“I woke up and knew, spiritually, I have just accepted the faith”

Agency and Dream Ethnography in the Bahá’í Faith

Abstract

This paper focuses on how first-generation Bahá’ís view dreams and visions as confirming their choice to become Bahá’í. It presents life story interviews, highlighting the significance of their dream narratives in religious conversion. The study emphasizes that these dreams integrate their prior religious identity, mainly through the appearance of messengers of God serving as supernatural agents, which conforms to Bahá’í beliefs in progressive revelation. It advocates for anthropological attention to Bahá’í dream accounts, presenting dreams as premonitions or encouragements for conversion and acknowledging leaving a previous faith. The paper calls for investigating dreams’ bridging function, viewed by converts as a nonhuman and non-institutional force aiding conversion. It aims to explore agency in dreams concerning religious conversion by analyzing dream accounts from first-generation Bahá’ís’ life stories, illustrating how dreams influence and transform individual beliefs.