Istikhara, literally "seeking the best" [is] a non-obligatory prayer through which God's help is requested when one is facing a difficult decision. The answer often comes in the form of a dream-vision.

...Most istikhara stories I heard, from both men and women, had to do with the choice of a marriage partner. "I didn't know if he was right for me," Nabila--a young woman in Mahalla, a town in the Nile Delta--told me while her family and I were sitting in their living room, drinking tea and eating cake. Nabila, who was described by her relatives as being close to God, as "fearing God," reported that since she did not know whether the man was right for her, she prayed istikhara about him. Everyone but I knew how the story would end, but all listened intently nevertheless.

The night following the istikhara prayer, Nabila dreamed that she was walking down a street with her sister in their neighborhood in Mahalla. (Nabila pointed to her sister, who was sitting across from her, and then pointed to where the street was on which they were walking in the dream.) Suddenly, she continued, the sky turned completely dark and, although the man who had proposed to her never appeared in the dream, she read the darkening of the sky as a warning sign and rejected him.

The dream was simple and clear, and--as she was to find out later that the man was not honorable--it had also been right.

SOURCE: Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination by Amira Mittermaier (2011, University of California Press), p.266 (def. of istihkara and p.97 (Nabila's dream). DATE: rough guess. Mittermaier's fieldwork was 2003-4; the dream was long enough ago for the suitor's perfidy to emerge and for the story to polish.

EDITOR'S NOTE

In Greco-Roman tradition this posing of a question or a dilemma to one's dreams was called incubation; some secular dreamworkers call it dream induction. These, and a hundred shamanic variants worldwide, differ in assumptions about control and direction (are you asking your deep self, external spirits, impersonal forces, a god? Are you begging, asking or demanding an answer? Just quieting yourself so as to see what's already there?) but they all fill an oracular function, and not a helpless or superstitious one; you set the agenda, you judge the advice given.

Every culture has such techniques, and they work--both in the sense of returning relevant answers, and in that more answers seem right than not. Even the first sense challenges contemporary sleep-and-dream theory, especially the claim that dreams are just memory consolidation, or just the mind reading patterns into mere chaos. If so, questions wouldn't shape dreams; yet they do (as I know from personal experience). We can debate the wisdom of incubated dream advice, but not that when asked, and however they're asked, dreams answer.

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