The three kinds of dreams in Islam

The first rule of Islamic dream interpretation is not about symbols at all. It is about you, and specifically about how you feel when you wake up. Before anyone says what a single image means, the hadith sort dreams by their effect on the person who had them, and everything that follows on this site depends on that sorting.

What the hadith actually say

The clearest statement is in Muslim 2263a, from Abu Huraira. The Prophet ﷺ said dreams are of three types: a good dream, which is glad tidings from Allah; an evil dream, which causes pain and comes from Shaytan; and a third, which is a suggestion of one's own mind. In the same hadith comes the advice for a dream you dislike: get up, pray, and do not tell it to people.

The same division turns up again, in a notable form, in Bukhari 7017. After reporting the Prophet's words about believers' dreams, the narration quotes Muhammad ibn Sirin passing on a saying that "used to be said": there are three types of dreams, the reflection of what a person thinks and goes through when awake, what Shaytan suggests to frighten the dreamer, and glad tidings from Allah. Bukhari quotes Ibn Sirin on dreams in two places, here and in Bukhari 6993, where he adds a condition to seeing the Prophet ﷺ in a dream.

The three kinds have names in Arabic, and it helps to know them because the rest of the literature uses them without explanation.

The test the Prophet gave: how the dream leaves you

Look at how the Prophet ﷺ separates the first two. In Bukhari 6985 he does not describe their contents. He says that if one of you sees a dream he likes, it is from Allah, and he should thank Allah for it and tell it; but if he sees something he dislikes, it is from Shaytan, and he should seek refuge in Allah from its evil and not mention it to anyone, for it will not harm him. The test is the dreamer's own reaction.

That matters for two reasons. It makes the test usable by anyone, with no knowledge of symbols. And it explains the advice that follows: you do not decode a dream you dislike, because decoding it is exactly the engagement it was sent to provoke. One Companion's experience shows how seriously this was meant. Abu Salama used to see dreams so disturbing he ran a fever, until Abu Qatada passed on the Prophet's advice, after which they stopped weighing on him (Muslim 2261a; the same story is in Bukhari 7044).

A hard case: the frightening dream that was true

The reaction test has an obvious weak point, and the hadith show it. Abdullah ibn Umar, a young man sleeping in the mosque in the Prophet's lifetime, noticed that others were seeing dreams and wondered whether there was any good in him. One night he asked Allah to show him a good dream. He saw two angels with iron maces taking him toward Hell, and he kept calling out for refuge. Then a third angel met them and told him not to be afraid: he would be an excellent man if only he prayed more at night. He told his sister Hafsa, who told the Prophet ﷺ, who said that Abdullah was a good man. From then on, the narration adds, Ibn Umar prayed much at night (Bukhari 7029).

That dream was frightening, and the Prophet ﷺ did not tell him to dismiss it. So what did the test mean? The most natural reading is that the test concerns where the dream leaves you, not where it starts. This one ended in reassurance and a concrete invitation to do something good, and that is the mark of glad tidings. A dream that frightens and leaves you with nothing but fear, or with a push toward something wrong, is the other kind. We would not push the point harder than that, because the hadith do not.

What each kind asks of you

Each kind has a different job for you to do, and none of them is "work out what it means" as a first step.

For the full routine and where each step comes from, see what to do after a good or a bad dream.

46 parts, 45 parts, 70 parts

The true dream is called a part of prophecy, and the number varies. Bukhari has it as 46 parts (Bukhari 6989 and Bukhari 6983), Muslim 2263a gives the forty-fifth part, and Muslim 2265a gives the seventieth. Commentators offered explanations. The best known starts from the fact that revelation began with true dreams (Bukhari 3), counts that opening period as roughly six months, and sets it against the 23 years of revelation that followed, which comes to about one part in 46.

Whether or not that arithmetic is right, the lesson survives the variation. Prophecy has ended, but what the Prophet ﷺ called mubashshirat, glad tidings, remains: "the true good dreams" (Bukhari 6990). The point of the phrase is proportion. A true dream is a real but small share of something very large, and it never carries the authority of revelation. That is why the same tradition that honours it forbids using one to establish anything religious.

The Qur'an gives the background to all of this. Allah takes the souls at death and during sleep, keeping those for which death is decreed and releasing the others (Qur'an 39:42; also Qur'an 6:60, "He takes your souls by night"). Sleep is a kind of lesser withdrawal, and what is shown there is shown to a person in a state the Qur'an treats with real seriousness and no sensationalism.

What this means for reading any symbol

Everything else on this site assumes you have done this sorting first. If a dream left you shaken, the dictionary is the wrong place to start: read what to do after a good or a bad dream and let it go. If it was ordinary or confusing, the most likely answer is the third kind, and the symbols will tell you little. And if it left you calm and clear, the entries in the dictionary are for exactly that situation, held with the humility Yaqub showed when he told Yusuf not to relate his dream to his brothers, because "Shaytan is a manifest enemy to man" (Qur'an 12:5).

You can run this sorting in a few clicks with the dream guide, which asks how you felt and what the dream involved, then gives you the manners the Sunnah teaches. It does not claim more than the hadith do: it will tell you which kind is most likely, say when it is a close call, and leave the rest to you and to Allah.