The Vazír's Dream: An Ocean and a Child of Light

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's Narrative of the early days of the Faith, which preserves the dream of Bahá'u'lláh's father and the interpretation given to it. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

Two years before the Báb was born in Shíráz, a child was born in Tihrán, in the spacious house of one of Persia's noble families. His father was Mírzá ʿAbbás of Núr — better known by his title, Mírzá Buzurg, "the Great" — a minister of state descended from an ancient line and closely linked to the court of the Sháh. The boy was named Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʿAlí; the world would one day know Him as Bahá'u'lláh. But all of that lay far in the future. For now He was simply a son of the household, and His father watched Him grow with the ordinary fond attention of any father — until a dream came that was not ordinary at all.

The accounts gathered by Nabíl preserve the vision much as the family long remembered it. One night, while his Son was still a child, Mírzá Buzurg dreamed that he saw Him in the midst of a vast ocean that stretched away on every side, without shore or limit. The Child's body shone, and the light of Him lit the water all around. His long black hair floated out upon the waves in every direction. And out of the deep there came an immense multitude of fishes, gathering toward Him — and each single fish took hold of the end of one of His hairs and would not let go.

It was a strange and arresting picture: the radiant Child alone at the centre of an endless sea, and the countless living things of that sea each clinging to a single strand of His hair. Yet, in the dream, not one of them could do Him the least harm. They could not detach so much as a hair of His head. And for all their number they could not hinder Him; He moved through the water freely, swimming wherever He wished, drawing the whole shining multitude after Him.

Mírzá Buzurg awoke shaken and full of wonder. The dream had been too vivid, and too unlike any dream he had known, to be set aside as nothing. He was a man of affairs, used to weighing matters carefully, and he resolved to learn what such a thing might mean. So he sent for a soothsayer — one of those interpreters of dreams whose craft was honoured in the Persia of that day — and laid the whole vision before him, leaving nothing out.

The interpreter listened, and what he said the family never forgot. The boundless sea, he told the Vazír, was no mere water. "The limitless ocean that you have seen in your dream," he said, "is none other than the world of being. Single-handed and alone, your Son will achieve supreme ascendancy over it." As for the countless fishes that had thronged about the Child and clung to His hair, these too had their meaning: they signified, the interpreter said, "the turmoil which He will arouse amidst the peoples and kindreds of the earth." Then he gave the heart of the reading in a single sentence that has echoed down the years: "Around Him will they gather, and to Him will they cling."

He went on to assure the father that no harm would touch his Son from any of it. The fishes had been powerless either to wound the Child or to hold Him from His course — and so it would be, he said, with the One whose life this dream foreshadowed. Through whatever storms might come, He would remain unharmed, His purpose unhindered, His ascendancy His own.

Mírzá Buzurg could not have grasped how literally the words would be fulfilled. He was a minister thinking in the terms of his world — of office, lineage, influence, the rise and fall of houses at the court. A soothsayer's promise of "supreme ascendancy" might be read, by such a man, as a forecast of high station for a gifted son. He had no way of knowing that the Child of the dream would one day be stripped of every earthly possession, banished from His native land, and shut for years behind prison walls — and that out of exactly that emptying would come a Cause that did, in the end, draw the peoples of the earth toward Him as the dream had shown.

Nabíl set the dream down not as a fairy tale but as part of the sober record of how the Promised One came into the world and grew up among His own. Long before Mullá Ḥusayn would carry the Báb's scroll to His door, long before His own pen would begin to pour forth its ocean of verses, the meaning of His life had already been glimpsed once, in the sleep of a watchful father, and spoken aloud by a stranger who did not know what he was saying.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Dawn-Breakers by Nabíl-i-Aʿẓam.

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/