Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination, by Amira Mittermaier

When picking up Dreams that Matter, it should be impossible to forget that Egypt right now is not quite the same Egypt in which this text was written.The extent to which Egypt has changed, and the nature and content of those changes, is still, at this point, in a constant state of flux.But this is a unique text, one that speaks both to an Egyptian winter that preceded the Spring, and offers interesting possibilities for thinking about the politics of imagination in post-Tahrir Egypt.This is not a book about the content of dreams, for a number of solid theoretical and practical reasons, but it is a book about the work that dreams do, and the way people interact around dreams.And since dreams are unlikely to disappear, neither will their power, and their importance, in Egypt today.Mittermaier takes care to organize this text carefully, acknowledging from the outset that an analysis of dreams, or more precisely the landscape in which dreams have power both in themselves through their interpretation, is complicated and multi-layered.Chapter One, "Dream Trouble," lays out the historical background of dream interpretation within Islam, and specifically in the Muslim context.The primary focus of the chapter is on the nature of authority in dream interpretation and the extent to which dreams, and their interpretation, have been understood as a part of "true Islam."Dreams appear, in this chapter, to pose challenges to both reformists and strict traditionalists: to reformists because dreams operate outside the system of conventionally understood rationality, and to strict traditionalists because dreams and the ways that they can be interpreted can give rise to understandings of religious practices that differ from the understanding advocated by orthodox religious institutions.Introduced in this chapter, the particular challenges that dreams and their interpretations pose to both reformists and the strictly orthodox is a theme that continues throughout the book.Chapter Two focuses primarily on the dream interpreters themselves, their personal, intellectual, and religious background as well as their physical location in the geography of Cairo and the community concerned with the interpretation of dreams, including the physical location of dream interpreters, and the ways that dream interpretation often takes places in spaces that are simultaneously both public and private.Chapters Three and Four focus specifically on the ways that dreaming, both when awake and when asleep, challenges the primacy of visual evidence.Chapter Five has a more specific focus, and looks specifically at the ways that visitational dreams inform people's behaviour,

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