Dreaming across Boundaries

Abstract

Edited by Louise Marlow, this anthology consists of twelve articles on thehistory of dreams and their interpretation in an array of historical Muslimsettings. A number of well-known hadiths support the idea of ProphetMuhammad communicating with Muslims through dreams, and earlierbooks and articles have established the existence of “a dominant, if notentirely uncontested, tradition of [dream] interpretation” common to muchof the premodern Islamic world (p. 3). The articles address variations on thiscore discourse specific to the cultural, sectarian, and disciplinary orientations of the original actors. Beyond this goal of discursive specificity,Marlow notes two themes as having guided her selection: “the complexprocess of translation whereby a personal visionary experience assumes theform of a literary, narrative account accessible to, and subject to interpretationby, an audience” (p. 9); and the “ways in which the leveling and potentiallysubversive effects of dreams were countered by their integration intohierarchical or normative systems” (p. 8). While the articles are arranged ina roughly chronological order, they are considered here according to theirsociohistorical, literary, and intellectual-historical orientations ...