Sleep, Dream, and Love from the Perspective of Ibn Arabi

In Ibn Arabi's thought, sleep and dream is important. He has distinguished between connected and disconnected imagination and brought the place of dream in the connected imaginary world and revelation in the disconnected imaginary world. He considers the dream’s interpretation to be related to the connected imaginary world. Therefore, Qur'an cannot be just a dream, because it lacks Shari'at and its rules do not have a grammatical aspect. The dream is one of the divine annunciators and the sincere dream is a part of revelation. Ibn Arabi considers the imagination as a force of the heart, and love is the excess of affection whose manifestation is within the heart. The heart has seven stages as seven layers of the sky, which is in one stage, the mine of affection, love, and compassion for the people, and in the higher stage, the mine of love of the divinity, and finally, the mine of the manifestations of the divinity’s attributes. Therefore, by expressing the position of dream and its relation with revelation, we discuss about calling Qur'an a dream letter and the relationship between sleep, dream, and love in order to determine the secret of man's superiority over other creatures.