Dreaming of Laughing in Islam

Laughter is read by its measure and by what it is directed at. Moderate laughter, or a smile is the settled good reading: joy, relief, an ease arriving — and the interpreters treated a smile as better than open laughter throughout. Excessive laughter, the kind that cannot be stopped, was read by the older interpreters as a warning that grief may be near, on the plain principle that a state carried past its measure turns into its opposite. Laughing until one weeps sits exactly on that turn, and the interpreters read the tears as the real content of the dream. Laughing at someone is read badly and consistently so: mockery is a wrong in itself, and the dream is read as a fault in the dreamer rather than as anything about the person laughed at. Being laughed at is read as a fear of how one is seen, more often than as an actual humiliation. Hearing laughter without seeing anyone was read as news of a gathering or of good among people elsewhere. Laughter in a place where it is out of keeping — a graveyard, a house of mourning — is read as heedlessness rather than as joy.

The reversal here is not a trick. The Qur'an itself sets laughing and weeping side by side as two states given by the same One (an-Najm 53:43), and the sources on conduct consistently prefer the smile and caution against laughter that hardens the heart. The interpreters simply read the dream in the terms the tradition already used: the smile is unreserved good, and laughter beyond its measure is not.

A dream of laughing is not a warning that a sorrow is coming, and no one should spend a day braced for grief because of it. It is not a prediction and not a ruling. A person who slept after a happy evening, or one who has been holding something in, will dream this without any meaning attaching to it. If the dream unsettled you, the taught response holds: seek refuge in Allah, turn onto your other side, and leave it untold.