Some Reflections of Forty Years of Dreams

[RonPrice]

PREAMBLE


The following two essays were first written at some time in 2004 about five years after I had retired from full-time employment. I revised them on two occasions: on March 25th 2005 and on February 16th 2008. By May 2005, a the age of 60, I had freed myself my full-time work, part-time work and most of my volunteer activity. The edition below I refer to as my 3rd edition of these essays. The 1st edition of these essays was written a dozen years after I began to keep organized notes on dreams and dream life(1), a dream-life for me that at the time went back some 40 years to 1952/3. Although I have kept notes and detailed references in my dream file, Journal: Volume 1.3 Dreams 1952 to the Present, no footnotes are found here, just the names of sources.
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(1) My first recorded dream was on 21 March 1986, but only three dreams were recorded until 19 April 1992. In 1992 I recorded ten dreams and so it is that I see 1992 as the serious beginning to my keeping of organized notes on my dreams.
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INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS: ESSAY NO.2

After 22 years(1986-2008) of collecting my dream experiences, collecting them episodically, for I collected only a few, some seventeen A-4 pages; after attempting to recall and write down my dream experiences going back to the first year of my late childhood in 1952/3 when I was eight/nine years old, some fifty-five years; after 16 years(1992-2008) of attempting to analyse my dream experiences, what I would like to do here is extend the first essay I wrote on this subject in 2004 and which I revised in a second edition in 2005 and in a third edition in 2008.

Lord Byron says dreams "look like heralds of eternity" and "Abdu’l-Baha often refers to the world of dreams to illustrate the existence of the soul, to illustrate that the soul is not dependent on the body, to illustrate the greater intensity of feelings, perceptions and happiness after the release of the spirit or soul from the body. But ‘Abdu’l-Baha also refers to "a confused medley of dreams," "idle dreams," and "empty dreams." Dreams can also be prophetic. For ‘Abdu’l-Baha they foretold His own death.

"That truth is often imparted through dreams no one who is familiar with history, especially religious history, can doubt," so it is said in a letter written on behalf of the Guardian. "At the same time dreams and visions are always coloured and influenced more or less by the mind of the dreamer and we must beware of attaching too much importance to them. The purer and more free from prejudice and desire our hearts and minds become, the more likely is it that our dreams will convey reliable truth, but if we have strong prejudices, personal likings and aversions, bad feelings or evil motives, these will warp and distort any inspirational impression that comes to us.

In many cases dreams have been the means of bringing people to the truth or of confirming them in their particular belief systems. We must strive to become pure in heart and `free from all save God,' and this is no easy matter. I have never been particularly impressed with the purity of my mind, my spirit or my soul, so it never surprises me when I have dreams that are confused, complex, bizarre, troubled, even sick and touched with various kinds of despair. My dreams as well as my waking thoughts have often been far from pure and true. "Garbage in and garbage out," as one of the sayings from the decades of my life goes, a saying which I hear again and again over the years.

We should test impressions we get through dreams, visions or inspirations, by comparing them with the revealed Word or some body of wisdom literature we hold dear, hold as a standard, if we have any standard at all. We should check our dream experiences through the sifting mechanism of this wisdom, this literature and see whether our dreams are in full harmony therewith. In another letter in the Baha'i literary corpus in a similar vein we find:"...The Guardian would suggest that you study very carefully the statement of Abdu'l-Baha in connection with the question of visions, dreams, etc., as Abdu'l-Baha has very fully explained this delicate subject. You will find references to this in `Baha'u'llah and the New Era,' `Some Answered Questions' and the Books of Tablets. The Guardian likewise has commented on this matter.

"Briefly, there is no question that visions occasionally do come to individuals, which are true and have significance. On the other hand, this comes to an individual through the grace of God, and not through the exercise of any of the human faculties. It is not a thing which a person should try to develop. When a person endeavours to develop faculties so that they might enjoy visions, dreams etc., actually what they are doing is weakening certain of their spiritual capacities; and thus under such circumstances, dreams and visions have no reality, and ultimately lead to the destruction of the character of the person."

Of course, there are many people I have met in life who would not agree with this quote. They have a different wisdom literature sifting mechanism. To each their own, I say. But this mechanism is part of mine, a mechanism I have been refining for over half a century now. It is not my intention to simply quote from the many sources of understanding on this subject, Baha’i and non-Baha’i sources, although I will do so from time to time. I have also developed a file, a two-ring binder on the subject which allows me to try to get some synthesis on the theoretical orientations to dreams. Time does not permit me to finish this essay here. I shall return to this theme at a later date.

Ron Price
16 February 2008
3rd edition
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INTRODUCTION TO MY EXPERIENCE OF DREAMS:1952/3-2007/8

In The Baha’i Holy Year 1992-1993 I began to more seriously 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 year 1952/1953. In 1992 I also started organizing the notes I had collected in the previous six years. I had some notes that I began to collect in the last months while living in Katherine NT, in early 1986. The views of commentators on dreams and dream-theory, essays on dreams and notes from books that I had read, the occasional book that was relevant to the search into my dreams and their meaning had begun to assume a collection niche.

Now, after sixteen years(1992-2008) of recording some of my dreams, keeping notes on dreams and providing a succinct summary of the previous forty years of my dream life(1952-1992), 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. This essay is an attempt at an overview, an understanding, an adequacy of perspective, a context to begin an examination of fundamental questions vis-a-vis my dream life.

What I will actually do with the results from this initial examination, this initial elaboration, of my understandings and those of others I have drawn on is a question yet to be worked out. Whatever I "do," it will probably evolve over time, if it evolves at all. Like many thoughts, they remains just that--thoughts and action never results. Perhaps I have already made a start in the realm of action with some of my poems that allude, as they often do, to dreams and my dream life. Three of these poems can be found in my two-ring binder entitled--Journal: Volume 1.3 Dreams 1952 to the Present. I have not included them here in this introductory essay. I must say here, as a sort of opening note, that the work of John Davidson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Tasmania and a Baha'i, who taught a course on dreams in the 1980s and 1990s, has been something of an inspiration here.

It has been more than a century since Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams(1900) and, of course, the history of dreams in western civilization goes back to both the Greeks and the Hebrews, inter alia, but it is not my purpose here to go into this history. Freud said that dreams were the royal road to one’s inner life, but there is a tangle of thought and feeling in dreams and so that royal road is not a straight and simple path. Jung said he was helped to overcome the egotism inherent in his autobiography and in his 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, Adler went on.

Scientifically-minded people seldom dream it is said. That is certainly true of both my wife and my son, neither of whom seem to have much going on in their dream life and both of whom are much more scientific in their approach to life. My own dream life is not unlike that of my younger step-daughter who is much more on the humanities and arts side of the intellectual spectrum. The hard-nosed realism of the scientist results in an approach to dreams that 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 in which he refers to dreams as "the children of idle brains,"supports this view.

But this is not all. The literature on the subject of dreams is now burgeoning and it is not my intention to even provide a cursory overview of that material, not here in this essay nor elsewhere. I feel there is potential in the dream world, a potential I have scarcely fathomed after this sixteen years of study and analysis. Brian Finney says that dreams arouse "expectations of significance that remain unfulfilled because of their private and indirect nature." The pages of my dream file will reveal some of these expectations and some of my radical departures from common sense and reality, throwing light, I trust, on the autobiography I have written and whose title is: Pioneering Over Four Epochs: A Study in and a Study of Autobiography.


Many of the quotations and articles now available on the subject of dreams from various sources are 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. The literature now is, as I say above, burgeoning. In the last five years, 2003-2008, I have begun to accumulate a collection of such articles in my dream file. But, I must confess that the subject is for me a minor key in the great symphony of life, the great symphony of my culture of learning as well as the attainments and achievements of the mind. I rarely come to the study of dreams as a subject; I rarely record a dream. There is just too much else going on in my intellectual life that is of greater interest and value tome in my work.


In my twenty-two years of dream collection and description(1986-2008) and sixteen years years of study and analysis(1992-2008) it would seem I do not often come out of my dream world and put my pen in hand. Only when there is some leftover affect that stays in my mind on waking, perhaps two or three times a year at the most and on average. In the nearly nine years since coming to Tasmania, 1999 to 2008, I have made only 29 entries or three a year. After all these 22 years I have recorded only seventeen pages of written and typed notes on specific dreams, less than 1 page per year. If I use the time period 1952 to 2008, fifty-six years, as my data base, I have about one page every three years, 170 words a year, 14 words a month, 3.5 a week and, arguably, one word every two days.


In the last year, since May 2007 when I began to take the anti-depressant effexor, my dream life has come alive with activity I recall every night. But I have only recorded four dreams in this period of nearly ten months. This level of recording is a good indicator of the degree of my systematic efforts to study my dream life. I do hope, though, that this brief essay and the material which is set out in my dream file, although not included here in any detail, will be of use to whomever comes upon it. It is only beginning to be of some use to me as I enter these years of late adulthood. Perhaps a more serious study of the field of dreams in these first years of my late adulthood, age 60 to 65, is on the horizon. Time will tell.


This activity, this file, these ideas, provide a pleasurable resource and exercise of contemplation from time to time as I play with the stuff of my dreams as they slip 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. It seems to me, though, that the data I acquire is simply too cursory to be of great value. My scientific interests for the most part lie in other disciplines of life, not dream-study.


1953 was a significant year, with the Kingdom of God beginning as it did that year, from a Baha'i perspective. Of course in the more than half a century since then(1953-2008), there has been a vast increase in the empirical study of dreams, sleep and the associated issues and problems. But it is not my intention here to dwell on this burgeoning literature, the problems of sleep or, indeed, most of the issues that have emerged in the study of dreams. This file is more of a personal retrospective, so to speak. Perhaps in a future, in a follow-up essay on the subject, I will widen the ambit of my study. As 'Abdu'l-Baha says "a most wonderful and thrilling motion appeared in the world of existence in that year,1953, 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 from the development of the Baha’i Faith with which I have been associated over that same half century.


16 February 2008
3rd edition
(POSTED aT: GLOBAL ONENESS
COMMUNITY ON: 26/8/'08)

[Belgarath]

Very interesting essays. I don't keep records of my dreams but I may start. It may prove valuable to me and my spiritual growth when looking back over the years, as it seems to have done for you.