On The Dream
The dreams, songs, images, and testimonies that appear in this essay are from the documentary al-Manam (The Dream), by Mohammad Malas, and from the diary Malas kept while making his film. When translated from ear to page, the dreams come to take the form of poetry.1 This is unsurprising: in the Arab tradition, poetry is intimately linked to visionary experience. Both are responsible for the emergence of new truths about man and the world.2
The non-agentive character of dreaming is underlined by the fact that al-Manam’s dreamers go unnamed over the course of Malas’ film. Here, lyric compositions translate this anonymity, yielding poems in which it is impossible to attribute authorial agency.
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Ma [Water]
If dreams cannot be captured as they are happening, one way to understand cinema is as a response to this abiding limitation of human technology. When the Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas wrote of the cine-ma, encoding in its three syllables the Arabic for water (ma), he made a similar claim.3 Hidden beneath the first and second syllables, Malas perceived the flowing currents of a hydraulic unconscious.
In 1980, Malas began shooting a documentary he would later call al-Manam (The Dream).4 Funded by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, al-Manam consists of interviews Malas conducted with Palestinians living in the refugee camps of Lebanon during key years of the revolutionary movement for a Palestinian nation. As we soon learn, these camps have their provenance in the Zionist conquests that simultaneously shaped the Palestinian anticolonial struggle. But the question Malas poses to his interviewees does not directly address their political movement. Instead, he asks them, What do you dream about?
As Malas goes on to recount in his film diaries, the question was distasteful to his Palestinian peers, who wanted to be represented as revolutionaries, not as slumberers. After all, many of the dreams Malas records turn out to be escapist fantasies. One interviewee confesses that, When I was imprisoned I used to dream that I’d been set free.
But a chiastic reversal is just as true: When I was set free, I started dreaming that I’d been imprisoned.5 al-Manam reminds us that Palestinian unfreedom is the political form that conditions all dreaming.
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[How beautiful was sleep in the shade of my home] 6
As she descended into the valley,
Her mother called to her: my daughter, my daughter
May God bless you and keep you happy
My mother, my mother don’t weep, it makes me weep
My mother, my mother no tears, not a single tear
My loving brother visits me Fridays
My sister, my sister stuff my pillows for me
I left home without a farewell to my sisters
I dyed my hand with henna but not my fingers
How beautiful was sleep in the shade of my home
Earth
Early into his diaries, Malas links dreams to prophetic visions. According to an Abrahamic tradition, man was created in the image of God. Prior to her embodiment, Eve was revealed to Adam in a dream-vision:
Friday, March 28, 1980
According to Ibn Sireen, it was the prophet Adam who experienced the first vision on earth. God caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep, then from him created Eve in a similar shape, revealing this to Adam in a dream. When Adam awoke Eve was sitting near his head. Then God said, “Adam, who is sitting near your head?” Adam said, “She is the vision you revealed to me in my dream, God.7
Consider the first dream recounted in al-Manam: a prophecy of victory.
It was raining and cold after
that it was light and the sky
filled with verse
Every verse that appeared, I read
Then— a big crowd of people a
single woman dressed in white
came to me
the first time I saw her she asked
Why aren’t you praying?
I don’t know how to pray teach me
Okay
She did
I prayed
We won It’s
not possible to have won
so quickly 8
The victory of the Palestinian revolution is the dream that unifies Malas’ interviewees, and that gives his film its title. Here, the dreamer slides precipitously into waking life when she can no longer suspend her disbelief in a sudden victory.
In his diaries, Malas catalogues many of the dreams that do not appear in his documentary, but that share in their contestation of a reality principle. Like Malas, the following dreamer is a director:
All of a sudden, a flood occurred. The water was rising. The flood was sweeping away cars and old carts, people, and animals. The water was rising more and more until it came above us. We were about to suffocate under the water. The torrent became a sky, and we were beneath it. I looked up and saw the carts and mules in the sky as if they were behind glass. They were wriggling. They wriggled then stopped. They froze in place as if they were in a movie clip that had been paused.9
The dreamer wakes up just before he and the others are about to suffocate. But what he wakes up to is the ongoing nightmare of history.
The Flood
In 1983, the German historian Reinhardt Koselleck took interest in a dream-archive gathered by the Berlin-based journalist Charlotte Berardt nearly a half-century prior, during the installment of the Third Reich. The dreams belonged to Berardt’s neighbors: Jews like herself, targeted by the annihilatory fascist state. The meaning of these dreams was overtly political, Koselleck wrote, and this collapsed the conventional distinction between manifest and latent dream content. Political experiences and menace has—to retain the psychoanalytic metaphor—flooded over the gatekeeper and flowed unhindered into the so-called unconscious.10
Koselleck argued for these dreams as parts of a composite whole, the semiotic qualities of which placed specific demands upon their reader. Thus he maintained that a historian such as himself would be able to read such sources in a rigorous fashion if he learns to anthropologically interpret the imagistic testimony of a dumb language.11 By dumb Koselleck meant a language that was not linguistic: the muteness of dream-images incapable of signifying their systematic and collective character. He grew sure of what he stopped short of calling a collective unconscious: what was initially singular and related to individuals nonetheless made up a supra-individual history, he wrote of the dreams of persecuted Jews.12
In al-Manam, the link between individual dreamers—history—is reflected in the uncanny resemblances between sequential shots. If the cut refers to the interface between shots, or to a temporal and spatial gap that marks an indissoluble point of rupture, it also sutures one shot to the next. Malas will typically introduce a new interviewee with a cut, its boundedness marking the individuality of the dreamer. Yet the dream-images continue to speak among themselves. Two steel columns at the shoe factory give way to the twin barrels of an anti-aircraft gun.
Against the backdrop of these juxtaposed images, the dreams narrated in al-Manam resonate with particular vividness. Like the dreams Koselleck wrote about, cinema is structured like a language.13
So is the collective unconscious traced by the dream narratives. Dreams of persecution, of death and of salvation, of notorious political figures, and of world-ending comprise an unconscious grammar.
A man faces Malas’ camera and begins to recall his dream: a sudden explosion turns a fruit market into bits and pieces of corpses. But this account feels more like reportage.
A bomb fell on the vegetable market I was next to the strawberry stand I froze for two minutes, immobilized people were running unaware if they had injuries some fell, others screamed a man in a gold-coloured car was wounded in his chest the driver was confused the car stopped it was terrifying a different kind of bomb that splintered in all directions the strawberry man was killed he was all bits and pieces no complete corpses 14
The dreamer appears before a strawberry-red print of the iconic Che Guevara. Guevara had visited Gaza in 1959 on behalf of the Cuban government, in a show of support for the Palestinian national movement.15 As the camera circles the dreamer, his face eclipses that of the martyred revolutionary icon, shot nine times by US-backed Bolivian forces in 1967. The nature of Guevara's death recalls the camera's mechanism: the shot that embalms and preserves its subject. Here, the cinematic shot insists on the dreamer’s vitality, even as he recalls his dream of death.
Because the event he recalls is just a dream, it shows us that Zionism’s physical and corporeal violence is contiguous with the psychic violence endured by the dreamer. The dreamer registers that at any given moment, the world as he knows it may end— its visible coordinates exploded into bits and pieces. Revolution is the mirrored inversion of this strawberry dream. It aims to explode “reality.”
Trained as a filmmaker in what was then the USSR, Malas maintained a formal interest in socialist realism: the Soviet aesthetic doctrine that aimed to change reality by representing it. The dreams in al-Manam may be fictitious, but this…does not prevent them from belonging to life’s reality.16 In his diaries, Malas defines the reality in need of transformation as the persistent attempt by everyone to hinder the Palestinian right to self-determination.17
The Eye
Watching al-Manam we get a sense of the futur anterieur Roland Barthes used to delimit the temporal character of the photographic image. The photograph’s indexical claim to the presence of its subject was sealed by the past. Thus the subject of the photograph harkened to an anterior future in which death was at stake. Whether or not the subject is dead, every photograph is this catastrophe, he went on to say.18
The notion that its documentary subjects will have been is given specific horror in al-Manam. Some of Malas’ interviewees were killed in the Shatila massacre of 1982, after which he completely abandoned the project, returning to it only several years later, in 1986.
Far into his film diaries, Malas describes returning to Shatila camp after its siege was lifted, in 1988. The experience of fumbling in the darkness of unlit passageways invokes for Malas a Biblical aphorism. The eye is the lamp of the body, he writes.19
In al-Manam, a young girl’s vertiginous dream might be explained by the fact of her closed eyes:
I dreamt I arranged a coup d’état
I told them that the first thing we had to do
Was to take over the headquarters of the secret police
Then I had to write a declaration
The paper was huge— H U G E!
The pen was huge
I saw myself writing in enormous letters F O R D E M O C R A C Y
The paper was so large it made me dizzy 20
To dream can involve apprehending images never before seen, neither in waking life, nor in sleep. This horizon of possibility is—crushingly—delimited by the dreamer’s unconscious knowledge. In her self-imagination, the girl is too small F OR P O L I T I C S. Her ambitions to topple an unnamed police state are literally outsized: she is dwarfed by the pen and paper needed to declare her undertaking.
In the documentary, light pours in from behind her through the open windows of an empty classroom, her face just barely visible.
When Malas visits Shatila in 1988, he fears the encounter with a familiar face. I knew I was afraid of running into someone we’d filmed seven years earlier, afraid of looking at them….21 Encouraged by his belief in the ethics of witnessing, Malas was nonetheless eager to glimpse these faces. ....[It] was the faces hidden behind the siege, faces that neither the satellite channels nor the relief trucks nor the ambulances managed to convey to us over the years…which made us all curious and which cut through the forbidden distance the siege had created between us.22 (It is difficult, now, to conceive of the past in which Malas writes, our distance from it measurable by the traffic in images of Palestinian suffering.)
If the siege had hidden Shatila’s human face from the world, Malas endeavored to cut through it with his camera. Yet, the faces he captures don’t always look back. Ordinary activities like dreaming become unrecognizable to a viewer spared the enclosure of Palestinian exception. Even water— Malas discovered— bears its trace. Water everywhere takes on the color and light of things, except here, he writes of Shatila’s rain-soaked surfaces, where the water has no color or light, other than its own.
Notes
1 Over the course of this essay, I have relied upon my own knowledge of colloquial Arabic, filmic subtitles, and the aid of my teacher, Shrooq Abushaban, to produce my translations of the dreams.
2 Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics (University of Texas Press, 1990), 77-78.
3 Mohammad Malas and Samirah Alkassim. The Dream: A Diary of a Film (The American University in Cairo Press, 2016), 145.
4 al-Manam, directed by Mohammad Malas (1987, Syria).
5 Ibid., 68.
6 This song features in al-Manam. Translation and lineation my own.
7 The Dream: A Diary of a Film, 3.
8 Al-Manam, translation and lineation my own.
9 Ibid., 91.
10 “Terror and Dream: Methodological Remarks on the Experience of Time during the Third Reich,” Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (MIT Press, 1985), 220.
11 Ibid., 226.
12 Ibid., 221.
13 “[The unconscious] is structured like a language…” Jacques Lacan wrote. “Science and Truth,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 868.
14 al-Manam, translation and lineation my own.
15 Rassem Bisharat, “Che Guevara and Palestine: When the Latin American Revolution Met the Spirit of Palestinian Resistance,” Middle East Monitor, October 26, 2025, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251026-che-guevara-and-palestine-when-the-latin-american-revolution-met-the-spirit-of-palestinian-resistance/.
16 “Dreams, while they cannot be produced, nevertheless belong to the sphere of human fictions to the extent that, as dreams, they offer no real representation of reality,” writes Koselleck. “Terror and Dream,” 217.
17 “Reality is the persistent attempt by everyone to hinder the Palestinian right to self-determination,” Malas wrote. The Dream: A Diary of a Film, 41.
18 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howard (Hill & Wang, 1981), 94-97.
19 The Dream: A Diary of a Film, 141.
20 al-Manam, translation and lineation my own.
21 Ibid., 139.
22 Ibid.
Laila Riazi is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature and critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley.