Epilogue

The epilogue draws out the common threads in all three traditions—Byzantine Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and early Islam—and shows how they survive in the contemporary world. In political conflicts, dreams are still sometimes used as justifications for military action, especially by jihadists and others keen to incite inter-religious conflict. Online evidence shows that dream discourses are still being interpreted and appropriated by some contemporary Christian and Islamic believers as tools of providence and divine revelation. Unlike the post-Freudian understanding of dreams as reflections of individual psychic processes of the unconscious, dreams had both individual and social significance in the Byzantine tradition, and in the Islamic tradition up to the current day. Immense semiotic power was thus given to a medium that was able to be misrepresented and manipulated at will. This has always been the problem with dreams and is probably the main reason why they are discounted in most post-Enlightenment societies, but not by all. The chapter asks whether such dreams are important to certain fundamentalist religious cultures because they give equal opportunities to men and women to mediate divine judgement and participate vicariously in violence. It closes with an assessment of current trends in Islam and evangelical Christianity.