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)
i don't recall the UHJ labeling one year more holy then another but perhapse i wasn't paying that much attention. i seem to recall there was something special going on in the faith that year but it slips my mind what it was about. was it the finalizing of plans for the terraces? and getting the financing togather to start work on them? i seem to recall there was also the 50th anniversery of the united nations somewhere along in there and i do remember being urged to read 'a turning point for all nations' oh wait, of course wasn't that the 100th anniversary of Baha'u'llah's passing? it's been a while since i was active in the faith, though my wife currently is. so i hope you will forgive me. many of my beliefs still resemble those of the teachings but also some do not, so i have distanced myself to avoid the risk of misrepresnting them though i continue to wish the faith and all in it well. i do not believe the central figures of the faith ever to the best of my knowledge gave any specific guidance on the INTERPRETATION of dreams, only what i take to have been the suggestion that in them is one of the ways we experience a sense of our connectedness with that which is beyond ourselves. (and that whatever we experience in them is for our own personal and individual experiencing and not to be taken as prophetic for others then our individual selves, much the same as we would treat unverifyable 'traveller's tales') and of course there's that quote in the hidden words "why recon yourself a puney being when all the universe is folded within you" that in the context (i can't seem to find what i did with my hidden words at the moment to quote the reference) seemed to be refering to dreams and dreaming. =^^= .../\...
Thanks for your response, themnax. You got it right: 1992 was the 100th anniversary of the Ascension of Baha'u'llah. You're right too on not alot on interpretation of dreams in the Baha'i Writings. You've got lots of company in your exiting from the Baha'i Faith. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that exiting from religion is a national pasttime, at least here in Australia. I've always liked Paul Tillich's definition of religion as "the ground of your being, the basic meaning system in your life," or to put it in the vernacular, " religion is whatever turns you on." Then, of course, we all have a religion; everyone is in search of his God and we are all in it--until we die--and then we are in something else--or nothing--as the case may be. That's all for now!-Ron
