introduction to my experience of dreams

in the baha’i holy year 1992-1993 i began to collect my dream experiences. that holy year was, as the universal house of justice stated, "an opportunity…for inner reflection on the part of the soul." my dreams before 1992 had virtually disappeared from my memory except for perhaps six major dreams and dream sequences going back to the beginning of my baha'i life in the years 1959 to 1963. in 1992 i also started collecting notes and photocopies from various sources, commentators on dreams and dream-theory, essays on dreams and i read the occasional book that was relevant to the search into my dreams and their meaning. now, after a decade of recording some of my dreams, keeping notes on dreams and providing a succinct summary of the previous thirty-three years of my dream life(1959-1992), i have established a base of understanding, a base for the integration of my dreams into my autobiography, to the extent that that is possible.

what i will actually do with this base is a question yet to be worked out. perhaps i have made a start with some of my poems that allude as they do to dreams and my dream life. three of these poems can be found in this file in tis introductory section. freud says dreams are the royal road to one’s inner life, but there is a tangle of thought and feeling in dreams. jung said he was helped to overcome the egotism inherent in autobiography and in life by the dream process. he also felt dreams helped us contact the shadow self. adler, in contrast, saw dreams as the antithesis of common sense and reality, indeed, as their arch-enemies. our life-style often gets out of touch with reality and common sense and dreams can help us see this unreality in context, he went on. scientifically-minded people seldom dream it is said. this hard-nosed realism, as an approach to dreams, stands as a sharp contrast to many of the other interpretations that see dreams as glimpses of immortality, fragments of a fable, an archetype, etcetera. for that reason i find this realism attractive as an interpretive system or non-system. a famous quotation from shakespeare, dreams as the children of idle brains, supports this view. but this is not all and i feel there is potential in the dream world, a potential i have scarcely fathomed after this one decade of study and analysis.

brian finney says that dreams arouse “expectations of significance that remain unfulfilled because of their private and indirect nature.” 1 the following pages will reveal some of these expectations and some of my radical departures from common sense and reality, throwing light, i trust, on this autobiography. i find, too, many of the quotations and articles from various sources relevant to my understanding and experience of dreams. i read them from time to time when i am trying to sort out a dream and its meaning. in these first eighteen years of dream description(1986-2004)2 and a dozen years of study and analysis(1992-2004) it would seem i do not often come out of my dream world with my pen in hand, only when there is some leftover affect stays in my mind on waking, perhaps two or three times a year at the most, on average. in the five years since coming to tasmania, 1999 to 2004, i have made five entries. after all these years i have recorded only ten pages of written and typed notes, about half a page per year.

i hope this brief essay and the material which follows will be of use to whomever comes upon it. it is certainly of use to me periodically as i begin these years of retirement in late middle-age. it provides a pleasurable resource from time to time as i play with the stuff of my dreams as it slips into my waking life from rem and non-rem sleep. rem sleep was discovered in 1953. this was the first empirical breakthrough in dream science.3 1953 was a significant year, with the kingdom of god beginning as it did that year. of course in the half century since then(1953-2003), there has been a vast increase in the empircal study of dreams, sleep and the associated issues and problems. but it is not my intention here to dwell on this burgeoning literature. perhaps in a future, a follow-up, essay on the subject.

as 'abdu'l-baha says "a most wonderful and thrilling motion4 appeared in the world of existence in that year, mirabile dictu. let it be seen what breakthroughs and insights appear in the years of my late adulthood and old age from the further study of dreams and in the development of the baha’i faith with which i have been associated for that same half century.
footnotes

1 brian finney, the inner i: british literary autobiography in the twentieth century, p.206.
2 including a one page archive of dream experiences going back to the beginning of my pioneer life in 1962.
3 john holt, "does sleep make sense?" the australian, 19 january 2000, p.29.
4 'abdu'l-baha in god passes by, wilmette, 1957(1944), p.351.

ron price
july 23rd, 2004.
(updated essay)

have you found any answers in all your studies? or has it only induced more questions?