The Prophet ﷺ said one day, "Has any of you seen a dream?"A man replied, "I saw a scale descending from the sky. You and Abu Bakr were weighed against each other, and you outweighed Abu Bakr. Then Abu Bakr and Umar were weighed, and Abu Bakr outweighed Umar. Then Umar and Uthman were weighed, and Umar outweighed Uthman. Then the scale was lifted up."We saw displeasure on the face of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.
أن النبي ﷺ قال ذات يوم: من رأى منكم رؤيا؟ فقال رجل: أنا رأيت كأن ميزانا نزل من السماء، فوزنت أنت وأبو بكر، فرجحت أنت بأبي بكر، ووزن أبو بكر وعمر، فرجح أبو بكر، ووزن عمر وعثمان، فرجح عمر، ثم رفع الميزان، فرأينا الكراهية في وجه رسول الله ﷺ.
Abu Dawud (4634), Tirmidhi (2287), Nasai in Al-Kubra (8080), and Hakim (3/70-71) and (4/393-394) all narrated it through Muhammad bin Abdullah Ansari, who said, "Ashath bin Abdul-Malik Humrani told us, from Hasan, from Abu Bakra," and he related it.Tirmidhi said, "This is a hasan hadith."Hakim said, "It is sahih according to the standard of the two Shaykhs."Dhahabi responded to this, saying, "This Ashath is trustworthy, but the two of them did not use him as evidence."Hakim said elsewhere, "This hadith has a sahih chain of transmission."I say, its narrators are trustworthy, but Hasan Basri is known for concealing defects in his chains of transmission, and here he related it using the ambiguous form "from" without clarifying his source. However, there is another chain for it.Abu Dawud (4635) and Ahmad (20445) both narrated it through Hammad bin Salama, who said, "Ali bin Zayd told us, from Abdul-Rahman bin Abu Bakra, from his father," in similar wording, and he added at the end, "He said, 'A caliphate of prophethood, then Allah gives dominion to whomever He wills.'"Ali bin Zayd is Ibn Jadan, who is daif, but each of the two chains strengthens the other.