Dreaming of Jungle in Islam

A jungle or dense wild forest is read by whether the dreamer can move through it and by what he meets there. Being lost among trees with no path is the settled reading: a matter that has become complicated beyond the dreamer's ability to see the whole of it, requiring patience rather than force. Finding a path, or following one already trodden reverses the reading — the complication has an order in it, and someone has been through before. Cutting through undergrowth is read as progress bought by effort, which the older interpreters treated as the honest and slow way out. Meeting a wild animal in it shifts the dream onto that animal and onto the specific difficulty it stands for, rather than onto the place. Coming out into open ground is the clearest good reading in this chapter: a confusion resolved, a matter finally seen from outside. A jungle that is green and full of fruit but still impassable was read as a good that is genuinely there and not yet reachable. Standing still in it without fear is read as accepting that a matter will take time.

There is no Arabic idiom underneath this one, and inventing one would be dishonest. The interpreters connected wild, trackless country to confusion for the reason the place itself gives: everything in a thicket is close, nothing is visible at a distance, and every direction looks the same. The classical texts speak in terms of wilderness and untravelled land rather than of tropical forest, but the reading is the same — the danger is not the trees, it is the loss of bearings.

A dream of being lost in a wild place is not a prediction that a plan will fail, and it names no situation. It carries no ruling. Anyone who went to sleep in the middle of an unresolved problem may find it drawn for him in exactly this shape, and that is the mind working, not a message. If the dream left you afraid, do what is taught for a frightening dream: seek refuge in Allah, turn onto your other side, and do not relate it to anyone.