INTRODUCTION TO MY EXPERIENCE OF DREAMS:1953-2006

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 year 1953. 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 more than a dozen years of recording some of my dreams, keeping notes on dreams and providing a succinct summary of the previous thirty-nine years of my dream life(1953-1992), 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 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. Perhaps I have already made a start 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 on Dreams, but I have not included them here in this introductory essay.

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 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, Adler 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 in which he refers to them 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 dozen 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 following pages of my file 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 now available on this subject 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. The literature now is, as I say above, burgeoning. In the last two years, 2003-2005, I have begun to accummulate a collection of such articles in my Dream
file.

In nearly twenty years of dream description(1986-2005)(2) and more than a dozen years of study and analysis(1992-2005) 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 that stays in my mind on waking, perhaps two or three times a year at the most, on average. In the nearly six years since coming to Tasmania, 1999 to 2005, I have made twelve entries or two a year. After all these 20 years I have recorded only twelve pages of written and typed notes, about 3/5ths of a page per year.
If I use the time period 1953 to 2005, fifty-two years, I have about one page every four years, 60 words a year, five a month, one a week and, arguably, one letter a day.

I hope this brief essay and the material which is set out in my Dream file, although not included here, will be of use to whomever comes upon it. It is certainly of use to me periodically as I begin these years of retirement and a more serious study of the field of dreams in these first years of my late adulthood. 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.

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(1953-2005), 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, 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.