The Mosque, Part 2

As I reported earlier in this substack, I had a dream in 2018 where I saw the Star of David, the symbol of Israel, projected on the side of a mosque. I thought the dream was too politically volatile to post, so I made it available to paid subscribers only.

Today, I saw something that is as close to this as I expect I’ll ever see, so I’m making this public to everyone.

From the Journal, 3/16/2018:

The part of the city we are in is on a hill. Nina and I walk to a broad staircase built into the hill. From the top of these stairs, we see a mosque below us. The mosque is in the sun, but in moments is covered in shadow as the sun moves. Then, shafts of light hit it all over the facade. My assumption in the dream was that the light was shining through gaps in the many trees on the hillside. However, each shaft of light landed on the building in a perfect, crisp-edged Star of David symbol: a six-pointed star.

I thought it was such an interesting incongruous sight, a mosque covered with Stars of David, that I took my camera out to take a picture. As I adjusted the settings, the shafts came and went a couple of times, putting it back in shadow, then illuminating it with stars, but it never went back to full non-star sunlight.

Comment:

Today, while scrolling through news of the war in Iran, I saw the image below, of the Israeli flag projected (by light) on the side of an Iranian (muslim) building. It isn’t daylight, projected by the sun, multiple stars of David, or a mosque, but the idea is quite similar.

The Israeli flag projected by light onto a building in Tehran, Iran. Source: @NiyakGhorbani via X.

Before evaluating the degree of correspondence in the mosque dream, a methodological point is worth making explicit. I find in my records that dreamers — myself included — frequently encounter situations that turn out to be real, but which are not personally about them. A friend recently dreamed he had invented a new firearm: a rifle with a cumbersome mud-and-rain guard designed to solve a specific magazine-detachment problem. He remembered the mechanism in detail. Later that day he encountered footage of a historical prototype — a real object, built and tested, deemed non-commercial and never produced — that matched his dream invention precisely. He had not invented anything. He had dreamed someone else’s invention from the past. Two nights ago I had a smaller version of the same experience: I dreamed of a friend and noticed what looked like a tracheotomy scar on his throat. Later that night, watching an old episode of Death Valley Days, the story was resolved with an emergency tracheotomy. The scar was not about my friend. It was simply a rare image — a word and concept I encounter perhaps once every few years — that surfaced in an unrelated broadcast the same evening. The correspondence was real. The personal connection was the misreading.

I think of this as a problem of layering. Dreams seem to present information in acetate-like strata: one layer genuinely personal, another belonging to the wider world. The dreamer, encountering them as a single image, assumes full ownership of everything in the frame. Not everything in the frame belongs to the dreamer.

It has now been almost exactly eight years since the mosque dream, and the image above is the first correspondence I have encountered. The match is partial — a single flag rather than multiple Stars of David, a secular building rather than a mosque, an act of political defiance rather than shafts of natural light — but the essential image is the same: a Jewish symbol projected by light onto a Muslim structure.

What the dream suggested to me at the time, and what I still believe it points toward, is something broader than any single event: a general loosening of Islam’s hold in places where its dominance has long been assumed. Iran has made plain that religious identity declared under a theocratic state carries significant incentive to misrepresent one’s religious affiliation. Whether this dream is ultimately about Iran specifically, or about a wider shift, I cannot say. On that larger scale it remains unrealized. But the correspondence is real, and I find it worth documenting.