Dreaming of Island in Islam

An island is read by whether the dreamer is on it by choice. Arriving at an island after being at sea is the good reading: safety reached, ground found after a period without any. Being stranded on one reverses it toward isolation — cut off from help, or from people whose help was expected. An island that is green and habitable is read as a settled place apart, and the older readings took it favourably for a person withdrawing from turmoil rather than from responsibility. A bare or waterless island is read as a separation with nothing to sustain it. Leaving an island by boat is read as re-entering the affairs of people. Seeing others on an island the dreamer cannot reach has been read as a company he is outside of. An island in a calm sea and one in a storm are read differently for the plain reason that the surrounding water carries its own symbol, and the sea's state colours everything on it.

There is no idiom and no Qur'anic image behind the island, and inventing one would be worse than admitting it. What the interpreters connected it to is the fact of the thing: an island is land defined entirely by what surrounds it. Its safety and its isolation are the same feature seen from two directions — the water that keeps trouble away is the water that keeps everything else away too. That is why the same dream reads as refuge for one person and as being cut off for another, and why the dreamer's own situation decides which.

A dream of an island does not tell anyone to withdraw, and it is not a warning about travel or about the sea. It is not a ruling and not a prediction. A person who has been feeling alone will produce this dream without any meaning attaching to it. If it left you uneasy, do what was taught for a distressing dream: seek refuge in Allah, turn onto your other side, and keep it to yourself.