Khayaal

Thought, fancy, the image in the mind; the poet's conceit and the lover's reverie.

Literally: thought, imagination, the image in the mind

Khayaal is the inner image — the thought or imagined presence of the beloved that fills the lover's mind, the face conjured when the real one is absent. In separation the khayaal becomes the lover's constant companion, more present than any other thing. The ghazal lives much in this realm of imagined nearness; and in the contemplative register khayaal rises into creative imagination itself, the faculty by which the self pictures and so reaches toward what it loves.