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Eyes Inward

Dreamed 2004 by Amira Mittermaier

INTRODUCTION

Amira Mittermaier lived in Egypt in 2003-4, studying Egyptian dreamwork. Shaykh Qusi led a large dream-group in Cairo; he welcomed her, introducing her to many fruitful interviewees, some of whom had (by the time of this dream) become friends.

EYES INWARD

An open space. It might be the desert.
Men and women, maybe fifteen in total, dressed in strange khaki uniforms. I recognize them. They're Shaykh Qusi's followers.
I watch as they take small metal tubes in their hands, raise them to their faces, and push them into their eyes, all the way in, until the tubes disappear. Their movements are gentle but determined. Only round, white, inward-turned eyeballs remain in the place where their eyes used to be.
Next their shaykh hands them batteries, which they swallow.
That's why they see, I think. That's the secret.

Then I wake up and what I have witnessed stops making sense. How can one see more with one's eyes closed or turned inward?
I guess I understand these things better when I'm asleep.
Maybe I've been in the field for too long.
I jot down the dream in my notebook before it fades from my memory.

SOURCE: Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination by Amira Mittermaier (2011, University of California Press), p. xv, labeled "Prelude".
DATE: Her fieldwork was 2003-4; last lines imply it's late in her stay.

NOTES

I find the image of jamming something hard into one's eye quite creepy. Yet I've had similar dreams, and it's not always negative. Islamophobia? Maybe. I tend to be uneasy with all the Abrahamic religions' scorn for the material body (and world).

I'm not sure if her penultimate line "Maybe I've been in the field too long" expresses burnout, or the fear she's going native, losing her anthropological objectivity? But the book that followed this "Prelude", exploring a diverse community under complex pressures, made me wish she'd gone more native, dropped her postmodern baggage, the quotes from Freud and Foucault, and given us more of what these dreamers saw, in their own words.

But then I'm a native myself. A shaman who finds Freud and Foucault as archaic and doctrinaire as I do the Qur'an.


LISTS AND LINKS: the desert - cults? - eyes & vision - dreamwork - Islam - Wayan's similar dream: Eyebolt - even grosser and more positive eye-imagery: Ann's dream Maggots - more Amira Mittermaier - Egypt: Cairo

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