Deceptive Dreams in Animal Farm and Kalila wa-Dimna

Abstract

This paper examines the deceptive dream as a political instrument in Ibn al-Muqaffa's Kalila wa-Dimna (8th century) and George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945). Despite their temporal and cultural distance, both texts deploy dreams not as innocent visions but as structures of manipulation that promise freedom while delivering oppression. The dream becomes a kind of sacred authority, so revered that questioning it feels almost forbidden, and this status grants enormous power to those who position themselves as its interpreters. Hope, once bound up in a compelling vision, can be quietly redirected and emptied of its original meaning without ever being openly discarded. The true danger of the dream, then, lies not in any outright lie, but in its openness to interpretation. The very quality that makes it inspiring, its capacity to mean different things to different people, is precisely what makes it so vulnerable to being captured and turned against those who believed in it most deeply.