There is widespread interest in Egypt in dreams and their interpretation: books on dream symbolism are found at most bookstalls, professional and semi-professional dream interpreters flourish, and television shows feature experts who interpret dreams. Yet there is hostility toward dream interpretation, from two different quarters: modernizing Egyptians see it as superstitious and not in keeping with scientific, rationalist worldviews to which they ascribe or aspire, while more mainstream Islamic traditions condemn the practice, usually associated with Sufism, as heterodox.

After a theoretical and methodological introduction, Amira Mittermaier devotes a chapter to the politics of dream interpretation, focusing on the case of the television show Ru'a, in which a shaykh, with a Sufi and a psychologist, interpreted the dreams of callers-in. The show was yanked off the air after it was rumored that one caller reported a dream in which the moon was breastfeeding a boy and the shaykh said the dream presaged the birth of the mahdi. The shaykh vehemently denied having done this, but the show was stopped nonetheless under pressure from a number of groups, including the (pre-Arab Spring) government, official religious spokesmen, and Western-trained and liberal journalists and intellectuals. The reformist Islamist faction the Brotherhood and the Salafis also objected, declaring that true revelation has not been available since the time of the Prophet and that dreams have no religious value.

Amira Mittermaier, daughter of a German father and an Egyptian mother, does not devote her book's primary attentions to dreams, or even to the diverse Egyptian systems and techniques of dream interpretation. Instead she highlights the current politics and sociology of not only ordinary nocturnal dreams but also waking visions, dreams sent by the devil, and experiences in which dreamers encounter the Prophet or one of his close companions. She focuses on the personalities of four important shaykhs who are all somehow connected with the Sufi tradition, and their adherents and clients. Her interest is clearly drawn to the question of whether dreams and visions must be reduced, as in Western thought, to the wishes of dreamers’ unconscious minds, or whether there is instead, as most dream interpreters and their followers believe, some realm of the imagination in which guidance, predictions of the future, or religious experiences may legitimately occur.

Her final substantive chapter deals with the fate of psychoanalytic dream theory in Egypt, which has not been particularly successful. But her greater interest is in the personalities of the people involved, and the realms of the barzakh and al-ghayb. The barzakh is the in-between, where the dead dwell until Judgment Day, but in Sufi thought it is also the place where one encounters the Prophet. Al-ghayb is the unseen and unknowable divine mystery that may be glimpsed in either dreams or waking visions. Mittermaier, the good anthropologist, does not judge, but rather seeks to convey, and she is attentive to the realities and evocative details of the ethnographic encounter. She samples the many, conflicting ways in which contemporary Cairenes use and understand non-ordinary experiences and their meanings.