Angels of Visions
There are also angels connected with visions. Al-Bukhari trans- mitted that 'A'isha, may Allah be pleased with her, said that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:
"I saw you twice in a dream before I married you. I saw an angel carrying you wrapped in a piece of silk and I said, 'Unwrap it! and it was unwrapped and there you were. I said, 'If this is from Allah, it will come about.""
Ibn Hajar said, "Al-Qurtubi transmitted in al-Mufham from one of the people of knowledge that Allah Almighty has an angel who presents the things seen in the sleeper's domain of perception and gives them a sensory form, so that sometimes they are likenesses which correspond to already existing forms, and sometimes they are examples of intelligible meanings. In both cases there is either good news or warning."
Al-Hakim at-Tirmidhi said, "Allah has entrusted an angel with the business of visions. He learns the states of the tribe of Adam from the Preserved Tablet, and then he copies from it and coins a likeness of each according to a particular archetype. When a per- son sleeps, he gives form to those things for him with wisdom so that it will be good news or warning or rebuke for him.
The Adamic creature is overpowered by Shaytan due to the intense enmity which exists between him and Shaytan, and so he tricks him in every possible way and wants to corrupt his affair in every possible way. Therefore he muddles up his dreams, either by putting error into them or by making him forget them."
Ibn Hajar said, "All dreams fall into two categories. The first are true dreams, which are the dreams of the Prophets and those of the righteous who follow them. They occur to others in rare cases. This is the type of dream when what happens in it corresponds to what happens in the waking state. The second consists of muddied
dreams which are dreams which do not warn about anything.
There are different types of these.
One is the playing-about of Shaytan so that the dream is trou- bling. For instance someone might see his head cut off and himself chasing it or dream that he falls into a state of terror and has no one to rescue him from it and other such-like things. Another is when someone sees one of the angels commanding him to do something haram, for instance. Dreams like this present logical impossibilities.
A third is when someone sees the same sort of things his self says to him when he is awake or that he desires something and sees it when he is asleep, like when he dreams of something which normally occurs in the waking state or of something that domi- nates his nature. This kind of dream occurs mostly about the future, sometimes about the present and only rarely about the past."