According to religious scholars, dreams are of three types: spiritual, psychological and satanic.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “There are three types of dreams: a righteous dream is glad tidings from Allah, the dream that causes sadness is from Satan, and a dream from the ramblings of the mind.”
Psychology defines a dream as an expression of a suppressed desire, which an individual cannot realize in reality or an expression of worry and conflict inside one's soul.
Some people become obsessed with their dreams and go to people who claim they have knowledge about dream interpretation.
Arabic Satellite TV channels have taken advantage of the situation and run dream interpretation shows hosted by people whose main goal is to make quick money by claiming they have dream interpretation skills. Such people often end up conning people out of money and the Kingdom's courts regularly deal with such cases, Al-Riyadh newspaper reported.
Those who claim to have dream interpretation skills are often sorcerers or palm readers. They take themes that frequently appear in dreams and then relate them to disease, marriage, divorce, travel and other common topics.
For example, on dream interpretation shows, a commonly asked question is whether or not the caller is sick. If the caller answers yes, dream interpreters will warn him or her to stay away from certain things and then send the caller to a specific place to buy an herbal medicine that costs a lot of money.
Most so-called dream interpreters do not realize the consequences of their actions. They do not hesitate in sowing sedition and causing problems among family members by interpreting dreams in a certain way.
For example, a dream interpreter might tell a woman that one of her relatives wants something bad to happen to her and then warn her to be extremely careful when dealing with relatives.
The woman may believe this and begin to suspect all of her relatives and eventually break any ties with them for fear they will harm her.
In some cases, people may try to get revenge and end up harming their relatives.
Dream interpreters often accuse housemaids of sorcery. They know that most families in the Kingdom have maids and use this to their advantage and ask callers personal information about their maids such as their age and nationality and then proceed to make false accusations against the maid.
Recently, a Saudi woman asked a dream interpreter on a TV show about her dream. The woman mentioned she had a sick child and she was told her maid was using sorcery to make her daughter ill.
Although the woman knew the maid well, she believed the dream interpreter and called the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (Haia). When the Haia members searched the maid's belongings, they did not find anything except slips of money transfers she made to a Holy Qur'an memorization society back in her country.
Sociologist Abdulaziz Al-Zeer criticized dream interpreters who appear on satellite channels and called upon authorities to put an end to this charade. He said there are only few people who can really interpret dreams based on the Shariah; the rest are impostors and pose a threat to society because their dream interpretation can sometimes have disastrous consequences.
“Most of their interpretations are not based on the Holy Qur'an and the Prophet's sayings,” he said.
