Salwa's Dream
Dreamed c.1990? by Salwa Alshebeny
Besides offering advice and comfort, Prophet-visions can also be evocative; they can reshape the dreamer. One of Madame Salwa's dreams exemplifies how the Prophet can interfere in believers' lives, how he can direct them:
I dreamed that [the Prophet] was in a store, and I was passing by. There were also other girls, and I tried to attract his attention, so I went tak-tak-tak [making a sound with her shoes] while I was walking by. I stopped at the end of the street and looked back, and he, the prophet, was right behind me. He smiled at me and said, "What are you doing? Why did you stop? You know where to go. Your house is up there." So I walked up the hill to the house that he had pointed to. It was a white house with green rugs. Inside were angels and Abū Hurayra [one of the Prophet's companions]. He explained to me how to read hadiths correctly.Madame Salwa interpreted the dream for herself. "It meant," she explained, "that the Prophet knew that my inside (guwwa) was religious even though I didn't look llke it. The angels and the [Prophet's] companions are my home." Although Madame Salwa was exposed to weekly Qur'anic recitations from an early age onward, she said that she "didn't look religious" at the time the dream-vision came to her and that she used to wear short skirts (very short ones, it seems, from the gesture that went with the story). Yet the Prophet already knew that she would come to follow the right path and sent her in the right direction. When I met Madame Salwa years later, her friends, mother and sister praised her as being very spiritual (rawhāniyya), and much of her energy went into reading the Qur'an.
SOURCE: Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination by Amira Mittermaier (2011, University of California Press), p.169-70. DATE: just a guess. Mittermaier met Alshebeny in 2003.
EDITOR'S NOTE
This is just one of many such dreams in Mittermaier's study of personally meeting the Prophet or his companions; they seem quite common among Muslim dreamers. Mittermaier (p.166) points out "The Prophet himself affirmed the possibility of his dream-visitations by saying "whoever sees me in his sleep has truly seen me, because the devil cannot take my form." This hadith is widely known in Egypt; so Mittermaier concludes "the dreamer can (almost) be certain that the dream appearance is neither a reflection of her desire, nor the devil producing a dream-image in her mind."
Whoever you think is speaking in such dreams--internal or external--I suspect that if you're likely to act on advice from certain credentialed dream-figures in your spiritual tradition, your dream process will balk at letting devilishness--internal or external--fake those credentials; there are many ways to sabotage impersonation (from amnesia on), and strong motive to do it. Bad advice that will get acted on is just too risky. No filter's perfect (hence Mittermaier's "almost") but it's like the paralysis that keeps most of us, most of the time, from sleepwalking.
So trust the dream-advice of your angels, saints, unicorns and thunderbirds--more or less. There's reasonable evolutionary evidence to think you can.
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