An Ottoman Voice in My Committee of Sleep

 

Once again in a dream I am playing scholar and scribe, working with a team to collate, translate and edit several versions of an Ottoman Turkish text that may be derived from Old Anatolian. A female philologist is working on this. We compare several words for dream in Turkish – rüya, hayal, düş – and older terms from the Turkic language group and the different states and qualities each implies.  

I smile, on waking, at this new evidence that specialists in my Committee of Sleep, monitoring my research into different dreaming cultures and dreaming minds, are trying to nudge me in their preferred directions.
    These are a few of the subjects my dreams have prompted me to research over the past year.

The biography of Yeshe Sogyel
The city of Ugarit and the Library of Ashurbanipal
Irish and Scots folklore of the Cailleach
The life and music of Nina Simone
The cult of Cybele
telestike or statue-animation in late antiquity
The life of Pemalingpa and other tertöns or “treasure revealers”
Aerial tollhouses on Eastern Orthodox road maps to the afterlife
The genre in Chinese poetry known as Youxian or “Wandering as an Immortal”
The burial rites of the Toraja of south Sulawesi
Dion Fortune’s approach to “intermediate beings”
shamanic dream practices of the Passamaquoddy

Almost every night brings another research assignment delivered in a dream. Sometimes it is just a postcard or a mysterious word (“Phthonios”), sometimes an immense cinematic drama, maybe playing on several screens.
     Thankfully, I sometimes find that the dream is a prompt to recover work I have already done – including essays and draft chapters – that I had forgotten. This may be, in part, the case with my Ottoman prompt. Under the Ottoman empire dreams were valued highly, and even a Sultan kept a dream journal. When I try to marshal what I have learned about Ottoman dreams, I think of the brilliant Turkish scholar Asli Niyazioğlu, who has made a most rewarding study of the role of dreams in Ottoman biographies. I posted an article based on one of her books here.
     Accepting that the Turkish lady in my dreams was pushing me to go further I found a scholarly essay by Asli on the influence of dream interpreters of the Halveti (Khalvati) Sufi order over Ottoman sultans. In the late sixteenth century, the Sultan himself had his dreams recorded and sent to the Halveti şeyh for interpretation. The Sultan’s senior architect, successor to the famous Sinan, took up his profession because of a dream interpreted by the sheikh in this way. [1]
     Asli explains in this interview how in Ottomoan biographical dictionaries, dreams are often presented as keys to career decisions. She explains that a common Ottoman term for dream was "mirror"; dreams were seen as mirrors in which divine intention was reflected. 

 

 1. Asli Niyazioğlu, “Dreams, Ottoman Biography, Writing and the Halveti Sunbuli Sheikhs of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul" in  Ralph von Elger and Yavuz Kose (eds) Many Ways of Speaking about the Self: Middle Eastern Ego-Documents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (14th-20th Century) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010, pp. 171-184.

Art (Top) Ottoman woman enjoying coffee,early 18th century, unknown artist. In Pera Palace Museum, Istanbul. (Bottom) Miniatutre of Ashab-i Kehf (Sleepers of Ephesus) in Topkapi Palace museum, Istanbul.