Smoke in a dream

A speaker in the tribe of Kinda was telling people that the Smoke would one day come on the Day of Resurrection, take away the hypocrites' hearing and sight, and leave the believers with nothing worse than a cold. Masruq heard it and was frightened, so he went to Ibn Mas'ud, who was reclining. Ibn Mas'ud sat up angry. Whoever knows a thing may say it, he told Masruq, but whoever does not should say "Allah knows best", because that too is knowledge (Bukhari 4774).

Then he told the story as he understood it, and it is the strangest account of smoke in the sources: a smoke that was seen by people who were hungry. It is the nearest thing the Sunnah has to an explanation of where one person's smoke can come from, and it is where this entry begins.

What the Qur'an makes of smoke

Four verses carry the image most clearly, and they do not agree on its tone. In Qur'an 44:10-11 the sky brings "a visible smoke", covering the people, "a painful torment". Qur'an 56:43-44 gives the people of the left "a shade of black smoke", neither cool nor beneficial, and Qur'an 77:30-31 describes a shadow with three columns that gives no cool shade. In all three, smoke is a covering that cannot shelter, a shade that fails at the one thing shade is for.

The fourth is different. Qur'an 41:11 says Allah turned to the heaven "while it was smoke" and told it and the earth to come into being, and they answered that they came willingly. There, smoke is the stuff of the sky before it took shape. We know of no dictionary that builds a dream reading on that verse, and we mention it so that nobody thinks the Qur'an uses the word only as a threat.

The smoke that was hunger

According to Ibn Mas'ud, the Quraysh had refused Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ prayed that they be given years of famine like the years of Yusuf. The famine came, and it was severe: they ate bones and carrion. A man would look at the sky and imagine something like smoke between himself and it, because of extreme fatigue and hunger (Bukhari 4821). Then came the verses of Qur'an 44:10-11, and then Abu Sufyan asking for rain to be prayed for, since the people were on the edge of destruction. The Prophet prayed, it rained, and the Quraysh went back to their old ways. Ibn Mas'ud counted the "mighty grasp" of the next verses as Badr (Bukhari 4774).

This is a waking perception, not a dream, and we should not stretch it. But it does give a rare piece of information: according to a Companion, an image of smoke can be what an exhausted body produces, with nothing burning anywhere. That is the same logic as the third kind of dream the Prophet names, "a suggestion of one's own mind" (Muslim 2263a). Hunger, fever, a stuffy bedroom: the body supplies the haze, and the dream draws it.

Reading smoke by its spread and its source

Here is how the three steps of the method apply. The Qur'an gives smoke the sense of a covering hardship. The hadith add Ibn Mas'ud's account, where smoke is the shape distress takes. And the dictionary tradition, working by analogy, reads smoke in dreams as trouble that obscures: strife, sorrow, a matter that clouds judgment. The details differ from book to book, and none of them rests on a text about dreams.

Three things move the reading: how widely the smoke spreads (one person or many), whether it clears, and the state of your body. Someone with a cold, a heater on or an empty stomach has a plain explanation already. If there were flames under the smoke, that part belongs to fire, which the Qur'an uses very differently.