Chapter Twenty-Five: On Revelation and the Disclosure That Comes to Human Souls, and on Visions, Dreams and the Like

what (1) they hunt, and deliver it to their masters sound of wound and injury, for all the gnawing of hunger in them. So too we see the birds of the dove fill their crops with grain and cast it down before their chicks, and many animals give themselves up to destruction as a ransom [61] for their young. And again, the brave man throws himself into the battle though he knows his body will perish, seeking the thanks and the praise that accrue to him after his death. These things and their like the animals and others do out of desire for a passing pleasure; how much more, then, the perpetual intellectual pleasure that Būlus the Apostle described in his words: « No eye has seen it, no ear has heard it, nor has it crossed the thought of man — that which has been prepared for the good possessors of the virtues » (2).

The Twenty-Fifth Chapter

On the demonstration of the revelation (waḥy) and the unveiling (inkishāf) that accrue to human souls, and of vision and dreams and the rest

We say: you have already learned (3) that the imaginative faculty (al-quwwah al-mutakhayyilah), whose dwelling is the middle of the brain, has for its business composition, division and analysis; and in sleep the act of this faculty grows strong, together with the stilling of the inner faculty through the ceasing of the outward senses. And these compositions here mentioned may be true and may be false.

[62] The false have four causes. The first: the forms we have beheld while awake remain as phantasms (1) on the tablet of imagination, and in sleep they gleam in the common sense (al-ḥiss al-mushtarak). The second cause: when the cogitative faculty applies itself intently to some thing or some matter openly (2), the form of this matter is traced upon the form-bearing faculty (al-muṣawwirah); then, when the stilling of the outward senses occurs at the time of sleep's heedlessness, the phantasm of what was in the form-bearing faculty is impressed upon the faculty nearest to the senses, which is the common sense. The third cause: when the imaginative faculty is ruined by an accident befalling the tablet that carries it, so that its operations are thrown into disorder — then if heat prevails over him, he beholds (3) fires and furnaces and kindled kilns; and if cold prevails, he beholds rivers and snows and ice; and if there is repletion in him, he feels weights pouring down upon him. The fourth cause: the work of the devils, in most conditions, is to make people imagine things (4) in dreams, and to contrive to make them transgress by means toward which their intellects yearn.

As for true dreams, we say: all that has been and will be and now is, is known to [63] the Creator, exalted be He, with a knowledge unmixed with alteration or division. And these matters here mentioned are known to the possessors of the separate intellects; and a kind of that is known (5) to the souls that have parted from their bodies; and a kind of it to the souls that have not parted, but in which there is a receptivity for the overflowing and the bestowal from the Creator, exalted be He, and from the separate intellects as well, and from the souls that are of their own kind. So the cause of the hindrance to this reception is the perpetual bodily attachment. And when stillness and calm occur in sleep, and there is no yielding to bodily matters, connection must needs come about with the spiritual substances that correspond to it, and it is formed with their forms, and there are traced in its essence the things known that were hidden from it and that are proper to it and to its body. And of these things known it is bound to have remembrance in the waking state and not otherwise, as it was said to Yūsuf: « Arise, take the child and his mother and go off with them to Miṣr » (1). And since it is in the nature of the imaginative faculty that it likens (2) meanings to likenesses, whatever likeness is complete has no need of interpretation (taʼwīl), for it has produced [64] the matter as it truly is; but if it is incomplete in some of its kinds — as when one sees a thing in the form of its contrary because of the kinship between them, or sees (3) the entailed as the entailing, the first being like weeping that is construed as joy, and the second like the fat bulls that indicate years of famine — this sort stands in need of interpretation, which is the knowledge of the relation of the meanings to the forms beheld (4) in the imagination that stands before it in the common sense.

— Notes —

[51] 1) Fallen out in the original: mā.

[51] 2) The First Epistle of Saint Būlus to the people of Kūrintus 2:9.

[51] 3) In the eighth chapter.

[52] 1) In the original: ashbāḥ.

[52] 2) Sic.

[52] 3) Fallen out in the original: shāhada.

[52] 4) In the original: yatakhayyalū.

[52] 5) In the original: maʻlūmah.

[53] 1) The Gospel of Mattá 2:13.

[53] 2) In the original: yatashabbahu.

[53] 3) In the original: an yará.

[53] 4) In the original: shūwihat.