binary pairing to reveal a hidden hierarchy within,barzakhis the space of
the dream or the mirror via which, through an inversion of the logic of the
concrete world, we achieve greater comprehension.^50 As the intermediary
between God’s non-delimited knowledge and our fragmentary under-
standing that results from being embedded in the concrete world,barzakh
also functions like the Lacanian mirror, in which we envision ourselves,
and our projection of others, as complete and whole in a manner that we
cannot experience in the disjointed realm of our inevitably insufficient
body in the real world. While we are alive and able to return,barzakh
functions as a space through which we pass in order to contextualize
knowledge of the physical world in relation to the beyond. Both
Suhrawardi and ibn Arabi understood imagination as ultimately taking
the place of sense perception in the real world. Following ibn Sina in a
position that al-Ghazali found heretical in its denial of Quranic literalism,
ibn Arabi went so far as arguing that the torments of hell and pleasures of
heaven functioned as postmortem images.^51
Dreamimagesthusoffered an important isthmus into divine truth. Building
on ibn Sina’s understanding of the compositesense, the thirteenth-century
theologian Nasir al-Din al-Baidawi (d. 1296) explained the interpretation of
the sleeping dream while explicating the Quranic Sura of Joseph:.
Ru’yais likeru’yatunexcept that the former is specially appropriate to what occurs
in sleep. The distinction between the two forms is effected by means of the two
alternative feminine afformatives, as inqurbatunandqurba. Ru’ya,‘vision,’is the
impression of an image which is communicated from the realm of the imagination
to thesensus communis. Truthful visions occur only by means of a contact of the
soul with the supernatural world due to the mutual affinity which exists between
the two when the soul is to any extent freed from preoccupation with the control of
the body, so that it is impressed with an image of concepts which exist there in the
supernatural world, in so far as these are adapted to that soul’s capacity. Thereafter,
the imaginative faculty embodies the concept in an image appropriate to it, and
communicates this image to thesensus communis, and the image becomes, as it
were,‘observed.’Moreover, if the image bears so strong a resemblance to the
concept that they are differentiated from each other by no more than the general
and the particular, the vision needs no interpretation. Otherwise, it will need it.^52
In capturing a vision of essence, the dream image communicates a reality
otherwise foreclosed in the mundane sentient world. Although, like a paint-
ing, a dream image is itself contingent, what it represents is not. Because of
this, it gains a quality of the self-evident essence that it brings forth: truth.
(^50) Almond, 2004 : 34. (^51) Sinai, 2015 : 281. (^52) Beeston, 1963 :3–4.
The Materiality of Dreams 197