the dream of spiritual initiation and the organization of self representations among Pakistani sufis

A Pakistani man, after dreaming that two sufis come to him and feed him, may find his life transformed as a result of his dream. The power of dreams to change a person's life has been observed by anthropologists and psychologists (for example, Hallowell 1966; Singer and Pope 1978; Wallace 1952, 1956), but the process of transformation is not well understood. This article will show how a semiotic model of the self, which sees a person as an ever-changing array of self representations constituted through dialogue,1 can explain this transformative power of a dream in terms of the dream's content and its relationship to the dreamer's subsequent experiences. Too much dream research has focused on content at the wrong level, at least for present purposes. Freudian psychoanalysts have downplayed the significance of manifest dream content in their search for the disguised wishes and conflicts that constitute the "latent content" of a dream (Freud 1965[1900]:345-347). But, while a dream clearly weaves together elements from the dreamer's past, expressing his disguised impulses and conflicts, as Freud demonstrated, it must also be a projection into a culturally articulated future (see Basso 1987:99) if it is to be transformative. This article will show that this projection can be identified in the manifest content of the dream, which simultaneously replicates a cultural "template" and expresses the dreamer's idiosyncratic concerns in a cultural idiom that may be socially communicated. These concerns can be understood as a desire to establish a self-image that is congruent with the dreamer's current circumstances and that facilitates his resolution of persistent personal conflicts. However, the significance of the content of a dream ultimately depends on subsequent events, on how the future actually unfolds. A sufi initiation dream, for example, may have a powerful impact on the dreamer's system of self representations, so that as a result of the dream the dreamer comes to regard himself as the disciple of some sufi teacher. But the social salience of a particular self representation will depend upon subsequent events and may shift over time as external conditions change. If the dreamer does not succeed in resolving conflicts by adopting the new self representation, the relevance of both the self representation and the dream may Pakistani dreams of initiation into a sufi order illustrate how a dream may have the power to transform the dreamer by becoming the basis for a new, semiotically constituted self representation. The semiotic power of the dream can be understood only by considering several aspects of the dreaming process: how the manifest dream content simultaneously replicates a cultural template and expresses the dreamer's idiosyncratic concerns and conflicts, how the interpretation of the dream facilitates the establishment of a new self representation and associated social relationships which may resolve the dreamer's conflicts, and finally how the significance of the dream is ultimately determined by the dreamer's ability to realize the expectations of the new self representation in his subsequent life. [dreams, self-concepts, psychological anthropology, semiotics, sufism, Pakistan]