Question:
Why do we have dreams and aren’t able to know the meaning? It’s not always possible to get it interpreted. Does it matter if we know or not know the meaning of the Dream?
Answer:
When you like something a lot or want something a lot or fear something a lot it will occupy your thoughts and monopolize your attention. Those concerns show up in your dreams and the majority of the latter is made of the mostly indistinct bubbling up of the psyche’s fancies, lower desires, and whisperings before the eyes and ears of the mind. On rare occasions it is a truthful dream consisting in Prophetic, angelic, or divine inspiration. Only then do dreams matter.
Imam al-Baydawi said in his Tafsir of Surat Yusuf (upon him peace) 12:5:
A dream consists in the imprint of the image that descends from the region of mental fancy to common sense. Such images can be truthful only through the soul’s connection to the malakūt (preternal dominion), because of their mutual congruence, once it frees itself from the body’s control in the least, when one conceives whatever is suitable to oneself of some of the meanings that are there; then imagination mimicks it in a corresponding form which it sends to common sense where it becomes seen. When there is strong congruence to that meaning so that there is no disparity other than in completeness or partialness, the dream is in no need of interpretation, otherwise it needs it.
Hajj Gibril Haddad
