Bin Laden’s Hopes and Fears: Dreams of the Future

Many centuries before psychoanalysts attempted to make sense of dreams as symbols of a person’s psychological life, the ancients understood dreams as nocturnal experiences in which God, the gods, or spirits would give advice or indicate what the future held. Religious and precognitive dreams stand together as the oldest dimensions of dream interpretation. Usama (aka Osama) bin Laden’s conversation about dreams surrounding the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, has reminded us how much these ancient intuitions about dreams continue to influence many in our multicultural world. Reports of precognitive dreams encouraged bin Laden to believe his scheme would succeed but at the same time caused him to worry that his secret might be discovered. I want to discuss his view of these dreams in light of the history of dream interpretation.

Bin Laden’s interest in the dreams and visions surrounding September 11 is in accord with the Muslim tradition of honoring dreams. Islam, like virtually all the other major religions of the world, has valued dreams as a primary means of divine revelation and a potential form of religious experience. In fact, Toufy Fahd, Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Strasbourg, maintains that Arab-Muslim dream interpretation reached heights known to no other civilization. (“The Dream in Medieval Islamic Society,” G.E. von Grunebaum and R. Caillois, eds., The Dream and Human Societies, 1966, p. 36) Dreams hold a central place in the origins and history of Islam as much of the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, was revealed to Muhammad in dreams over several years. Muhammad regularly asked his disciples about their dreams and shared his own dreams with them. Muslims consider dream interpretation to be a great science that God taught Adam and passed down to Muhammad through successive generations. G.E. von Grunebaum, a noted Near East historian, states that there is hardly an aspect of Muslim individual and community life where dreams do not play a part. (“Introduction: The Cultural Function of the Dream as Illustrated by Classical Islam,” Grunebaum, The Dream, p. 11)

To what degree bin Laden’s ideas and actions can be seen to reflect the doctrines and values of Islam as a whole has been hotly debated since September 11. His discussion of dreams surrounding the terrorist attack indicates that some of his ideas, about dreams at least, are consistent with traditional views. The relevant segment of the videotape pertaining to dreams documents a courtesy visit by bin Laden to a shaykh (a leader in the mystical orders of Islam), apparently in a guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

On the tape, bin Laden says that Abu-Al-Hasan-(Masri) told him a year before September 11: “I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots. So I wondered if that was a soccer game or a pilot game? Our players were pilots.” Further, he said the game went on and “we defeated them.” Bin Laden adds, “That was a good omen for us,” expressing optimism that the dream predicts victory for his side in the attack. Bin Laden states that Abu-Al-Hasan didn’t know anything about the operation until he heard it on the radio, emphasizing the predictive character of the dream. This sequence reveals a crucial aspect of traditional beliefs about dreams, namely that they can show events in the future, either directly or symbolically.

Artemidorus’ classic, Oneirocritica (Interpretation of Dreams), possibly the most widely known dream book of the ancient world and a strong influence on Muslim views, was translated into Arabic in 873, thereby stimulating dream classification in Islam. Artemidorus, one of history’s most renowned dream analysts, distinguishes between dreams that predict future events exactly as they will happen (theorematic dreams) and those that represent the future in symbols requiring interpretation to discern their meaning (allegorical dreams). As an indication of how important dream precognition was in antiquity, Artemidorus states that he was late in finishing the Oneirocritica because he was trying to gather only those dreams that came true.

Abu-Al-Hasan’s dream is an allegorical dream which occurs a year before the attack. Bin Laden has no difficulty recognizing the symbolism of the dream in which his side defeats the Americans in a soccer game or pilot game. Although Abu-Al-Hasan is unaware of the plan, he dreams of

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its succeeding. This supports the dream’s interpretation as involving either telepathy or precognition. The dream would be telepathic if it picked up on the plan as it existed in bin Laden’s mind or precognitive if it anticipated the actual attack.

Bin Laden himself speaks of the dream as a good omen that leads us to believe that he interprets it as precognitive. From a traditional religious perspective on dreams, confidence in their predictive power stems from the belief that dreams are from God and that divine omniscience includes knowledge of the future. Because precognitive dreams have been ascribed to prophets, holy men and women, and shamans throughout religious history, many believe such dreams to be spiritual phenomena. Some have proposed the hypothesis of a spiritual network extended in time and space to account for these remarkable phenomena ascribed to religious seers. For example, John Sanford, an Episcopalian priest and well-known dream researcher, suggests that religious instincts may be partly founded on the unconscious perception of an invisible reality that underlies conscious existence, a reality accessible through dreams.

Another part of the videotaped discussion reveals bin Laden’s fears about precognitive dreams and visions. If such imagery and ideas are out there in the “spiritual network,” accessible through dreams and visions, his secret plan could be in jeopardy. A man off camera says that Abd Al Rahman Al-(Ghamri), who also knew nothing of the operation, says he saw a vision, before the attack, of a plane crashing into a tall building. The shaykh adds that prior to the event more than one person saw a plane crashing into the building. He tells of a person who told him a year before the attack of seeing people leaving for jihad and finding themselves in Washington and New York, and a plane hitting a building. He tells of another religious man who swore by Allah that his wife had seen a plane crashing into a building a week before it happened.

In response to these remarkable stories someone asks bin Laden to tell the shaykh about Abu-Da’ud’s dream. Bin Laden explains to him that at a camp in Kandahar, Abu-Da’ud told him a dream in which he sees a tall building in America juxtaposed with a Muslim teaching how to do karate. “At that point I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream,” says bin Laden, and he tells Abu-Da’ud not to mention it to anybody if he has any more such dreams. This discussion of precognitive dreams ends with another person recounting his dream about two planes hitting a big building.

This sequence foregrounds another aspect of precognitive dreams: they may warn of dangers. The idea of divine foreknowledge undergirds the traditional beliefs about God revealing important events before they occur as well as alerting people to potential catastrophes. Over the last century, the annals of the societies of psychical research in England, the United States, and Canada have been sources of evidence that dreams illuminate the future. Dr. Louisa Rhine, Hidden Channels of the Mind (1961), has collected over 400 anecdotal accounts of precognitive dreams. Respected dream researcher Robert Van de Castle’s encyclopedic volume, Our Dreaming Mind (1995, pp. 405-438), provides a lengthy account of research in this area. In the psychotherapeutic context, Carl Jung, believed that precognitive and telepathic dreams are most likely to emerge where an important event such as an accident or death occurs and where there is a strong emotional tie between the dreamer and the persons or events dreamed about. (Herbert Read et al., eds., Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, 2nd ed., Volume 8, 1981, p. 262)

While precognitive and telepathic dreams are difficult to comprehend from our current scientific perspectives on time and space, we still have to acknowledge that such dream experiences have been reported throughout history and in contemporary society. Clearly we are more likely to notice precognitive dreams if we attend to our dream life and record dreams regularly. Psychotherapy or dream groups are the usual arenas for focusing on dreams in the modern Western world. My own experience of working with dreams over the last 30 years in the context of psychotherapy and the psychology of religion leads me to believe that dream precognition is difficult to deny even if we presently lack an adequate theoretical framework to understand such phenomena. The dreams surrounding the events of September 11 remind us that a traditional religious worldview is the original context for appreciating the precognitive powers of the dream.

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