Dreams are the most mysterious, interesting, and fascinating phenomenon of human lives. Everyone sees dreams. Sometimes dreams are horrible, frightening, and nerve-wracking. Many people claim that they often see dreams which become true, but I think that after seeing the dream, one cannot forecast which way and what part of it will become true. Prophet Yusuf ibn Yaqub (peace be upon him) had a vision of interpreting others’ dreams and predicting certain happenings in one’s life indicated by their dreams. Similarly, some people believe that certain things seen in dreams indicate certain future conditions of the dreamers. Like, seeing water is the indication of better economic conditions in the future, killing a snake is an indication of the end of your enemy, and seeing any dead close relative in a dream who is asking you to go with them, means that your death is very close, etc.
Nevertheless, different people interpret dreams differently, and such interpretations do not always come true. Until the end of my college and university education, I had been flying with the strength of my muscles almost thrice a week in my dreams. If someone had interpreted it as my future air travel, my air traveling is much less than my more than a thousand dream flights.
In my dream, I had been flying above our three-story house at an altitude of double-height. It was not always above our house; I often happened to fly over a river or lake to cross it. Some people say that the person who flies in his dreams ultimately gets a very high position in his life. But the greed which I showed in my dreams for flying is at least a hundred times more than I achieved in life.
These were just general things about dreams. But I have also experienced some extraordinary things about dreams. First, there is my experience of seeing an event of around fifteen minutes in the dream, which I saw again after a month or so in my real life. It happened only once in my life. I did not guess that this dream would come true in my life. This was not very important or had any long-lasting effects on my life, but the way this dream was repeated in my real life was truly marvelous. During the first year of my university education, I stayed with my maternal uncle’s family. During this period, I saw a dream that my cousin came from Karachi and stayed some days with his family. After that, he left to join his service again in Karachi.
With a blue bag on his shoulder, he came near the main entrance; my auntie also approached him and started talking, then came my uncle and embraced his son after his younger sister came to that place. They all had a dialogue for about fifteen minutes, and they said farewell to him. When I was awake the next morning, I remembered every word of their farewell conversation. The colors of their dresses and place and the gestures of everyone were fresh in my mind. It was late in 1967. Around two months after that, my cousin came from Karachi to visit his family, and after some days’ stay was saying goodbye to the family. The same place near the main entrance, the same order of the persons at that place, same colors of their dresses and hundred percent same words spoken by them.
I was shocked to see all of my dream in real shape before my eyes. I kept thinking for months about how that dream of mine was translated word-by-word into reality. Does it mean that our future is saved somewhere in Al-Kitab or somewhere else? Can we have the power to know about important phases of our future through the channel of dreams? I can still tell my readers some other interesting things about my dreams. It was again during my student life when I saw a dream. I was telling a friend of mine that I saw a dream where a person told me that he had seen a dream in which he saw something. It means I saw a dream within a dream and the dream. When I went to the USA in 1985 for a two-year MS degree, I saw that newcomer Pakistani students were facing everyday problems with the locals because of their accents.
For that reason, we were slow enough in our conversations. But to my surprise, I saw a very long dream one night. I saw that I am in my American University attending different classes. There are American students and American teachers.
I am discussing different topics of my discipline with students and teachers. I was very fluent and was expressing myself quite smoothly. When a Pakistani student visited my room in the morning, I told him about the dream. All parts of every discussion done in the dream were in my memory. I spoke on those topics fluently in English and kept on laughing for an hour along with my friend. After seeing my fluency, my friend laughed severely and asked me, again and again, to tell him how to see such a dream.
Lastly, I will tell you about a sad dream. My father, grandfather, sister, aunties, uncles, and many other close relatives died. I was sad but didn’t weep. Sardar Muhammad, owner of Lahore’s Ilmi Kutab-Khana, was the publisher of many of my books and had an excellent relationship with me. I was in the United States those days when he died in 1986, and a piece of news was published in the Pakistani newspapers about his sad demise. My friend Dr. Mujahid Mansoori mailed me the cutting of the news. I read it and was very sad. After I retired that day to bed, I didn’t know when I slept and what type of dream I saw or saw nothing, but I opened my eyes while screaming, “Haji Sahib…!” This loud sound of my screaming made me awake. I saw that my pillow was wet badly with my tears. It was like I had poured one liter of water on the pillow.
