If one sees himself renewing his Islam in a dream, it means safety from plagues, sickness, or adversities.
To proclaim the
The dream of the prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son, his obedience to the Divine will and his willingness to submit in absolute faith to God made him the first true Muslim and the father of prophets.
The true interpretation of the dreams of the king of Egypt by the prophet Joseph saved both the Egyptians and the children of Israel from famine and death.
The dreams of the Prophet Muhammad, upon him and all the prophets of God be peace and blessings, marked the beginning of his revelation, the noble Qur’fm which changed the face of human history and civilization. Although dreams belong to the domain of personal experience, they are a universal phenomenon, and thus have played a crucial role in the formation of human culture. Throughout recorded human history, dreams and the interpretation of dreams have inspired sages and prophets, poets and kings, as well as the most creative psychologist/philosophers of our day.
The science of psychoanalysis of Carl Jung and his school rests on the fact that dreams form the inner diary of every human individual, and hence the need to read and interpret them correctly. This fact has for long been recognized by the sages and prophets of traditional cultures and religions. Not all dreams, however are either true or authentic. Those of the prophets and friends (awliya’s) of God are Divine revelations, true and sacred.
The dreams of pious men and women are almost always true and meaningful. Some dreams come from Satan, and are thus misleading. Others may be caused by physical or psychological problems such as stomach discomfort or emotional disturbance. It is therefore important to distinguish true dreams from empty fantasies, and inspired dreams from satanic insinuations. This is a Divine gift to inspired prophets, holy persons and insightful sages.
The beginner in this field must know that there are two types of dreams: one type that comes from God Almighty, and the second type comes from satan. What is good comes from God Almighty, which is a type of revelation that comes to a righteous person and carries either glad tidings, or warnings. Such dreams also cause one’s heart to reflect upon his actions and to beware of heedlessness.
On the other hand, they could be a reprimand for an ignoble act one is pondering, or an act one may mistakenly thinks that it is the correct thing to do, or a new friendship that could lead him to hell-fire, or a clarification concerning his treatment of his family and friends and about his business dealings, or they may bring spiritual guidance, etcetera. This is the type of dream which is referred to in God’s Prophet’s sayings: “Atrue dream representsone offorty-six branches of a prophecy.” Both religious and irreligious people may see a true dream that could come true.
The second type of dream connotes deception, cunningness, contriving, jealousy, or a scare, causes pain, depicts any type of eavesdropping, engaging in mundane conversation, the call of one’s mind and desires, or imagination, or occur after eating a heavy late meal or even going to bed hungry, etcetera. This type of dream comes from satan. God’s Prophet (uwbp) has said: ‘As time draws nearer to the conclusion of this world,dreams will become confused.
The most true of dreams are those ofa truthful person. Thus, if one sees a dream that he dislikes, he should tell no one about it, and he should immediately leave his bed and perform his prayers.” He also said: “The best of ropes is steadfastness to one’s religious life." Interpreting dreams is a process of analyzing the nature of things and their opposing possibilities, connecting their roots, and assembling the fragments of one’s thoughts to better understand his or her real condition. In a dream, one may see things that may connote equilibrium or the opposite, while his passive and inert participation urges him to examine the elements and to awaken his consciousness. Sometimes, the elements themselves may be opaque or unclear. In this case, if one recognizes a person in the dream, perhaps the name of that person, or his trade, or his look, or the meaningofthe individual letters of his name, or their combined numerological value, etcetera, mayprovide a clue to the meaning of one’s dream.
Ten Thousand Dream Interpretation
If a young woman imagines that she is over religious, she will disgust her lover with her efforts to act ingenuous innocence and goodness.
If she is irreligious and not a transgressor, it foretells that she will have that independent frankness and kind consideration for others, which wins for women profound respect, and love from the opposite sex as well as her own; but if she is a transgressor in the eyes of religion, she will find that there are moral laws, which, if disregarded, will place her outside the pale of honest recognition. She should look well after her conduct.
If she weeps over religion, she will be disappointed in the desires of her heart.
If she is defiant, but innocent of offence, she will shoulder burdens bravely, and stand firm against deceitful admonitions.
If you are self-reproached in the midst of a religious excitement, you will find that you will be almost induced to give up your own personality to please some one whom you hold in reverent esteem.
To see religion declining in power, denotes that your life will be more in harmony with creation than formerly. Your prejudices will not be so aggressive.
To dream that a minister in a social way tells you that he has given up his work, foretells that you will be the recipient of unexpected tidings of a favorable nature, but if in a professional and warning way, it foretells that you will be overtaken in your deceitful intriguing, or other disappointments will follow. (These dreams are sometimes fulfilled literally in actual life. When this is so, they may have no symbolical meaning. Religion is thrown around men to protect them from vice, so when they propose secretly in their minds to ignore its teachings, they are likely to see a minister or some place of church worship in a dream as a warning against their contemplated action.
If they live pure and correct lives as indicated by the church, they will see little of the solemnity of the church or preachers.)
2. Social control, restraint.
3. Contentment and serenity.
4. A message is being conveyed from one level of consciousness to another (note type of religion and its tenets).
To dream that you are questioning your religious beliefs, suggests that you are a deeply spiritual person.
A Guide to Dreams and Sleep Experiences
At its most fundamental, the human religious sense emerges out of several factors. One is the awareness of existing amidst external and internal forces of nature which cause us to feel vulnerable and perhaps powerless. Such natural processes as illness, death, growth and decay, earthquakes, the seasons, confront us with things which are often beyond our ability to control. Considenng the information and resources of the times, one of religion’s main functions in the past was the attempted control of the ‘uncertain’ factors in human life, and help towards psychological adjustment to valine rability. Religions were the first social programmes aiding the human need for help and support towards emotional, mental, physical and social health and maturity. Even if primitive, such programmes helped groups of people to gain a common identity and live in reasonable harmony together. Like a computer program which is specific to a particular business, such programmes were specific to a particular group, and so are outdated in today’s need for greater integration with other races. Religions also offered some sort of concept of and connection with the roots of being.
Example: ‘For two nights running I have dreamt the same nightmare. I am in a chapel walking down the first flight of several flights of steps when I hear loud noises behind me. I am told to run, being warned of the soldiers who ride the cavalry horses nght down the steps, and who run you over if you are in their way.
The horses are fierce and they absolutely race down the steps at the same time every day, and you literally have to lock yourself away in a nearby room which is a long way down the chapel. I ran into the room hearing the pounding of the horses’ hooves. It was a terrible pandemonium in that chapel. In the room were school children the same age as me and some perhaps younger’ (Maria H). Maria, who is 16, in describing her dream says she had recently been confronted with whether to have a sexual relationship with her boyfriend. Religion, represented by the chapel, is Maria’s way of locking out her powerful sexual urges. Many dreams show that religion, as a set of beliefs, is used as a way of avoiding anxiety in the face of life’s uncertainties.
For many people, the rigid belief system helps them to avoid uncertainty in making decisions.
Dreams also portray and define the aspect of human experience in which we sense a kinship with all life forms. This is the side of spiritual expenence through which we find a connection with the roots of our being. While awake we might see the birth of a colt and feel the wonder of emergence and newness; the struggle to stand up and survive, the miracle of physical and sexual power which can be accepted or feared. In looking in the faces of fellow men and women we see something of what they have done in this strange and painful wonder we call life. We see whether they have been crushed by the forces confronting them; whether they have become ngid; or whether, through some common miracle, they have been able to carry into their mature years the laughter, the crying, the joy, the ability to feel pain, that are the very signs of life within the human soul. These things are sensed by us all, but seldom organised into a comprehensive view of life, and an extraction of meaning. Often it is only in our dreams, through the ability the unconscious has to draw out the significance of such widely divergent expenences, that we glimpse the unity behind phenomena which is an essential of spiritual life, i.e. we all have a life, we breathe, we have come from a mother, so share a universal experience.
Example: To quote J.B. Priestley from his book Rain Upon Godshill: ‘Just before I went to Amenca, dunng the exhausting weeks when I was busy with my Time Plays, I had such a dream, and I think it left a greater impression on my mind than any experience I had ever known before, awake or in dreams, and said more to me about this life than any book I have ever read.
The setting of the dream was quite simple, and owed something to the fact that not long before my wife had visiied the lighthouse here at St Catherine’s to do some bird ringing. I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds all flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek, and then, in a flash bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless effort? As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us, had been bom, if the struggle ceased for ever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again, and the time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men and creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled through them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it, what I had thought was tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never before felt such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds.’
Some Nonh American Indians developed the totem out of similar processes. In one generation a person might learn to plant a seed and eat the results. Later someone might see that through fertilisation more food was produced. Still later someone found that by irrigating, still more improvement was made. No one individual was responsible for such vital cultural information, and the collective information is bigger than any one person, yet individuals can partake of it and add to it.
The totem represented such subtle realities, as it might in a modem dream; as Christ might in today’s unconscious. That older cultures venerated their collective information, and that modem humans seem largely apathetic to it, shows how our ‘religion’ has degenerated. Yet utilising the power of the unconscious to portray the subtle influences which impinge upon us, and building the information gained into our response to life, is deeply important.
With the growth of authoritarian structures in western religion, and the dominance of the rational mind over feeling values, dreams have been pushed into the background. With this change has developed the sense that visionary dreams were something which ‘superstitious* cultural groups had in the past. Yet thoroughly modem men and women still meet Christ powerfully in dreams and visions. Christ still appears to them as a living being.
The transcendental, the collective or universal enters their life just as frequently as ever before. Sometimes it enters with insistence and power, because a too rational mind has led to an unbalance in the psyche—a balance in which the waking and rational individuality is one pole, and the feeling, connective awareness of the unconscious is the other.
Although it is tempting to think of the transcendent as ethereal or unreal, the religious in dreams is nearly always a symbol for the major processes of maturing in human life. We are the hero/ine who meets the dangers of life outside the womb, who faces growth, ageing and death.
The awe and deep emotions we unconsciously feel about such heroic deeds are depicted by religious emotion.
See angel; Christ, rebirth and Devil under archetypes; church; evil; fish, sea creatures; example in whale under fish, sea creatures; heaven, hell; sweets under food; dream as spiritual guide. See also hero/ine; mass; masturbation; old; paralysis; colours; sheep under animals.
If the religion depicted is the one you currently practice, this dream reveals your feelings toward that faith, its tenets, and your activities within that organization.
The subconscious or Higher Self expressing a need to reconnect with sacred powers and spiritual ideals.
Different religions appearing in dreams may stem from your exposure to recent articles or documentaries on the subject.
If this is the case, consider this part of the dream situational.
Each faith has a slightly different focus, which may reflect heavily on your current situation.
For example, Buddhism is highly introspective and philosophical, which might reflect too much brooding on your part, or perhaps not enough, depending on the other dream images.