The Other Eye

Abstract

The famous and vast body of Arab dream literature offers a very rich historical and systematic source for the study of indices, symbols and other visual indicators. While this oneiric literature has always attracted much attention to this world of dreams, their visual dimension has remained rather neglected. This article looks at one of the fundamental elements of the dream, namely its transposition from the visual to the oral and/or written, the only way, as J.C. Schmitt has underlined, by which we can know of dreams. Thus at the centre of this article stands the relationship between the visual aspect of the dream and the forms of its non-visual representation.