Imagining the Divine: Ghazali on Imagination, Dreams, and Dreaming

Journal of the American Academy of Religion March 2002, Vol. 70, No. 1, pp. 33–53. © 2002 The American Academy of Religion This study presents a phenomenological analysis of Ghazali’s discussion of dreams and dream discourse as it specifically relates to the faculty of the imagination. The imagination is an important, though ambiguous and understudied, category, as it is responsible for diverse visual activities such as dreaming, visions, and prophecy. The imagination, then, is responsible for translating the incorporeal divine world into corporeal material images. These images, in turn, represent an integral part of the mystic’s experience. The imagination tries to overcome the fundamental aniconic tension in monotheism between God’s immanence and His transcendence. As a result, the products of the imagination are very ambiguous: for the philosophers they are chimerical, yet for the mystics they provide an important access to truth. Although this study is devoted to Ghazali, a twelfth-century Muslim, the conclusions are meant to aid in the much needed construction of the imagination as a nuanced and important category in the academic study of religion.