knows what you earned by day, and then raises you in it so that a named term is completed.

The vocabulary carries the argument. The verb for taking is the same for death and for sleep. The verb for waking in Qur'an 6:60, بعث ba'atha, is the verb of resurrection. It is the word the dead use when they ask who raised them from their resting place (Qur'an 36:52), and it is the word for the youths of the cave waking (Qur'an 18:12). The Qur'an never needs to say that sleep resembles death, because it uses one word-family for both.

The Prophet ﷺ spoke the same way at night. He went to bed saying "with Your name I die and I live", and woke saying that praise belongs to Allah who gave life after causing death, and that to Him is the nushur (Bukhari 6324). That last word is the one Qur'an 25:47 gives to the day. Another bedtime prayer asks that if Allah holds the soul He have mercy on it and if He releases it He protect it (Bukhari 6320), and the verbs for holding and releasing are those of Qur'an 39:42. When the camp slept through the dawn on a journey, he told Bilal that Allah had taken their souls when He willed and returned them when He willed (Bukhari 595). Commentators speak of sleep as the lesser death and death as the greater, which is their language drawn from these verses, not a phrase in them.

Six words for seeing, dreaming and interpreting

The Qur'an's dream vocabulary is small and used with care. This table lists each word and the verses where we found it by searching the Arabic text (for ta'wil, the verses of Yusuf's story).

Two patterns stand out. The first is that the Qur'an keeps ru'ya for visions that were meant and ahlam for the muddled kind, which is the split the Prophet states in Bukhari 6984, where the ru'ya is from Allah and the hulm from Shaytan. None of the Qur'an's ru'ya is called muddled, and none of its ahlam is called true. The second is that the court's word in Qur'an 12:44 is not the king's. He said ru'ya, and they answered ahlam, which is a verdict before it is an excuse. One look-alike is not a dream word: ri'y in Qur'an 19:74 means outward appearance.

A note on translations. In Qur'an 12:4, Qur'an 12:36 and Qur'an 12:43 the Arabic has only "I saw" or "I see myself", and Sahih International adds "[in a dream]" in brackets. The phrase تأويل الأحاديث ta'wil al-ahadith in Qur'an 12:6, Qur'an 12:21 and Qur'an 12:101 comes out as "narratives", "events" and "dreams" in the same translation, which is a reminder of how much weight one Arabic phrase can carry. We follow the dream readings in the dreams of Surah Yusuf.