Introduction -- The biographer between this world and the hereafter -- Patrons and adversaries -- Sufi sheikhs and the very special dead -- Father and son -- Collection of lives as a well-ordered garden -- Ottoman biographers and Sufi lives : an overview -- A well-ordered garden : empire, decorum and exclusivity -- Gardener at work : ʻAṭā'ī and his sources -- From this world to the realm of dreams -- Dreams, careers and biographers -- Nightmares on the Sufi path -- Hereafter in the mirror of dreams -- The dead and visits from the hereafter -- The living and the dead in seventeenth-century Istanbul -- Apparitions and embraces -- Dreams and tokens of remembrance -- Epilogue.