Dreaming in Cairo for Bidoun

A book review I wrote for the new issue of Bidoun, "Squares"

Amira Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination

University of California Press, December 2010

“For years I wondered why dreams are often so dull when related,” William Burroughs once wrote, “and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple — like most answers, you have always known it: No context… like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank.”

Every Wednesday night from the years 2001 to 2003, millions of Egyptians would tune into Channel 3 on national television to watch Ru’a, a popular talk show in which audiences would intently listen in as callers would, in great detail, retell their dreams. With a guest psychologist by his side, the respected scholar Sheikh Hanafi, a theologian affiliated with the formidable Al Azhar institution, would interpret the stuff of the dreams. The program, which ran for fifty-seven episodes in total, had its ardent fans — one girl went as far as to take detailed notes every week and then re-dreamt dreams drawn from the show. Though lauded as a “fusion” of Islam and modern science, callers inevitably directed their requests to the sheikh and ignored the psychologist entirely (doubtless his Freudian interpretation would bring embarrassment).

And yet, a little over a year into its life, the show met a bitter end when a Saudi caller recounted a dream in which she saw the moon breastfeeding a boy. Though he later denied it, Sheikh Hanafi interpreted this strange vision to mean that the mahdi had been born, the savior in Sunni eschatology whose appearance indicates that the end of the world is nigh. Presumably fearing messianic rumblings, Al Azhar, the seat and voice of Sunni Islam, went into a frenzy, quickly issuing a decree prohibiting the broadcast of dreams to the masses. The Muslim Brotherhood, too, posted a fatwa online urging Muslims to distrust their dreams as sources of knowledge or guidance. In January 2003, Ru’a was wiped from the airwaves, and that was that.

Still, the light of the breastfeeding moon illuminated the way for the German-Egyptian anthropologist Amira Mittermaier, who recounts the story of the doomed television program in Dreams That Matter, a study of the place of dreams in contemporary Egyptian life. In her ethnography of dreaming in Cairo, we enter a culture of dream-telling and dream-interpretation enacted in homes and saint shrines, on Sufi broadcasts on satellite TV, and in cyber-dream websites run by sheikhs. Mittermaier surveys a city’s worth of narratives: dreams that offer romantic advice or identify partners for marriage, dreams that lead to the formation of new Egyptian political parties and construction projects, dreams of pets, of dead relatives, and of bodily functions, dreams featuring the Prophet Muhammad, and dreams incubated by sleeping in special positions. Her aim, ostensibly, is to construct an “anthropology of the imagination,” in which imagination is defined not as a faculty isolated in the brain but as a transcendent network of intermediary realms, an ontologically real space of the in-between where minds connect: between divine and human, living and dead, sleeping and waking, presence and absence, and illusion and reality. In her endeavor to look beyond the visible in Cairo, Mittermaier takes this in-between as her ethnographic object. Yet, it is, at times, a space the ethnographer herself gets tangled up in.

Not too far into the book, we learn the anthropologist’s research subjects begin to dream of her. And she, in turn, has dreams about them. One of her primary interlocutors, Sheikh Qusi has an active life in his followers’ dreams, which they record in a collective notebook with a photograph of the sheikh on the cover. This handwritten “Book of Visions” contains accounts of hundreds of dreams that he appeared in, from 1973 onwards. Mittermaier herself dreams that she gets into a fight with Sheikh Qusi — and then wakes up with two big scratches across her cheek. Awakening with dream-scars, she has herself slipped into the “Book of Visions” she came to Egypt to study in the first place, and into the intermediary realm between illusion and reality that she had objectively defined. Though she tells us she felt disturbed when she woke up that morning, Mittermaier doesn’t delve much deeper into her own implication in the ethnography of dreaming she constructs, missing out on certainly one of the most captivating dimensions of her own work.

Perhaps it was just too boring for Mittermaier to simply re-tell her interlocutors’ dreams in her book. Once she appeared in a sheikh’s dream wearing a school uniform. In another dream, she visited a research subject she had not yet met the night before their interview, enabling the woman to recognize her the next day. And yet, her participation raises age-old questions about the entanglement of ethnographers with their subjects, a question pushed to its extreme in the 1969 cult classic Keep the River on Your Right, a memoir and film about the anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum’s experience living in a remote jungle in Peru among the cannibalistic Arakmbut tribe. The ethnographer has sex with his subjects and, at one point, famously eats human flesh. It is true that entering subjects’ dreams isn’t as taboo as eating them for lunch, but still, her crossing into this intimate space raises questions about the ethnographer as director of the research and, indeed, its subject.

In the end, it is this unexpected narrative strand of Mittermaier’s own dream exploits in sleeping Cairo that makes the book worth reading. It is, too, in its approach and texture, a departure from most discussions about Cairo — or even cities for that matter — we encounter in the public sphere. Dreams that Matter is not straitjacketed as an exploration of underdevelopment, terrorism, gender, or politics, but rather, it is somehow all and none of these things at once. And for that reason alone, this somnambulist anthropologist’s exploration of Egyptian dream life is a unique, if not compelling, one.

Anna Della Subin

[photo from the Bidoun shoot for Squares. see more at www.bidoun.org]

man-made music by Holy Spirits

As far as I know the Holy Spirit has never said much to the Father or the Son. But the Brooklyn-based band Holy Spirits leaves gently ringing the ears of God, Greenpoint residents or whoever else is out there listening.

They have just released their first EP The Afternoon's Blood. You might call it experimental folk pop. With Aaron Hodges & Rob Alvarez's floating vocals and Michael Barron's full-bodied drumming striking that part inside you that you don't understand just yet, Holy Spirits is on its way to becoming an indigenous sacred music of Brooklyn.

This weekend I discovered it is the perfect music to have stuck in your head while you float down a river in the wild, particularly their track Contain. With Aaron singing ...I contain this all...

It makes one think how a certain Someone has said that before.

You can listen to Holy Spirits or request the EP here

and if you are in Cambridge come hear them on August 8th at HMS Putnam playing with Solanin & Siv Lie. info here

Ground Zero Dreams

Check out an essay of mine published in Cult/ure, the Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School, about how 9/11 has been vividly dreamt by both Americans and Islamic militants-- before, during and ever since the events of that day...

Ground Zero Dreams:

The 9/11 Dreams of Americans and Islamic Militants Through the Indian Lens of the Problem of Illusion

The abstract:

"The cataclysmic events of 11 September 2001 have been vividly dreamt both by Americans across the country and by Al-Qaeda operatives, who have recorded and interpreted their dreams of airplanes, skyscrapers, fiery explosions—and each other. This essay explores the ontological paradox that as we are dreaming, we are a figure in another’s dream, through the Indian lens of the problem of illusion, drawing on its philosophical narratives in order to explore how we may use dream sharing to build an ethics of reconciliation, and to promote healing in a time of trauma."

Freud's theory of dreams as wish-fulfillments

[Photograph of Freud's desk in Vienna, on which he had lined up statues of gods, demi-gods and mythical beings, staring back at him as he worked. Taken in 1938 by Edmund Engelman.]

As Freud explained to his patients, and writes in The Interpretation of Dreams, all dreams have meaning, and are motivated by the wishes of the unconscious mind. The contents of dreams are the fulfillment of that wish within a safe place, in which the unconscious cannot set in motion anything that would modify the external world—for the gates of the citadel are guarded in sleep. Yet it seems that not all the dreamers that Freud treated in his psychoanalytic practice wished that their dreams be wishes—in Chapter Four, Freud relates how one of his female patients, “the cleverest of all my dreamers,” produced a contradiction to his theory that dreams are wish-fulfillments. She described a dream in which she was travelling to the country with her mother-in-law to spend the holidays together. Yet, in her daytime life, she had rebelled against this very idea—her dream had undone the solution she had wished, instead expressing the frustration of a wish. In response, Freud writes, “The dream showed that I was wrong. Thus it was her wish that I might be wrong, and her dream showed that wish fulfilled.” For the non-fulfillment of one wish means the fulfillment of another. Freud explains that such “counter-wish dreams” tend to happen to his patients after he explains his theory to them, and, indeed, “it is to be expected that the same thing will happen to some of the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready to have one of their wishes frustrated in a dream if only their wish that I may be wrong can be fulfilled.” In the passage, Freud springs off the page to implicate us all—having read Freud, we can never falsify his theory that dreams are wish-fulfillments using one of our own dreams, because we could just be wishing Freud is wrong. Indeed, Freud himself uses his own dreams to demonstrate how every dream is motivated by a wish—and yet it is his wish that his theory be correct. Moreover, making the theory doubly-unfalsifiable, Freud argues that the dream as wish-fulfillment is the operation of the wish to continue sleeping. So if we are a human who sleeps and dreams and has read Freud or had a conversation with him, it seems we cannot disprove Freud’s theory of dreams as wish-fulfillments. The Interpretation of Dreams emerges as a self-consciously charged text, which inevitably must transform the way we dream and interpret our dreams, perhaps transporting us inside a Fun House of Mirrors where we stand next to Freud. Inside, everything held up to the lens of his theory will inevitably reflect the theory itself to infinity. Caught in this position, we might be likely to say, “It is all only a dream.”

And yet not just a single, flat image of “wish-fulfillment” would be reflected, as there are various levels within the dream of what is wished for, and what is doing the wishing. Freud argues that throughout sleep, “we know just as certainly that we are dreaming as we know that we are sleeping.” When a dream takes things too far—perhaps invoking a scene too terrifying to bear—the preconscious tells the consciousness not to worry and to continue sleeping, for “it is only a dream.” When the dreamer is threatened from within by something—when the censorship, which is never fully asleep, has let some material slip through—it leads it to suppress the anxiety produced by passing a dismissive, critical judgment on it. This judgment in turn gives the impression that rational, common sense-thought has been operating all along during the dream-work. And yet, it seems we are lying to ourselves when we say “it is only a dream”—for what has been dreamt in the inner dream is, according to Freud, the truest expression of reality. Paradoxically, the purpose of this “dream within a dream,” from which one wakes up into the second dream-frame, is to at once rob the dream of its reality yet to express it as the “truest recollection of reality.” As he argues, “If a particular event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event—the strongest affirmation of it.” What we say is “only a dream,” is the truest part of the dream—the representation of which expresses the desire that the thing described had never happened. In this way, the inner layer expresses the deepest wish of the unconscious being censored, while the outer frame of the dream expresses the wish of the censoring ego.

What is doing the wishing, the unconscious, is, as Freud writes, “the true psychical reality.” And yet ultimately, it is unknown to us—we cannot know reality as it is. As Freud writes, “in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.” In exploring what a dream is, Freud reveals that we cannot truly know the external world either, for our senses are imperfect and tend to trick us, just as the censoring ego tries to trick the dreamer into thinking that the manifest content of the dream is the only meaning the dream has. In daytime, do we ignore something latent in the external world just as we ignore the latent content of the dream? Ultimately, in exploring dreams in which we dream that we are dreaming, Freud comes up against the problem that it is simply not possible to be sure at any given moment whether one is dreaming or awake. Our only validation of whether we are dreaming or awake occurs when we actually do wake up—in retrospect. Yet if the reality of the external world is incompletely presented to us through our senses, we cannot truly be sure whether we are awake, or to be certain we are not in another “dream within a dream.”

Caught within a dream within a dream of the dream as a wish-fulfillment, surely no wishes are ever really being “fulfilled,” leading to a satisfaction. Ultimately, a portrait of the human condition emerges as one of unending, striving desire. What is a wish? It means we want something we do not have, yet the attainment of which would mean we would no longer wish to have it. Since we can never stop wishing, we will never stop dreaming.

Illustrations of the Conference of the Birds

Images from manuscript illustrations of Farid ud-din Attar's Mantiq al-Tayr, or The Conference of the Birds

Swimming elephants

Senoi dream theory: A big scandal in the study of dreams

“If you should hear that a flying saucer from another planet had landed on Gulangra, a lonely mountain peak in the Central Mountain Range of the Malay Peninsula a hundred years ago,” writes the anthropologist and adventurer Kilton Stewart, “…you would want to know about the people who navigated it and the society from which they came.” In the elaborate analogy that opens his famous 1951 essay “Dreaming in Malaya,” Stewart imagines “celestial navigators” touching down in an isolated, preliterate community and teaching the people their methods of healing and education in order to reproduce on Earth their own utopian civilization that is free from violence, mental illness, and war. With this image in place, Stewart astounds his readers with an actual account of such a people, the Senoi of Western Malaysia, who have achieved a utopian social harmony through a unique practice of dream controlling and interpretation, habituated in daily life through childhood education. Rather than conquering outer space, the Senoi have “conquered the space inside the individual,” through the following set of psychological and spiritual principles of dreaming: Instead of merely letting the dream happen to him or her, the dreamer should take action, confronting and overcoming danger and steering the dream towards pleasurable experiences, such as transforming a falling dream into a flying one. One should continue dreaming a dream to its resolution or conclusion, while enjoying the process fully. Before waking, one should try to obtain a creative product from the dream, a gift to society that is useful or beautiful, such as a song, a poem or design to be used in the waking world. If one dreams of a friend or relative, one should let the dream guide one’s interaction with that person in waking life towards a harmonious coexistence.

In the sixties, a time when spaceships were indeed landing on a distant landscape, Stewart’s description of Senoi dream theory began to capture the imagination of the American public, as his essay was reprinted in anthologies and read by influential thinkers interested in alternative states of consciousness and who then established Senoi dream groups to enact these practices. And yet later scholarship on the Senoi has revealed Stewart’s ideas about their dream methods to have come, like the aliens, out of thin air. Through comparing the work of other anthropologists studying the Senoi, inconsistencies within Stewart’s own dissertation, and his own research, G. William Domhoff in his book The Mystique of Dreams argues that the Senoi, composed of the Semai and Temiar peoples, do not in fact practice the unusual dream theory described by Stewart, and though they are a non-violent people, they are not living in an extraordinary utopia. The analogy of isolated peoples said to be practicing methods of living derived from an extraterrestrial source still holds true, only our celestial navigator is Kilton Stewart himself. It seems that Stewart, a colorful adventurer, storyteller, skilled hypnotist, dreamer and charmer of women, was more interested in developing his own principles of social betterment than doing “good scholarship.” A passionate social critic who lived between the two world wars, Stewart saw the violence and mental illness surrounding him as the product of the West’s severing its connections with the emotional and psychological wisdom and the ability to think creatively still preserved in primitive tribes. Yet it is clear upon a second reading of “Dreaming in Malaya” that “Senoi dream theory” is Stewart’s own manifesto, as it makes use of relatively little Senoi terminology or culturally-specific references. Indeed “Senoi” means “human being” or “person,” and if that term is translated then the essay easily comes to express a wider vision of a utopia built upon the controlling and sharing of dreams.

As Domhoff argues, Stewart’s “Senoi” dream theory caught on among Americans for both its mystique of primitive authenticity and its resonation with the American “can-do” spirit. During the Vietnam War, the dreaming practices of another, nonviolent Southeast Asian community resounded with anti-war Americans reacting against the aggression of their industrialized, urbanized Western civilization. Yet beyond this romanticism, as Domhoff writes, “Paradoxical as it may sound, I think that Senoi dream theory had a deep appeal for Americans at this time because it was a new application of our deepest and most ingrained beliefs about human nature presented in the context of an allegorical story about community and authenticity. Very simply, the ‘Senoi way of dreaming’ actually rests on the unquestioned American belief in the possibility of shaping and controlling both the environment and human nature,” which is seen as malleable and perfectible. For as Stewart, however inaccurately, wrote, “The Senoi believes that any human being, with the aid of his fellows, can outface, master, and actually utilize all beings and forces in the dream universe.” As Domhoff points out, this is actually what Americans believe—and in this way, “Senoi dream theory” is simultaneously a reaction against American imperialism and the expression of it. Senoi dreaming becomes another expression of the American dream.

Rather than teaching us about the dream cultures of Malaysia, Stewart’s “Dreaming in Malaya” becomes a fascinating literary artifact about why we study dream theories and tribal cultures, as told by an unreliable narrator, himself a mythical character. As Domhoff argues, our ethnographies of distant peoples are truly mirrors of our own society, serving as allegorical stories to address the fundamental issues of our community. Each new romanticization or “mystique” of an exotic, indigenous culture in turn teaches us more about our own culture and gives us further insight into what a dream is, particularly when combined with historical awareness and the rigor of scientific thinking. Examining our own communities, Senoi dream theory caught on as Americans searched for “authenticity,” which, as Domhoff writes, “presupposes and is produced by a present circumstance of felt inauthenticity.” Yet since some Americans thought they found it in an “inauthentic” text, and indeed applied these techniques towards positive emotional and spiritual development in their daily lives, ultimately, the figure of Kilton Stewart reveals how “the question of authenticity” is meaningless in dream cultures and psychological movements. Further, it is meaningless to ever say that we “lost authenticity” in our own culture and to search for it elsewhere, for to pose the question of authenticity is to sublimate or to deny authority to the imagination, which paradoxically is what Stewart elevates above all. Though we can take inspiration, we do not need to look to Malaysia for legitimation of the idea that dream controlling, sharing and interpretation, particularly in childhood education, can be harnessed as a force of positive social change, as dream researchers such as Kelly Bulkeley have demonstrated. The astounding part is not aliens landing but the fact that dreams are something we all already have, here on earth, and are an untapped resource of social change. And there is nothing America loves more than an untapped resource…