beloved, A’isha reported that the Prophet said to her,“You have been
shown to me twice in a dream, I saw you pictured on a piece of silk, and
someone said, this is your wife.”^24 Similarly, dream visions of the Prophet
were understood as true. Al-Bukhari cites a Hadiththat the Prophet
assured his followers that Satan could not take his form, such that if they
saw him in a dream, it was truly him. For this reason, dreams of the
Prophet carried legal weight.^25
The Quran contextualizes even non-revelatory, normal sleeping dreams
in terms of divine engagement, explaining that God calls the souls of the
dead and of the living in their sleep, and only returns them to those who
continue to live (Q6:60, 39:42). All dreaming thus involves a real displace-
ment of the soul in a nightly encounter with the divine. As indicated in a
Hadithrelated by al-Bukhari (91:5), the dream is what is left to the world
now that the last prophet, Muhammad, has died:“Prophecy has passed,
and only the bearers of good tidings remain–good dreams which a man
sees or which are shown him in his sleep.”^26
Because dreams provided a real encounter with truth, they served as
ethical guides for worldly action. The bibliographer Abu’l-Faraj
Muhammad bin Ishaq al-Nadim (d.c.998) claimed that the Abbasid caliph
al-Ma’mun dreamed of Aristotle lecturing him on the good, leading him to
promote the rapid production of books.^27 Musical composers dreamed
inspiration for great works.^28 Like apprentices, poets trained for their
profession through dreams.^29 Instigating changes in behavior, journeys,
and important actions, dreams became central to autobiographical and
conquest narratives, enhancing the righteousness of any action including
the right to rule through oneiric verification of God’s intentions.^30
In these discourses, dreams present images more meaningful than
paintings. Al-Farabi suggests that the soul thinks in images that originate
in the divine active intellect, are manifest in dreams, and thus serve
clairvoyant or even prophetic purposes. Ibn Sina affirmed this, seeing the
prophetic dream as an act of providence.^31 For him, the imagination
becomes trustworthy during sleep because it is not distracted by the senses,
only possible for prophetic people during wakefulness.^32 Ibn Khaldun
repeated this wisdom, explaining:“When the surface of the body...is
covered by the chill of night, the spirit withdraws from all the other regions
of the body to its center, the heart...[which is] the vehicle of man’s(^24) Green, 2003 : 289; Elias, 2012 : 12. (^25) Green, 2003 : 292.
(^26) von Grunebaum and Caillois, 1966 :7. (^27) Green, 2003 : 292. (^28) Necipoğlu, 1995 : 197.
(^29) Mancini-Lander, 2012. (^30) von Grunebaum and Caillois, 1966 :10–13.
(^31) Green, 2003 : 292. (^32) Lelli, 2014 : 213.
192 The Transcendent Image