An almond in a dream refers to the livelihood and sustenance that the dreamer earns after a lot of dispute, hassle, and struggle.
If the person sees to be having almonds in his hands, he gets sustenance and livelihood equivalent to the number of almonds, albeit after some difficulty. At the same time, some dream interpreters say that almonds refer to knowledge and healing from illness. In addition, seeing a shelled almond is a good sign.
If the man sees to be having or receiving from somebody the whole almond with shell, he gets something from a miserly man but after much ado and hardship.
If sees bitter oil come out of almonds, he gets as much benefit from a cheapskate as the amount of oil.
An almond in a dream depicts blessings and wealth. However, seeing almonds with no skin indicates that most of the wealth will be hard earned. If the almonds have a skin, he makes money with comfort and ease.
There are two interpretations of seeing almond(s) in a dream: 1. Gain of hidden treasure. 2. Recuperation of sickness.
Clement of Alexandria: ‘My Stromates contain the truth mingled with the dogmas of philosophy, or rather wrapped and enclosed by them as the edible kernel of the nut is enclosed by its shell.’ Or Mahmud Shabistarl: ‘The shariat is the husk, the haqtqat is its almond... When the pilgrim has attained moral certainty, the almond is ripe and the husk is red.’ Or again, Abd al-Karim al-JilI: ‘Throw away the shell and take the kernel; do not be one of those who ignore the features, but tear away the veil!’
The Italian word for almond, mandorla, is applied to the oval which in the traditional iconography of painting and sculpture encloses the figures of Christ, Our Lady and the saints as in the glow of immortality. It shares this mystery of light in another way: it is the heavenly light which at one and the same time radiates from the dwelling place of the saints and is the ‘veil’ of the Beatific Vision. Furthermore it corresponds to the rainbow.
The Hebrew word for almond, luz, expresses perfectly this idea of something hidden, enclosed, inviolable. This, in short, is ‘the nut of immortality’.
In medieval esotericism the almond stood for Our Lady’s virginity - the mystic almond - and she was sometimes depicted surrounded by an elliptical halo.
According to Henri Estienne’s Thesaurus, ‘amandalos’ means dark, invisible, of the inner nature.
The figures of saints are often completely enclosed within a mandorla, frequently divided by three lines to express the Trinity. They have entered the bosom of the Threefold God, with whom they have become united in the Beatific Vision.
However, in common parlance to have eaten the almond means to have had sexual intercourse, since the almond is the vulva, the yoni, which the Upanishads tell us is ‘the symbol of the cosmic waters and the stormy whirlpool of the infinite potentialities of existence’. The mandorla may be derived from this old archetypal image.
The fact that medieval esotericism cloaked Our Lady’s virginity under the term ‘mystic almond’ serves to strengthen this theory. The most notable thing about this instance is that in passing from the sacred to the profane, the sacred value of the symbol is in no sense weakened, but rather made all the stronger, as can be seen in so many Sufi poems. For the sexual connotation given to the mandorla makes it the primordial womb, from which Man interfused with God was born into the light of the revelation.
