During my fieldwork I heard numerous stories that featured the dead as central characters... Even dead animals can address the living with their needs.

A friend in Cairo told me that her dead dog appeared to her one night. As the dog seemed to be suffering, the woman asked her husband the next day where he had buried the dog, only to find that bulldozers had destroyed the burial place on the day before her dream.

As she explained to me, it was the dog's spirit (rūh) that had come to her.

SOURCE: Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination by Amira Mittermaier (2011, University of California Press), p.151. Original passage untitled.

EDITOR'S NOTE

This dream interests me on two levels. First, the dreamer's casual rejection of the fundamental (and often fundamentalist) Abrahamic snobbery "Only humans have souls." I know Cairo's a big cosmopolitan capital, yet I still assumed the locals would all be Muslims and Christians (sure that dogs lack souls) or secular modernists (sure that souls don't exist at all). Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Second: if you reject our dog owner's literal interpretation--her dog's ghost visited to complain its burial site was desecrated (and doesn't even a tired old dog deserve peaceful sleep?)--then how did she know the grave had just been bulldozed? You have to swallow either (animal!) ghosts, clairvoyance, or a hell of a coincidence.

Pick one. Swallow. Don't hurt your throat.

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