Dreams and the Material World

This chapter turns to the hagiographic tradition and what it can tell us about the spiritual roles available to men and women within it. It is concerned mostly with archetypal-spiritual dreams and prophetic or mantic dreams, which pertained not only to the future but also to the present. Any dream in which a prophet, angel, saint, or other agent of God appears may be considered prophetic. Byzantine saints found new avenues of appearance through tangible items such as icons and holy relics. Their messages, which could have personal or wider significance, were generally clear in meaning and did not require interpretation by specialists. The chapter compares the dreams of holy Christian men and women with the dreams of their Muslim counterparts in the Sufi tradition. It shows that dreams allowed pious women a greater degree of spiritual agency than was normally accorded to them in either culture. This unusual equity of gender is also evident in the early hagiographic biographies of Muhammad. The chapter closes with apocalyptic visions in Judaism, Byzantine Christianity, and Islam, showing that they were symptomatic of communities in crisis, regardless of faith. Moving from community concerns to individual concerns about the afterlife, it looks at tours of the other world, including two undertaken by women.