Consideration of the Reliability of Dreams in Principles and Ancillaries of the Religion: A Critique of the View of Ahmad al-Hasan’s Followers

Ahmad al-Hasan’s followers consider dreams as the closest way of knowing the Imam. The paper deploys a library method to investigate the veridicality and reliability of dreams in principles and ancillaries of the religion. I provide descriptions and analyses to conclude that if a non-Infallible’s dream does not yield certainty or if certainly is not essentially reliable, then it cannot be cited as evidence and is not reliable, because in these two cases, dreams will yield probabilistic belief. Now since such beliefs are treated as unreliable by default—and only exceptional cases of probabilistic beliefs are reliable—and since probabilistic beliefs obtained from dreams are not exceptional cases, dreams should count as unreliable.