The Cinema in the Sky: A Childhood Dream of Bahá'u'lláh

Hand of the Cause Mr. ‘Alí-Akbar Furutan, in his collection *Stories of Bahá’u’lláh,* gathers more than one dream from the childhood of Mírzá Ḥusayn-‘Alí — the Manifestation later known to the world as Bahá’u’lláh.

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One of them, Furutan records on the authority of family recollection, came to the boy in His tenth or eleventh year. The household at that time was at the family estate in Núr in Mázandaran, the remote forested province at the southern edge of the Caspian Sea. The boy slept in His own room. He awoke one morning, the family later remembered, in unusual quiet, and told the household what He had seen.

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In the dream, He said, He had been standing in a garden when the sky above Him had begun to change. Where there had been ordinary cloud and air, a great green sea had appeared, filling the whole upper world. Birds were flying through the sea. Fish were swimming in it. The two creatures, which would in waking life never share a medium, moved together inside the same luminous green water suspended above the garden. The boy had watched, He said, with great delight.

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His father, Mírzá Buzurg-i-Núrí — a noted vizier of the Persian court, given to consulting interpreters of dreams — arranged for the dream to be recounted to a learned man. The interpreter, several recollections preserve, considered the imagery carefully. The green sea, he said, was the Cause of God that this child would one day proclaim. The birds and the fish, moving together within it, were the peoples and tribes of the earth — those of the heaven and those of the depths, those who fly and those who swim — gathered, in the time appointed, into a single element.

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Furutan is careful, in his collection, not to overstate the weight of childhood dreams. But he records the family preservation of this one because the household preserved it. The image stayed with the household across the boyhood and youth of Mírzá Ḥusayn-‘Alí. They did not know its significance in those years. They knew only that the boy had dreamed it; that the dream had impressed the dreamer; that the wise man’s interpretation had impressed the father.

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Many years later, when the same boy had become Bahá’u’lláh and the green sea of His Cause was visibly spreading across the peoples of the earth, the household remembered the dream. The sky had, in time, opened into the sea He had foreseen. The birds and the fish were gathering in it.

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*Paraphrased from Stories of Bahá'u'lláh (Ali-Akbar Furutan, George Ronald, 1986); see original for full text.*

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