Dalinar's visions
Dalinar's visions are short episodes Dalinar experiences during highstorms.
Highstorms and visions
After he began listen to readings from The Way of Kings Dalinar begun experiencing strange episodes during each highstorm. He feels the visions as real.[1] During these visions Dalinar has to be tied to the chair because he raves and thrashes about.[2] Watching him is unnerving and Renarin tells him that he speaks gibberish during the visions.[3] Though Dalinar thinks that the visions might have been sent from the Almighty he wavers and feels uncertain about them. Talking to the ardents doesn't bring any solution. Dalinar has to make a decision and he does so when he decides to abdicate his position as Highprince in favor of Adolin.[4] In an argument about this topic Renarin suggests that they try to prove whether the visions are fabrications or contain any real references, and they decide to ask Navani to write the visions down.[3] This leads to the discovery by Navani that Dalinar doesn't speak gibberish during his visions: during the first vision she witnesses, he speaks the Dawnchant. They consider this proof that the visions are real, as the Dawnchant is a real, ancient, but extinct language on Roshar; one which Dalinar would have had no prior knowledge of if his mind were fabricating the visions.[5] As a side effect, Navani is sure that this could help to translate an old book called Analectics.
The visions predicate
All these visions share the challenge given by an unknown voice.
“You must unite them, the strange, booming words had told him. You must prepare. Build of your people a fortress of strength and peace, a wall to resist the winds. Cease squabbling and unite. The Everstorm comes.”
—Dalinar's memory from one of the visions[6]
From the visions and this shared statement Dalinar draws the conclusion that he has to unite Alethkar's highprinces because only then will mankind have a chance to withstand the coming events.
Mentioned and recorded visions
One vision is mentioned[6] and four described in The Way of Kings.
- Starfalls
During this vision Dalinar finds himself in the role of a man, Heb, who lives with his wife and daughter, presumably during the advent of a Desolation. Heb and his daughter are attacked by Midnight Essences but manage to reach Heb's house unharmed. Two more of these beasts follow, and after Heb (Dalinar) fights them off, Heb takes his wife and daughter and flees from the house, only to run into other Midnight Essences. When he and his family think all is lost, two Knights Radiant come. One immediately begins to fight the beasts while the second uses "Regrowth" to heal Heb and his family before joining her companion in fighting the Midnight Essences. Feeling good again after the healing, Heb joins the fight and the three of them fight off the Midnight Essences. The male Knight Radiant, Harkaylain, asks Heb about his strange fighting stances and invites him to come to Urithiru, where the Knights Radiant are centered: because everybody who could fight is needed.[1]
Dalinar mentions that this is his twelfth vision.
- A Highway to the Sun
Dalinar is in the role of a soldier (named Leef) at Feverstone Keep, and there witnesses when the Orders of the Windrunners and the Stonewards abandoning their Shardplate and Shardblades, and leave the people. Though Dalinar tries to get an explanation for their abandonment from the leaving former Knights Radiant, he gets none. The voice tells him that "this event will go down in history" and Dalinar assumes that he just saw the Day of Recreance.[3]
- That Which We Cannot Have
In this vision Dalinar is shown the aftermath of a Desolation. His role is as a man named Karm, an advisor to a king, probably Nohadon himself. This king wavers over what to do with the Surgebinders, and how they could be made to act more honorably. Though this king is younger than Dalinar had imagined Nohadon to be, and refused the idea of writing a book as absurd, Dalinar is sure that he was right about him being Nohadon. Eventually this man decides to unite the people so that they can stand better against future Desolations.[5]
- In the Top Room
This is the last vision recorded in The Way of Kings. Dalinar finds himself in a place that he recognizes as the place of his very first vision. A man stands beside him, showing him what might happen in the future—though the man admits that Cultivation is better in seeing the future than he. Then, finally, Dalinar realizes that this voice, this man, never has never heard him, explaining why he never answered Dalinar's questions. This man then tells Dalinar that he is God, the Almighty and that Odium has killed him.[7]
Oddities during the visions
Though Dalinar feels the visions as real, he always remembers who he really is. His actions and thoughts are his own, though he can interact with his environment.
Dalinar cannot summon his Shardblade in a vision.