95 – Umm Salamah relates that Umm Sulaym—the wife of Abū Ṭalḥah—said, “Messenger of Allah, Allah is not shy of the truth. Must a woman perform ghusl (the ritual bath) if she has a wet dream?” He replied, “Yes, if she sees the fluid…,” the hadith. Agreed upon. (1)

Glossary of hadith terms
• iḥtalamāt (she had a wet dream): from ḥulm, with ḍamma on the ḥāʾ and sukūn on the lām. It denotes what a sleeper sees and imagines while asleep. Here it refers to a woman seeing in her dream what a man sees—an image representing intercourse.
• “saw the water”: i.e., semen is discharged from her as a result of the dream, as in the version recorded by Ibn Mājah (602): “She is not obliged to perform ghusl until she ejaculates just as a man ejaculates.”

Lessons drawn from the hadith
1 – A woman may experience a wet dream just as a man does; she may imagine the sexual act in her sleep, and a discharge can occur.
2 – Such nocturnal imaginings do not signify any deficiency in religion so long as they befall upright women. The Prophet ﷺ heard of them from women and did not instruct them to fight against them or their causes. This is a natural matter: a person possesses an instinctive drive that the conscious mind restrains; when that conscious oversight is absent, the subconscious awakens to satisfy the natural urge.
3 – If a woman has a wet dream and notices the fluid, ghusl becomes obligatory for her.