Dream Interpretation (تفسير الأحلام)
At the inception of psychiatry in Sudan, psychiatric treatment was wholly in religious hands. The doctrinal principles of theory and practice are founded on ancestor cults strongly imbued with magico-religious animism. Nevertheless, legend and folk tales supply some valuable opportunities and incentives for collective abreaction and other forms of individual and group therapy. In the evolution of mental disturbances and the regressive phases of illness towards recovery, representations of an ancestral kind are frequently symbolized or enacted. It is exciting that a highly developed system of ingenious dream interpretation has developed according to the community’s history, evolution, beliefs, and cosmic setting.[[i]]
The practice of dream interpretation (تفسير الأحلام) by the Sudanese religious
healers is based on a seven-hundred-year-old Arabic textbook by Ibn Sireen (ابن سيرين). For Ibn Sireen,
there are two types of dreams: the hypnagogic dream, which is false. Hence, it has
no significance from the interpretational aspect and is dismissed by the
interpreter as accidental. The other type is the genuine dream, which is the
subject of fruitful[[ii]]
interpretations, predictions, and therapeutic elaboration. In interpreting the
latter, the principle is that dream events have a fixed primeval connotation
and a current changeable meaning that derives its entity from the constitution,
life experience, and habitual practices of the dreamer and the general context
of the dream itself.
The interpretation process employs complicated and
relatively rigid systems of simile (التشبيه)
and metaphor (الاستعارة) derived from the
Koran, the Prophet’s traditions, poetry, and proverbial lore (hyperbole (الغلو), antithesis (النقيض),
and paradox (المفارقة).
[[iii]]
The healer will prepare the patient for dream evocation by suggestive anticipatory methods. The shrines are still where the dream prophecy is expected to be evoked. Nowadays, unevoked dreams are made the theme of discussion and interpretation.
Patients and healers alike will widely believe that dreams
are prophetic but that the past, the present, and the future are linked in a
continuum. One of the basic features of this system of dream interpretation is
that both the patient and the doctor accept the primordial (الأفكار
البدائية) ideas that run through the system.
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