Dream and waking reality

Dream and waking reality are not secure opposites in the novel’s late episodes: Gibreel Farishta wanders sleepless through London as several stories seem to occupy him at once, while memories and visions recast the city around him. His experience remains open to competing explanations. The narrative gives his dreams force and consequence, but also places them beside ordinary exhaustion, public events, and other characters’ skepticism, without making those accounts fully agree.

A boundary deliberately left unsettled

The uncertainty is established through a narrator who refuses to explain everything. Speaking directly about the limits of revelation, the narrator recalls once sitting on Alleluia Cone’s bed and speaking with Gibreel, who wanted to know whether reality belonged to Ooparvala or Neechayvala. The narrator did not answer him, and declines to clarify the matter for Saladin Chamcha either. This withholding makes the uncertainty structural: Gibreel’s experience cannot simply be resolved by an authoritative explanation supplied from outside the story.

That refusal matters again when the narrator describes Gibreel’s choices as a contest between character and destiny, while explicitly declining to instruct him. The image of a wrestling match makes his uncertainty active rather than merely intellectual. Gibreel must choose whether he is an agent of wrath or love, vengeance or forgiveness, and whether to use the trumpet Azraeel. The questions arise within the narration, but no immediate answer dissolves the competing possibilities. Dream and waking life become part of a larger uncertainty over how to interpret what Gibreel experiences and what he will do.

London as a crossing of stories

After days of wandering without food or sleep, Gibreel no longer recognizes the distinction between waking and dreaming. He feels as if he is moving through several stories at once: mourning Alleluia’s betrayal, hovering over a Prophet’s deathbed, watching a pilgrimage to the sea, and sensing an adversary drawing him toward a final embrace. At the same time, another version of him walks London’s streets, trying to understand the will of God. These are not presented as neatly separated dreams that begin and end; their simultaneous pressure is what gives his experience its disorienting shape.

The city itself seems to answer his search with messages. London’s history appears in its built environment: Dutch-style redbrick buildings and squares recall the arrival of William III, whose courtiers reshaped fields to meet their needs. The city’s implied lesson is double-edged. Migrants can impose a new coherence on a place, but that coherence does not prevent disruption; William III later fell from his horse in the parkland he had chosen to civilize and broke his neck. In Gibreel’s unsettled state, urban history becomes more than background: the streets seem to speak, though the narrative leaves open whether this is supernatural communication, imaginative interpretation, or a mind under strain.

At other moments he encounters crowds of walking corpses who continue ordinary routines: shopping, catching buses, flirting, going home to make love, and smoking. Gibreel calls their attention to the contradiction between their apparent lives and their death, but they ignore him, laugh, look embarrassed, or threaten him. He then falls silent and hurries on. The episode makes his private vision collide with the public scene. The dead behave as if they were alive, while Gibreel’s insistence that he sees the truth does not make the crowd acknowledge it.

Memory, verses, and the trumpet

As the city becomes vague and difficult to describe, pilgrimage, prophecy, and the adversary blur and emerge again. Alleluia also returns in Gibreel’s thoughts, linked to Al-Lat and to verses that recall both Jumpy Joshi’s efforts to assemble a book and the pain associated with those verses. The shifting association does not provide a stable explanation for Gibreel’s distress; it shows how remembered love, religious imagery, and literary language become entangled in the same consciousness.

The trumpet in his greatcoat pocket gives that entanglement a physical focus. Azraeel seems to call for Gibreel to take it out and blow, but Gibreel restrains himself: he decides it is not yet time. The horn’s presence links his wandering to the possibility of decisive action, while its continued confinement preserves the difference between imagining an act and carrying it out. His waking conduct therefore remains consequential even as his surroundings take on the quality of a dream.

Verses recur as a compact sign of the overlap. The narration asks what a poet writes and answers that a poet writes verses; Gibreel’s mind is full of them, and verses have broken his heart. The repeated association draws poetry, memory, and suffering into one pattern without treating them as interchangeable. His mind returns to words, but the return does not settle whether those words belong to remembered events, his serial dreams, or the present search for meaning.

The final dream and the question of history

After the Brickhall fire, Gibreel carries Saladin out and collapses. In the ambulance, Saladin has an oxygen mask over his face, while Gibreel, described as suffering no worse than exhaustion, talks in his sleep about a magic trumpet and the fire he blew from it like music. The scene gives the dream a bodily setting: Gibreel is unconscious, his speech is delirious, and the trumpet and fire emerge as images in that speech. Yet the account does not make the fire unreal; it distinguishes the remembered or dreamed image from the actual aftermath in which the two men are being transported.

Mishal Sufyan, who remembers Saladin as a devil and has come to accept the possibility of many things, begins to wonder whether Gibreel’s babble means something more. Hanif Johnson rejects that possibility, identifying Gibreel as an actor playing out what seems to him like a film scene. He insists that the events in Brickhall belong to British history and to a process of change, not to mysticism. His response does not erase Mishal’s uncertainty; it places a social and political interpretation beside her willingness to consider the extraordinary.

Gibreel’s voice then changes in his sleep, and his subject matter shifts to pilgrims, a dead baby, a decaying mansion, and a tree. These images signal that he is dreaming for the last time of one of his serial dreams, but the people with him do not receive them as shared knowledge. Hanif comforts the newly bereaved Mishal and urges her to remain with him and with the real world. Gibreel, still asleep, shouts for Mishal to come back, as though addressing someone inside the dream. The ending preserves both planes: the ambulance carries the survivors through the material aftermath of the fire, while Gibreel’s dream speech continues to summon another story. Neither plane wholly cancels the other, and the gap between them is the concept’s final, unresolved force.