From Dream Prophecies Comes a Very Real War

There was the dream of the soccer game, the karate dream, the dream of the airplane, huge and lumbering, carried on one man’s back. We speak loosely of a great national nightmare, but they speak concretely of dreams, visions and omens.

Perhaps the most surreal thing about the videotape of Osama bin Laden and his associates discussing the attacks of Sept. 11 is the convergence of modern technology with ancient prognostication. Captured on tape is a coterie of men talking about their dreams, visions they clearly put stock in, visions that now seem to have betrayed them. To speak of dreams as casually and seriously as these men do with each other opens up a chasm between us, an unbridgeable space of eons.

If you wanted a shorthand for this war, which has led commentators to stretch for terms like “the fourth world” to distinguish the sleek glamour of smart bombs from the shabbiness of men in homemade tunics riding horses, it might just as well be Prediction versus Prophecy. The United States and its enemy are both intensely interested in the future. Both sides have turned to prognosticators, and we have both found our prognosticators as unreliable as the oracles of ancient Greece.

Mullah Omar decided to fight for power because of a dream he had in 1994 telling him to oppose the feuding warlords of Afghanistan. And he decided to dig in and fight to the last because of yet another dream. The word “dream” appeared in the news stories reporting these decisions without comment, as if it is self-evident that a man who makes major decisions based on dreams is a fool.

We are rationalists so through and through that when our political leaders--or their wives--make reference to anything that smacks of the occult, we scoff. Nancy Reagan went to astrologers; Hillary Clinton channeled Eleanor. For those who hated their respective husbands, nothing could crystallize the folly of their administrations more clearly.

We are only about a century out from the great devaluing moment of dreams in Western society. Freud’s “On the Interpretation of Dreams,” published just in time to mark the new century in 1900, may not be held in high esteem by a psychiatric community that has turned to meds and chat therapy, but it was the death knell for dreams as prediction. A little book but a titanic shift in society: Dreams left the public stage and became a private library of our individual wishes and repressed fantasies. They are symptoms of our inner life but tell us nothing of the world beyond our hopes, desires and fantasies; we don’t ride into battle bolstered by their wisdom.

We admit to dreaming, but we don’t talk about our dreams in the way Bin Laden and his associates discuss dreams. For them, these dreams underscore a mystical connection among the disparate members of a far-flung radical network. Bin Laden doesn’t tell us his own dreams; he repeats the dreams of other people. The dream of one Abu-Al-Hasan about soccer came a year before the attack; the dream of someone named Abu-Da’ud about karate made Bin Laden worry that the dreamer would reveal too much, that the “secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream.”

A religion as diverse as Islam has no one view of dreams. Umar Azam, author of “Dreams in Islam,” says dreams are traditionally divided into three categories: the good, the bad and the irrelevant. The best of them guide us in our best behavior; the worst are devil-sent. Many are simply distractions.

“In Islam, there are two souls, the spirit of life and the spirit of consciousness, and when the spirit of consciousness leaves the brain, when we sleep, then we dream,” says the author, now based in Manchester, England. “Religiously speaking it is not mumbo-jumbo--if it has to do with the soul. If it has to do with the soul, then it must be important.”

But an Islamic scholar who asks not to use his name has a different take. (“This is not really our moment,” he says.) “Dreams could be anything, and there is a vast literature about them. But if you apply a true theological standard, to attach importance to them is superstition.... There are good dreams, bad dreams, righteous dreams--all these categories--but as one poet said: It is a mystery, don’t try to probe it; if it leads you to good, do it; if it leads you to evil, don’t do it.”

In this tape, Bin Laden uses other people’s dreams to suggest that there is something like an inevitability or necessity to his actions. He himself, a man with a degree in civil engineering, sticks to straight prediction: “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower,” he says. And “due to my experience in the field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building.”

In the midst of a discussion of dreams, he makes reference not to night visions but to expertise, calculation, science. He broadcasts his own facility with both prophecy and prediction, but he stays with prediction. There’s something sly in all of this.

Americans have a mixed record when it comes to prediction, which, like dreams, is really about power. Sometimes the power is simply mechanical, as when we predict that certain stresses and loads will make a bridge stand, and it does; sometimes the power is more conditional, like that of Merrill Lynch tech-stock guru Henry Blodgett, who predicted that a stock would rise, and, behold, the law of lemmings made it rise.

Mullah Omar may have ended up on the losing side of this one, but his dreams weren’t necessarily wrong (he may merely have misinterpreted them). Many of our predictions were wrong too, but we ended up on the winning side against the Taliban. Al Qaeda’s prophecies can be as misleading as some American predictions.

It turned out that the Pentagon had the best predictions because it had the military might to make them come true.

So far.