Your father in a dream

Two of the dreams the Qur'an lets us overhear are told between a father and a son. Yusuf brings his to Yaqub: 11 stars, the sun and the moon, bowing to him (Qur'an 12:4). Ibrahim brings his to his son: that he is sacrificing him (Qur'an 37:102). In the first the father listens and answers, and in the second he is the dreamer and the son answers. Both times the son's words begin يا أبت, "O my father."

Neither passage reads a dream about a father, and no verse or hadith does. But they are the Qur'an's fullest pictures of what a father does with a dream, and for this image they are a better guide than the short lists of meanings you will find online. We start with them, then with the one Qur'anic father who refuses, and then with what the dictionary books add and what each part of it rests on.

Yaqub answers before he interprets

Yaqub's reply to the 11 stars is not a decoding. It is protective. Do not relate your vision to your brothers, he says, or they will contrive against you, for Shaytan is a manifest enemy to man (Qur'an 12:5-6). Then comes a forecast of favour and not of events: your Lord will choose you, teach you the interpretation of narratives and complete His favour on you and the family of Yaqub, as He completed it on your fathers before, Ibrahim and Ishaq. He never says what the sun and the moon are. The explanation arrives at the end of the story, when Yusuf himself says to his father: this is the explanation of my vision of before (Qur'an 12:100).

So the one father in the Qur'an who hears a dream spends his answer on guarding the dreamer, and leaves the reading to time. The Sunnah has the Prophet say that a dream one likes is from Allah, and that one should thank Him for it and tell it (Bukhari 6985). Yaqub's advice adds a limit on whom to tell, and to whom you tell a dream, and when not to takes that up in full.

Ibrahim consults his son

The second father is the dreamer. When his son was old enough to work with him, Ibrahim says: I have seen in a dream that I must sacrifice you, so see what you think. The boy answers: O my father, do as you are commanded, and you will find me, if Allah wills, steadfast (Qur'an 37:102-105). When both had submitted, Allah called to Ibrahim that he had fulfilled the vision.

Notice two things. Even with a dream that carried a command, the father spoke to his son and did not act in silence. And the son treated it as a command, which is exactly why this passage is not a template. It is a prophet's dream, and no ordinary dream carries that force. The Prophet ﷺ sorted the dreams of everyone else into good tidings from Allah, a painful dream from Shaytan, or a suggestion of one's own mind (Muslim 2263a), and none of the three is an order. Ibrahim and the dream of the sacrifice tells the whole account.

The father who refused, and the courtesy that stayed

The third father is the hard case. Ibrahim says "O my father" four times in a row, each time to tell him something difficult: that what he worships cannot hear or see, that knowledge has come to Ibrahim which has not come to him, that Shaytan is not to be followed. His father answers with a threat to stone him and an order to keep away (Qur'an 19:42-48). Ibrahim's reply is "Peace be upon you", and a promise to ask forgiveness. Later, when it became clear that his father was an enemy to Allah, Ibrahim disassociated himself from him (Qur'an 9:114).

The Qur'an does not make a father always right, and it does not make courtesy depend on that. Where parents press you toward associating others with Allah, it says do not obey them but accompany them in this world with appropriate kindness (Qur'an 31:15). The Sunnah's best-known ranking of parents puts the father after the mother, in the fourth answer the Prophet ﷺ gave to one man's question (Bukhari 5971). All of this concerns waking conduct. If your father was harsh, estranged or gone, a dream about him may bring that back, and these texts are the ones to set beside it.

A line, not one man: how the books read him

Arabic gives أب a longer reach than English "father". Yaqub calls Ibrahim and Ishaq Yusuf's "fathers" (Qur'an 12:6), Yusuf calls them and Yaqub "my fathers" (Qur'an 12:38), and Yaqub's sons list Ibrahim, Ismail and Ishaq as his fathers (Qur'an 2:133), though Ismail was Ishaq's brother and so Yaqub's uncle. A father in the Qur'an's language can be a forefather or an elder of the house. Popular compilations read a father in a dream as authority, protection and support, and a reading of him as an elder or a lineage fits that usage. That is our explanation of the fit. We cannot show the compilers argued this way.

For the other parent, see your mother in a dream. An elder you could not place has a page of its own in an old man in a dream.