Caravan of Dreams distills the essence of Eastern thought in a feast of Sufi stories, sayings, poems and allegories, collected by one of the world's leading experts in Oriental philosophy and Sufism. Idries Shah builds up a complete picture of a single consciousness, relating Eastern mythology to reality, illuminating historical patterns, and presenting philosophical legends in this unique anthology.Its title is inspired from the couplet written by the Sufi mystic Bahaudin:'Here we are, all of us: in a dream-caravan,A caravan, but a dream - a dream, but a caravan.And we know which are the dreams.Therein lies the hope.'

Collection of extracts, translations, thoughts, and teachings of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In his writing about Sufism, Idries Shah did some revolutionary things. Critically, and almost alone, he said that it was possible to divorce the essence of Sufi philosophy from what he insisted were secondary accretions of islamic culture and religion. Moreover, he said, in making this material available to the West, you could not only do this, you must do it. This is because, he believed, you can only absorb materials that are designed for your own time and place. Sufism as an essence may be 'truth without form' but, in order to penetrate into the human mind, it must be delivered in a package shaped to fit the receiving culture.'When something new enters a culture, there is a period where, like a new object being thrown into the chimpanzee pen at a zoo, all the chimps rush over to touch it, throw it on the floor, fight over it and so on,' he once told me. 'We must wait until the dust settles; only then will people be in a position to assess this material.'My father died in 1996 and the dust is settling fast. He leaves a body of work behind and, on this work alone, he believed, he should and would be judged. This anthology is intended to provide a basic sample of his work, an essential reader, to allow people to do exactly what he would have wished them to do: to think for themselves and to make up their own minds.- From the Editor's Note, by Saira Shah

Once and now, a little girl who plays with ghosts and spirits is lost in the desert… No family, no friends, just memories of an old life in a world of cities and cars, and a head full of visions and dreams that don’t belong in the world. She likes to tell stories. She stinks of camel. Once, she will say, “The scorpion was not always a creature of pain, just as each of us was not always what we have become.” Many times, she wonders what she is worth to the living who sell her, buy and steal her, to the spirits and ghosts and djinn and ghuls she plays with, to the Caravan of the Dead she comes to belong to, to the dead who wake her and are awakened by her. Once and now, she wonders what others are willing to pay for her stories… “A redemptive story of the saving magic of story itself. Lose yourself, and find yourself, in the tale of Aini, a virgin storyteller cast adrift by selfish parents to the whims of the desert to make her way in the world…maybe all the way to the Caravan of Dreams. In this short novel, Houarner has crafted a fantastic, beautifully dark journey to the center of the secret heart!” — John Everson, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Covenant and NightWhere "Houarner, always a maestro of the “smart” horror tale, further hones his art in this scary provocative nod to The Thousand and One Nights and other ancient traditions of phantasmal story-telling. Chock full the macabre and populated by the arabesque horrors of a culture far older than ours, this great new work by Houarner is a Must Read for all venturers into weird fiction.” —Edward Lee, author of White Trash Gothic and City Infernal

Alan Jacobs is a well known Mystical Poet and the subject of this long sonnet sequence is Awakening From The Dream of Life.This beautiful book also contains a selection from his most important poems. He is President of the Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK.

Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized music from the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, expanding on jazz traditions with distinctly new concepts of composition, improvisation, instrumentation, and performance. They remain figures of controversy due to their border-crossing processes. Miles, Ornette, Cecil is the first book to connect these three icons of the avant-garde, examining why they are lionized by some critics and reviled by others, while influencing musicians across such divides as genre, geography, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. Mandel offers fresh insights into their careers from interviews with all three artists and many of their significant collaborators, as well as a thorough overview of earlier interpretations of their work.