Dreaming of Smile in Islam

The reading turns on who is smiling and whether the smile is answered. Someone smiling at you is the plain favourable form, read as goodwill arriving from a direction the dreamer had not counted on. Smiling at someone yourself is read as an opening the dreamer is able to make, and the older interpreters took it as being about the dreamer's own conduct rather than about the other person's disposition. A smile you cannot return turns the reading toward something withheld in a relationship. A smile that seems false or fixed is read as a matter that looks settled and is not, and this form is not treated as being about the person seen. Smiling in a difficult place, or while grieving, is read favourably as forbearance rather than as denial. Loud laughter was distinguished from smiling throughout and read less favourably, since it points to heedlessness rather than to composure. A dead relative smiling is read as ease for the dreamer's own heart and was firmly kept from being treated as a message.

The Arabic keeps a distinction English has lost. Tabassum, the smile, is separated from dahk, laughter, and the Qur'an uses the first of Sulaiman in al-Naml 27:19, who smiled at the speech of the ant. Alongside that, the practice of meeting people with an open face is well established in the reports as an act of charity in itself, so the dream books read a smile as goodness that costs nothing and still counts.

A dream of a smile is not a report on anyone's feelings toward you, not a promise of reconciliation, and not permission to assume anything about the person you saw. It is not a ruling. If any dream leaves you unsettled, even a gentle one, the taught response is to seek refuge in Allah from its harm, turn onto your other side, and not to relate it.