The Tale of Adam Ruhani
If all human dreams could be assembled together, they would form a huge man, a human being the size of a continent. This would not be just any man, it would be Adam Ruhani, the heavenly Adam, man's angel ancestor, of who the imans speak. In the beginning, this Adam-before-Adam was the third mind of the world, but he was so carried away with himself that he went astray; when he recovered from his vertigo, he cast Iblis and Ahriman, his fellow travelers in iniquity, into hell and returned to the heavens, where he was now no longer the third but the tenth mind, because in the meantime the seven heavenly cherubim had overtaken him on the ladder of angels. And so, Adam-the-precursor found himself seven rungs behind on the ladder, this being the measure of how behind himself he was, and that is how time was born: time is part of the eternity that runs late. This angelic Adam, or pre-Adam, who was both man and woman at once, this third angel who became the tenth angel, is forever trying to reach himself, and at moments he even succeeds, but then falls again, and he is still drifting today between the tenth and second rung on the ladder of reason.
Man's dreams are the part of human nature that goes back to this Adam-the-precursor, this heavenly angel, because he thought the way we dream. He was swift as we can only be in our dreams; our dreams are woven out of his angelic speed. And he spoke the way we speak in our dreams, without the present or the past tense, only the future. And, like when we dream, he could neither kill nor sow seed. Hence, dream hunters plunge into other people's dreams and sleep and from them, extract little pieces of Adam-the-precursor's being, composing them into the whole, into a so-called Khazar dictionaries, with the aim of having all these assembled books incarnate on earth the enormous body of Adam Ruhani. If we follow our angel precursor when he is ascending the heavenly ladder, we approach God himself, and if we have the misfortune to follow him when he falls, we move away from God, but we can know neither one nor the other. We depend on luck, always in the hope that our contact with him will be when he is on his way to the second rung on the ladder of reason, so that he pulls us up higher, closer to Truth.
Thus, our calling as dream hunters can bring unimaginable benefit or terrible misfortune. But that depends on us. Ours it to try. The rest is a matter of technique.
Finally, one more word of warning. The paths that hurry through other people's dreams occasionally conceal signs to show that Adam-the Precursor is rising or falling in his climb. These signs are the people who dream of each other. Hence, the ultimate goal of every dream hunter is to find such a pair and to get to know them as well as possible, because two such people always constitute small parts of Adam's body from different phases and are at different levels on the ladder of reason. Except, of course, the highest, second level, where God spat into Adam's mouth and clothed his tongue in four salvias. So, as soon as you come upon two people who dream of each other, you have reached your goal. And later do not forget to leave your reports and additions to the Khazar Dictionary where all successful dream hunters leave theirs--in the mosque in Basra dedicated to the prophetess Rabbia. . . .
Thus spoke the old man to Masudi. And so Masudi abandoned music to become a dream hunter.