3.9.2
His wife having now completed the donning of her finery and her toilet, he carried the notebook to her and told her what had happened to him. She was overjoyed beyond description and told him, “All that was thanks to the service you did me and your help to me in getting dressed. You must continue, my dear, and be regular about so doing.” The next day, he did as he had done the day before in terms of both writing and serving and it happened to him exactly as it had the first day, and both grew happier still. When it was the day of the feast, he climbed up to the pulpit and read out the first notebook, so astonishing his audience with his eloquence, the felicity of his wording, and the niceness of his choice of tropes that, when he was finished, the people set to congratulating him and saying to him, “Never have our ears been struck by words as eloquent as yours.” “That,” he told them, “is by the grace of the sandal strap,” but they didn’t understand. Then he returned to his house, happily uttering hallelujahs, and told his wife what had happened. “My advice to you, my dear,” she said, “is to devote your efforts to serving and to writing, so that when you have fifty notebooks, we can make our way with them to some distant lands and read them there, for in this country you can only read a sermon on a feast day and the feasts here are few, and it would be a shame for these magnificent notebooks to go unread.” “I was thinking the same thing myself,” he said.
3.9.3
Then they prepared themselves to travel to certain Eastern lands, taking with them the notebooks, which filled precious teakwood chests on which they had spent a huge sum. When they reached those shores, they rented a spacious house overlooking verdant gardens and he sent a crier to cry through the markets, “Attend, good folk, the sermon of Master Flummox son of Lummox on such and such a day at such and such a time, that he may expose your ears to such elegant tropes as you have never heard before!” People then crowded in to hear him, drove after drove. When they had settled down in the gathering place, he ascended a staircase that had been set up for him there and opened up the first notebook that his own congregation had found so admirable and lo, it was erased, and contained nothing but the letters he had written with his own hand. He tried to link them up to extract from them some sort of meaning but could not do so, so he came down from the pulpit in embarrassment, and it was in that state that he woke from his sleep.
T
HE
I
NTERPRETATION
3.9.4
This is the interpretation offered by the God-needy slave the Fāriyāq to Master Flummox son of Lummox: “The letters, words, lines, pages, quires, and volumes that you imagined had been added to your words and that your congregation admired will not work in countries other than your own because of their tie to the tying of the bustle and the sandal strap — though God knows best.”
3.9.5
When these words reached the person in question, he burst in upon the Fāriyāq, stamping the ground with his foot and sticking his nose in the air, and said, “This interpretation is more incorrect than the first and the expression is even more succinct. One can barely understand what you are saying, and if the interpretation of dreams is to be as mysterious and murky as the dreams themselves, there is no call to employ oneiromancers and put people to the trouble of reading the incomprehensible.” The Fāriyāq responded, “This is how it is done in our country, which is the fountainhead of dreams and the font of dream interpretation, for your heads derived this feature from our heads and ours only, and were it not for us, you wouldn’t have been capable of dreaming a single dream all your life long.” At this, the man appeared to come to his senses and he calmed down. Then he said, “You have one dream left now and here it is.”
CHAPTER 10: THE THIRD DREAM
3.10.1
The master of the Oneiromancer’s Chamber — may God prolong his tenure as spokesman for all hag-ridden dreamers and realize his dreams along with those of other high achievers—saw one day in a dream that a tall staircase consisting of a hundred steps had been set up for him so that he could climb it and preach to the congregation from the top. After he’d shaved his beard and mustache and donned his stair-climbing clothes, he dispatched someone to gather the faithful in an appointed place and all had been informed as to this in advance and gone there before him, while he tarried a while waiting for his wife to get out of bed so that he might wipe her nose107 and embrace her before setting off. Having done so, he took his notebook under his arm and took off at a run in the direction of that mighty assembly, looking neither right nor left.
3.10.2
When he reached the place and saw that the staircase was set up and the people gathered around it, he was beside himself with joy and said to himself, “This is an opportunity such as Fate has granted to no other. Today I shall send these folk back to their homes with hearts like mine and morals like mine. Should I never perform another good deed, it will be enough and my future reward will have been entered in God’s records.” Then his thoughts took him to extremes and he grew drunk with happy dreams and he approached the staircase in a state of distraction and almost before he had reached it took a flying stride onto its first step, omitting to first extend greetings to any of those present.
3.10.3
He opened his sermon with the words, “Praise be to God, who commanded the erection of this staircase and found it pleasing to serve as His throne…,” on hearing which invocation one of those standing said to the person behind him in disavowal, “It seems to me that our preacher today is out of his mind, and I have no desire to hear more from him” and he turned and left. The preacher now climbed the second step and said, “… and has brought the people to this blessed assembly, each spreading his ears like a cloth to catch his words…,” causing another of the bystanders who heard his words to say, “This clause is worse than the first: it doesn’t matter to me if the staircase is a throne or a bier, but it makes me angry to think of my ears being spread out like a cloth!” and he turned and went. The preacher, however, went on pronouncing another lame sentence of the same sort with each new step he climbed and with each another bystander withdrew, which he failed to notice, being too taken up with the joy that distracted him, and by the time he reached the hundredth step everyone had abandoned him.
3.10.4
Once he had settled himself upon it, he turned his head to right and left and saw no one, so he said to himself, “I composed my sermon and brought the people here for it. Now I see that they have turned their backs but the sermon is still with me. Let me then read it out aloud in this noble place that is elevated above the defilements and filth of the earth. Even if they do not hear it, God and His angels will, for it is said, ‘The further a person is from Earth, the closer he is to Heaven,’ and I see no place more proper for sermons than this. Perhaps some passerby will catch some word of what I say and it will bring about the salvation of his soul and those of his family and his neighbors. A single word from a single mouth may make the difference between death and life, and it would be shameful if I were to return to my wife and tell her that the sermon remained unread.” Then he mopped his brow, cleared his throat, and adjusted his clothes, having first placed the sermon on the Scriptures and knelt and briefly prayed, calling on God to inspire someone to pass that way and hear him. Then he arose, full of vigor and happiness, and said, “Listen, beloved brethren, and hearken well to what I tell you!”