rational spirit.”^33 In contrast to the modern understanding of the dream as
ephemeral and irrational, this discourse ascribes longevity and reason to
dreams. A Persian commentary on the thought of ibn Sina explains:“This
faculty is thus as it were their treasury so that if the sensible thing itself
disappears thisfigure and this form do not cease to subsist in it.”^34
Similarly, reflecting on the ruins of pre-Islamic civilizations encountered
near Baghdad, al-Jahiz (776–868) indicated that the mortality of the mate-
rial world made preservation impossible except in the recycling of thought
enabled through books:“The composing of books is more effective than
building in recording the accomplishments of the passing ages and cen-
turies. For there is no doubt that construction eventually perishes, and its
traces disappear, while books handed from one generation to another, and
from nation to nation, remain forever renewed.”^35 Living in Baghdad
during the Abbasid augmentation of power through libraries, translation,
and the development of new commentaries on existing philosophical
traditions, al-Jahiz conceives of the transmission of knowledge not through
the physical maintenance of books, but through the incorporation of their
content in new ones. Similarly, Persis Berlekamp explains that in the
medieval world objects were understood as mutable, subject to corruption
and decay. Therefore images served not to demonstrate reality, but to point
to the Platonic abstraction of truth.^36 This idea resembles the role of Jewish
Midrash,“the corpus of Jewish scriptural exegesis that [seeks out] mean-
ings from the core text of the culture in order to keep the text perpetually
relevant.”^37 In both epistemes, the stability of human creation, text or
object, is less important than the perpetual renewal of meaning.
The sentiment persisted across the centuries, as the Timurid historian
Mirkhwand (1433–1498) suggests:
Buildings may be seen
Ruined by sun and rain.
Erect history’s strong foundation
To escape from wind, rain, and desolation.^38
In contrast to our modern cultural emphasis on material preservation, such
comments associate materiality with perishability, therefore preserving
faith transitively through reuse.
The relative permanence of dreams comes from awareness of the here-
after. Although the suprasensory world of sleep isfleeting as we live our
(^33) Ibn Khaldun, 1991 : 368. (^34) Soucek, 1972 : 12. (^35) Necipoğlu, 1995 : 38.
(^36) Berlekamp, 2011 : 177–178. (^37) Bernstein, 2006 : xi. (^38) Necipoğlu, 1995 : 38.
The Materiality of Dreams 193