In the last months before the fortieth year, while the annual retreats of Ramadan were still marking their rhythm upon the mountain, another door quietly opened in the soul of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) stands at the head of the account, for it is her narration in the Sahih of al-Bukhari that fixes the sequence of the beginnings: the first of the revelation to come upon the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was the true vision in sleep, and no vision came to him but that it was like the cleaving of the dawn. Ibn Kathir transmits the words in his chapter on the beginning of the revelation, and with them the whole Ummah has learned to read this stretch of the sacred story: before the angel was seen, before a single verse was recited, there were six months in which the sleeping hours of the Prophet ﷺ became a screen upon which the truth of coming things was displayed, and every dream that visited him in those months came to pass upon the earth exactly as he had seen it, with the unmistakable clarity of the first light of morning.
The scope of this window is preserved in the reckoning of the Sealed Nectar: the signs of his prophethood began to appear and to twinkle on the horizons of life, and they were the true visions he experienced for six months before the revelation itself; and since the period of his prophethood was twenty-three years, the author observes, those six months of true dreams constituted an integral part of the forty-six parts of prophethood, each half-year counting as one part. Whether one follows the arithmetic or simply the fact, the fact itself is the treasure: for roughly half a year, from about October of the year 609 of the Christian calendar to August of 610, the inner life of the Prophet ﷺ was already receiving what the outward world had not yet been shown. The dreams were not vague shadows which a waking mind might construe this way or that; the master record of this chronicle states it with the precision the sources demand, that every vision he saw in his sleep came to pass in reality as clear as the bright morning light. Aisha's simile holds the meaning: falaq as-subh, the cleaving of the dawn, that first clean line of light which no darkness negotiates with. So were his dreams: they broke upon his sleep with a lucidity that belonged not to the realm of guessing but to the realm of truth.
The believer should notice what kind of beginning Allah chose for the final revelation: not thunder, not spectacle, but the most inward of all human experiences. Abu Nu'aym al-Asbahani transmits in his Dala'il an-Nubuwwah, and Ibn Kathir quotes him, the words of the succeeding-generation scholar Alqamah ibn Qays: the first visitation to the prophets is during their sleep, so that their hearts may be put at rest; revelation comes thereafter. Here is the divine pedagogy of gentleness: the soul of the Prophet ﷺ was being introduced to the approach of the unseen world in the softest of all its approaches, in the hours when the body lies at rest and the defenses of wakefulness are lowered, so that when the moment of the open vision arrived, something in him had already been taught what it was like to be visited. The scholars of the sirah saw in this a mercy arranged in stages; and Alqamah's remark, as Ibn Kathir notes, is substantiated by what preceded it and by what followed it, for the dreams came first, and then, in the cave, the angel.
What those dreams carried, the sources let us feel rather than enumerate, and their reticence is faithful, for a dream is not a public event. Musa ibn Uqbah transmits from az-Zuhri, from Said ibn al-Musayyib, that the first thing the Messenger of Allah ﷺ received were the visions which Allah revealed to him while he was asleep, and that these greatly troubled him, so that he told his wife Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) of what he saw. The detail is precious beyond its brevity. The dreams were so real, so charged with the weight of what they showed, that they did not leave him undisturbed; and the first person in the world with whom the coming prophet shared the burden of his inner life was his wife. The account continues with a sentence that belongs among the most tender in the entire Seerah: Allah protected her from any skepticism about them, and opened her heart to belief, so that she said to him: rejoice, for Allah never does anything but good. Khadijah believed the dreams of her husband before she had seen a single sign with her own eyes. Al-Zuhri was later to say, in the sentence Ibn Kathir preserves, that Khadijah was the first person to believe in Allah and to give credence to His Messenger; and here, months before the cave, that faith was already awake in her, meeting him at the door of each morning with trust instead of question. What a marriage that was, in which the wife becomes the first believer in her husband's unseen world, and the husband the bearer of a truth he cannot yet name.
The season of the dreams should also be read against the character which Makkah already knew. For years the city had called him al-Amin, the trustworthy, and al-Sadiq, the truthful; his tongue had never been caught in a lie among the stalls of the market or the assemblies of the clans. The six months of the ru'ya sadiqah carried that truthfulness into a realm which no market could audit: the hours of sleep. The dreams came true as his words had always come true, and the parallel is part of the meaning. Allah was showing, in the softest possible theater, that the man whom Makkah trusted with its deposits could be trusted with the visions of the night; that the same fidelity which governed his daylight governed his sleep; and that the truth which was about to be placed in his mouth upon the mountain would be carried with the same exactness with which every dream of those months descended into fact. The scholars who compiled the signs of prophethood understood the sequence in exactly this way: the truthfulness of the tongue was the covenant, and the truthfulness of the dream was its first public reading.
The dreams were also, in one of their forms, a rehearsal of the revelation itself. Ibn Kathir transmits from Ibn Ishaq, from Ubayd ibn Umayr al-Laythi, the report that the Prophet ﷺ said: Jibril (upon him be peace) came to me while I was asleep, carrying a piece of brocade cloth upon which was writing, and he said: Read; and I said: What shall I read; and he pressed me with it until I thought it was death, and then he released me. Ibn Kathir adds his verdict on this account, that it came as a prelude to the awakening that followed; and he cites Musa ibn Uqbah, from az-Zuhri, that the Prophet ﷺ saw all of that in a dream, and that the angel appeared to him thereafter while he was awake. Here the sources teach their own discipline: the firmly established form of the first revelation, the one Aisha transmits in the Sahih, is the waking encounter in the cave of Hira, which the following event of this chronicle will relate in full; but the dream-form which Ibn Ishaq preserves is not a rival so much as a herald, showing that even the bodily pattern of the great encounter was first rehearsed upon the screen of his sleep. So gentle is the teaching of Allah: He shows the soul the shape of what is coming before He asks it to bear the thing itself.
The true dream was no stranger to the household of prophethood. The believer who opens the earlier scriptures of the Qur'an finds the same light burning in them. Yusuf (peace be upon him), a boy in Canaan, said to his father: O my father, indeed I saw eleven stars and the sun and the moon; I saw them prostrating to me. His father read the dream for what it was, and forbade him to tell his brothers, for the vision was a prophecy and its fulfillment would try the whole family; and the years between the dream of the boy and its fulfillment in Egypt were the years in which Allah was writing the dream true. The lesson of that long arc deserves to be held up beside the six months of the Prophet ﷺ: a true dream is a promise, and a promise is not a schedule. Yusuf (peace be upon him) saw the bowing of the celestial bodies and then waited through the pit, the bondage and the prison before the vision knelt before him in the court of Egypt; and the dreams of the final Prophet ﷺ, fulfilled one upon another through the months of the approach, were training his soul in the very patience which his own coming years of Ta'if and boycott and cave would demand of him. The dream which comes true is Allah's signature upon time; between the signature and the reading of it, the believer walks by trust. And in the case of Ibrahim (peace be upon him), the command of the sacrifice itself came in a vision of the night, and the fulfillment of the vision was accounted to him as righteousness. From the beginning of revelation's history, Allah has used the dream as one of His channels: clear enough to be trusted, humble enough to be distinguished from the announcement of angels. That the final prophet should be given six months of such dreams before his mission is therefore not a novelty in the economy of the heavens but a signature, the same hand signing the same document in the same place.
The Prophet ﷺ himself, after the prophethood was established, taught his community to honor this channel. In the Sahih of al-Bukhari, in the chapters on the interpretation of dreams, he is authentically reported to have said that the good dream is from Allah. And in the well-known teaching transmitted in the collections, he told his companions that nothing remains of prophethood except glad tidings, and when they asked what the glad tidings were, he answered: the true dream, seen by the righteous person or shown to him. Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) had long been known throughout Makkah for his ability to interpret dreams before the revelation came, and one of the earliest believers, Khalid ibn Sa'id ibn al-As, was brought into Islam by a dream in which he saw himself standing on the brink of a fire, with his father striving to push him in, and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ holding him back from it by the waist; the dream led him to the Messenger ﷺ, and to belief. Nor did the gift die with the generation of the companions; the very call to prayer of this Ummah came through the true dream of Abdullah ibn Zayd in Madinah, which the Prophet ﷺ pronounced a true vision and ordered to be taught to Bilal. The ru'ya sadiqah which visited the Prophet ﷺ in those six months has remained the inheritance of the righteous in every century since, a small continuing echo of his six months, for the good dream is of the glad tidings which Allah gives to His believing servants in the life of this world and in the Hereafter.
For the six months themselves, the sources give us the setting and the effect rather than a catalogue. Al-Buti, in his Fiqh as-Sirah, places the dreams within the arc of the retreats: in the cave of Hira the Prophet ﷺ used to meditate and worship until his heart shone and his soul was purified, and he reached such a state of purity that there was no dream he saw without its being realized like the dawn of the morn. The dreams and the retreats are thus two movements of one symphony: the nights of devotion on the mountain were deepening the vessel, and the dreams were filling it, drop by drop, with the first waters of the unseen. It was as though the veil between him ﷺ and the world of truth was being thinned by degrees, Ramadan by Ramadan, dream by dream, until nothing would remain of it but the width of a single night in a cave upon a mountain. Ibn Kathir, surveying the whole in the wake of Aisha's account, transmits the remark of Abu Shamah, the later master of the sirah, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ used to see true visions before his mission; and the dreams of the six months were those same visitations now gathered into a final, concentrated season.
Nor did the channel close once the waking revelation had begun. The night journey of the Prophet ﷺ, as the sirah transmits it and as the two Sahihs confirm in their several versions, began while he lay asleep in the Hijr, so that what followed was, in its first movement, the seeing of a true vision; and throughout the years of the mission the dreams of the Messenger ﷺ continued to be among the tidings by which his Lord lifted him. The six months before the cave were therefore not an exception in his life but a first installment of a companionship that would never leave him: the sleep of the Prophet ﷺ became, from October of the year 609 until the end of his days, a place where truth kept house. The believer who traces the pattern from Hira to the Hijr sees one continuous gift: Allah teaching His beloved ﷺ by night what the day would confirm, from the first dream of the approach to the last vision of the ascension.
What does this event ask of the believer who reads it? First, a reverence for the inner preparation of the Prophet ﷺ. The mission did not fall upon him like a burden thrown from a height; it grew toward him through months of quiet truthfulness, dream upon dream fulfilled, until trust in what was coming had been built into the very grain of his nights. Second, an assurance that touches the reader's own life: the One who guided His prophet's sleep still answers the sleep of His righteous servants, and the good dream remains, in the Prophet's ﷺ own teaching, from Allah, to be received with gratitude, told only to those who will honor it, and never traded for the pretensions of soothsayers. Third, a quiet wonder at the ordering of the story: the women and men around the Messenger ﷺ were being prepared alongside him, Khadijah first of all, whose heart was kept from skepticism by the One who knew what was soon to be asked of her. The morning light which Aisha's simile fixed upon those dreams has never altogether faded; every fulfilled true dream in the Ummah since that season is a small descendant of the six months in which the revelation of Allah began, before the world knew it, in the sleep of the most truthful of men, the beloved Prophet ﷺ.