With a twinkle in his eyes and a reassuring smile, Sheikh Wassem Yousef picks up his pen, looks into the camera and says: "Tell me your dream."
And people do, either by phoning in or e-mailing the hour-long religious show, Ru'ya, or Vision, shown at 9pm on Noor Dubai TV every Saturday, Monday and Wednesday.
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"I dreamt I saw a beautiful baby girl, she looked up at me as I approached her and smiled," she says. "I noticed she had very big teeth, even though she was just an infant."
She pauses before volunteering more information. "I am divorced, and so there is no chance of me having a baby anytime soon." Her voice cracking, she adds: "I am all alone."
Usually Sheikh Yousef writes down several of the callers' dreams and then goes through each in detail. In Um Hassan's case, he makes an exception and spoke directly to her.
"It is a good dream, Um Hassan, don't be sad," he says. "Healthy big teeth are a good sign, only the loss or falling teeth signal problems to come. Everything about the dream is positive and good. So you can feel at ease as there might be some good news coming your way in the near future."
Before he moves on to another caller, Um Hassan asks permission on air to get the sheikh's personal number. In return, he nods his head and requests the production team to give it to her.
"It is a great responsibility being a dream interpreter," says the 31-year-old from Jordan. "I have to be careful how I interpret a dream, for just one wrong word and the person sharing the dream could be misled."
The relationship between viewer and dream interpreter is so close that once when the sheikh's pen ran out of ink on the air, he received several pens as gifts from his viewers.
The show has become so popular he is often recognised and asked to interpret a dream, so he has taken to avoiding malls and public gatherings. "Sometimes I feel like an ATM of dreams," he says with a laugh. "It can get exhausting."
Sheikh Yousef spent a year interpreting dreams on radio before moving to television three years ago. He relies on the Quran and hadith, or narrations, of the Prophet Mohammed.
"Dream interpretation is mentioned in the Quran and the Prophet himself regularly interpreted his dreams and the dreams of those closest to him," Sheikh Yousef says.
Many local channels and radio stations have segments dedicated to tafseer al ahlam, or dream interpretation, hosted by a scholarly sheikh.
According to a fatwa in 2008 from the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowments in Abu Dhabi, Islam permits interpretation of dreams so long as it is done by a trusted scholar. The fatwa said it must be accepted that these interpretations are "not definitive" and not to be relied on entirely.
If a dream contains signs of a death or divorce, Sheikh Yousef refrains from interpreting it. He also refuses to interpret any dream he cannot explain through religious sources. Next page
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