in which you had been, until you reach two, through whose existence number appeared, since one comes first in relation to it. One is thus the narrowest of things. Considered in its own essence, it is not in itself a number, but it is so in terms of what is two, three, or four. Its name and its very entity are never brought together. Know this.
(Forms in the Intermediate Realm and the Interpretation of Dreams)
People differ from what we have said in their description of the ṣūr as a horn. Having established this, know that when God, glory be to Him, takes the spirits from these natural and elemental bodies wherever they are, He lodges them in bodily forms within the whole of this horn of light. Everything a human being perceives after death in the intermediate realm is perceived through the eye of the form in which he dwells in the horn and through its light. This is real perception.
Some forms there are restricted in what they can do. Others are unrestricted, as are the spirits of all the prophets and the spirits of the martyrs. Some can look upon the world of this life from that abode. Some appear to the sleeper in the presence of imagination in which he dwells. Such a sleeper’s vision is always true.
Every dream vision is true and makes no mistake. If a dream vision is in error, the vision itself did not err. The one interpreting it is the one who errs,[55] because he did not know what was meant by that form. Do you not see that when Abu Bakr interpreted the dream vision of the person mentioned above, he, may God bless him and grant him peace, said to him, “You got some of it right
Notes
[55]
(The author distinguishes perceiving the form from judging its meaning. Here he attributes the error to the interpretation, just as earlier he attributed it to the one who judges rather than to the senses.)
Translator’s note TN1235-1: The analogy continues the previous page’s account of narrowing a multiplicity back toward one. The author treats one as the origin of number, whose appearance begins with two. “Ṣūr” keeps the same term used in the preceding discussion of the horn and the forms it contains.
