Alongside the systematic works Vital kept a private record of his dreams, of his visions, and of the things other people said about him, later gathered as Sefer ha-Hezyonot, the Book of Visions. It is not a devotional text and was not written for readers. He sets down dreams in which he is told he is the messiah of the house of Joseph, reports of what seers and possessed women said on seeing him, quarrels with rivals, anxieties about his standing among the Safed fellowship, and long stretches of ordinary disappointment.
The document is valuable for two opposite reasons. It shows the interior life of a sixteenth-century kabbalist without the smoothing that hagiography applies, ambition and self-doubt included, both of which a later admirer would have removed. And it shows the texture of religious life in Safed and Damascus, where dream interpretation, spirit possession and visits to the graves of ancient sages were ordinary practice rather than exotic exceptions to it.
Vital also wrote Sha'arei Kedushah, the Gates of Holiness, a manual of ethical and contemplative preparation whose fourth part, the one carrying the practical instructions, was withheld from print for centuries and circulated only in manuscript. Taken together the three bodies of work show one man as systematiser, as practitioner and as an unusually candid witness against himself.