The genre of the Arabic short story is often traced to several different roots. Yet, one of these origins can be evaluated as a genre of its own right—a genre of dream narratives (ru’ya). In Baghdad during the 1910s, several Muslim and Christian Arab intellectuals portrayed their hopes and fears for the future encapsulated within fictional prose dream narratives. While written in Arabic, they were composed in an environment that could not imagine a world without the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, while the goals of these texts were forward-looking, as dreams and visions imply, and some of these texts were even of a separatist nature, this paper argues that the spirit of these Iraqi ru’ya narratives should be examined within the Ottoman context. My paper will identify the earlier Ottoman Turkish roots of this genre, Namik Kemal’s Rüya ("The Dream"), written while in exile in Chios in 1873 but only posthumously published in 1908. Ottoman-Iraqi Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi translated Namik Kemal’s Rüya into Arabic, and the dream narrative was published in Baghdad shortly thereafter. By linking to Namik Kemal and pointing to intra-imperial translation efforts to generate cultural production, I will demonstrate the Ottoman origins of this genre. Once Namik Kemal’s translated Rüya was printed in Baghdad, other writers began modifying the dream narrative genre in the Ottoman-Iraqi press. These writers of different confessional backgrounds created patriotic visions and built worlds set in dreamscapes in order to improve upon the current structures of state and society in the Ottoman Empire for Arab imperial citizens. I will analyze the themes raised in the dream narratives, such as Arabism, the nature of kingship, and morality, contrasting them to the disposition and the governance of the Ottoman Committee for Union and Progress (CUP).