The chief subject matter of this study is an early seventeenth century Ottoman work of prose, Khw?bn?ma [Book of Dream], written by one of the most prominent authors of his time, Veys? Efendi (d.1628). In Khw?bn?ma, Veys? narrates his dream in which Alexander the Two-Horned strikes a conversation with the Sultan Ahmed I regarding the latter’s concerns of the abuses in state apparatus. Throughout this conversation, the legendary figure, Alexander, provides the young sultan with a brief and gloomy history of humankind as a lesson to learn that abuses are not peculiar to his reign and there is nothing to worry about. Due to this advice form, the text is regarded as an example of Ottoman mirror for princes genre that flourished following the reign of Suleyman. Yet, it has some considerable deviations from contemporary treatises, for it i) unequivocally fictionalizes the content through ‘dream’ fashion, and ii) challenges the prevalent “Golden Age” rhetoric through the historical vision purported by Alexander. Instead of reading the genre of Ottoman mirrors as transparent sources of Ottoman “decline”, the corpus of these texts would better reveal the intellectual, psychological and literary atmosphere in the post-Suleymanic era. It was a period many contemporary intellectuals were imbued with a sense of decline as having compared ‘their’ disordered presents with a “glorious” past. Yet, it was also the time that a distinctive Ottoman politico-literary style was consolidating. Khw?bn?ma stands right at the center of these various dimensions: In Khw?bn?ma, dream not only gives the text its own literary quality and creativity, which became inspirational for subsequent Ottoman literary production; but also serves as a refuge from the state of anxiety shared by some of those contemporary Ottoman intellectuals and elite culture. Through a survey of wide range of primary materials including Ottoman mirror for princes, biographies of poets, Islamic dream lore, and similar dream-framed accounts produced in contemporary and later Ottoman-Turkish literature, we will attempt to touch upon the intellectual sensibilities, historical visions, and new ways and receptions of fictionality apparent in early modern Ottoman culture.