Dream narratives and metafictionality in the Persian Jog Bāsisht

This article explores the literary theory of fictionality that emerges from Jog Bāsisht , the 1598 Mughal Persian translation of the Sanskrit treatise Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha . The text in its Persian translation has been investigated thus far mostly for its metaphysics and theory of spiritual liberation in comparison with its Sanskrit source text. Examining the metafictional devices used by the narrator, Basisht, in the story of King Lavan’s dream, this article seeks to investigate the ways in which metafictional narratives are structured and employed in the didactic setting of the treatise. It argues that dream narratives operate in two ways in Jog Bāsisht : they prove that storytelling creates reality, and they undermine the authority of the eyewitness as a reliable narrator. These functions of dream narratives, it further suggests, might have meaningful implications for the analysis of dreams and other metafictional narratives in Islamicate literature.