Recent scholarship has identified a historically continuous colonial or “Enlightenment” subject—-rational, universal, disembodied, etc.—-that purportedly dominated Middle Eastern modernities, or at least secular ones, from the 19th to the 21st centuries. This scholarship focuses almost exclusively on two divided historical periods: the high age of European colonialism from the late 19th century to the 1930s and the post-1970s era of globalization and the rise of Islamic political and piety movements. It thus bypasses the decades around World War II, in spite of the significant ruptures that occurred during those years, not least the collapse of the European empires. One question guiding this paper is: if the “Enlightenment subject” was connected from the beginning to European colonialism and colonial thought, as numerous scholars have argued, then why aren't we more curious about how historical decolonization might have affected it? The paper focuses on theories of the unconscious developed by the Iraqi sociologist and anticolonial intellectual `Ali al-Wardi in books such as Khawariq al-Lashu`ur (Miracles of the Unconscious, 1954) and al-Ahlam bayn al-`Ilm wa-l-`Aqida (Dreams between Science and Faith, 1958). Al-Wardi drew on the contemporary disciplines of sociology, psychology, parapsychology, and pedagogy, as well as on Sufi conceptions of selfhood. He singled out Freud and John Dewey as having revolutionized understandings of the human psyche in the early 20th century: Freud had shattered the belief that our actions are governed primarily by conscious will and rational choice--which al-Wardi asserted was a peculiar global “delusion” of the 19th century--and Dewey introduced a new conception of reason, seen as rooted in people’s subjective and embodied desires. Al-Wardi connected these social-science revolutions with contemporaneous ones in the natural sciences, especially the discovery of the instability of matter and Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time and space; the revolutions in quantum physics paralleled those in psychology and both were (re)discoveries of the irrational. The theory of relativity and the theory of the unconscious are both irrational, al-Wardi wrote, because they “rend the veils of time and space” as we had come to understand them since Newton. I suggest that al-Wardi’s interventions--and perhaps, as other scholars have suggested, Einstein’s and Freud’s as well--must be read in the context of decolonization struggles and the crises they generated in post-Enlightenment conceptions of selfhood, space, and time.