Dreaming of Desert in Islam

A desert is read by whether the dreamer is crossing it or lost in it, and by what he finds. Walking through it with a direction in mind is read as a stretch of hardship on the way to something, not as an end in itself. Being lost in it turns toward confusion in a matter the dreamer thought he understood. Finding water or a well in it is the strongest good reading in the chapter: relief arriving exactly where nothing was expected. A desert that blooms or greens is read as a state changing beyond what effort alone would explain. Being alone in it was read as a withdrawal — sometimes chosen and beneficial, sometimes an isolation the dreamer has not admitted to. Travelling in it with company shifts the reading onto those people and onto what is shared with them. Fear of it without any actual harm is read as the dread of a difficulty rather than the difficulty.

The reading rests on a plain fact rather than a hidden idiom: the desert is the place where a person carries everything he needs and where nothing is provided. The interpreters connected it to trial and to searching for that reason, and the Qur'anic accounts of a people led through wilderness before arriving somewhere gave the same shape — a passage, not a destination. Interpreters differed on whether it reads as hardship or as clearing, and the difference is usually in whether the dreamer was walking or standing still.

A desert dream is not a forecast of a hard year and not a sign that anyone has been abandoned. It carries no ruling and no news of what is coming. Feeling lost in waking life produces this dream more often than anything else does. If it left you uneasy, do what is taught for any troubling dream: seek refuge in Allah, turn onto your other side, and leave it untold.