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 when I was fifteen. In 1992 I also started collecting notes and photocopies from various sources, various commentators on dreams, that were relevant to the search into my dreams and their meaning. Now, after nine years 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. What I will actually do with this base, though, is another question. 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 below.

I wrote the following 'statement' as an introduction to my personal file on 'dreams' on April 25th 2001:

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 by the dream process. He also felt dreams helped us contact the shadow self or, what Adler saw as, the antithesis of common sense and reality. Alfred Adler also saw dreams as the arch-enemies of common sense and reality. Our life-style is vulnerable from reality and common sense and dreams lessen our contact with this reality. 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 archtype, et cetera. For that reason I find it attractive as an interpretive system or non-system.

Brian Finney says that dreams arouse "expectations of significance that remain unfulfilled because of their private and indirect nature." ¹ The following pages² 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 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 nine years of description, comment and analysis it would seem I do not often plunge into my dream world with my pen in hand, only when some leftover affect stays in my mind on waking, perhaps two or three times a year on average. So, although I am told that I dream every night, my remembered-dream-life is not a busy one. And when I do remember a dream I often, if not usually, do not record it in my file.

I hope this material, some of my thoughts, now in a file marked Dreams, 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 s

sleep.³

2 The following pages of my 'file on dreams.'

Ron Price

24 May 1997

   JUST RIGHT

The technical perfecting of a poem is an act of at-one-ment, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony. Yeats said that a poem comes right with a click like a closing box. Eliot said that when poets found the best arrangement for their words they might experience exhaustion, appeasement, absolution, something near annihilation, something indescribable. -Ron Price with thanks to Geoffrey Hill in The Force of Poetry, Christopher Ricks, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, p. 319.

There are too many experiences for me to say

that getting a poem just right feels like ‘this’

or ‘that’ or ‘the other’. Sometimes it is like

getting dressed, getting your clothes on, snug

and ready for another day. Sometimes it’s like

tidying-up the true or the beautiful,

translating a feeling into an experience, into meaning;

it’s like bringing all my faculties into play and then

I stop at some point, some word, some thought,

which feels right from convenience,

some indefineable rightness,

or some defineable rightness

that would take too long to define.

For a short time in this place by the fire

I both get outside of myself and inside myself

in a journey down a road of words playing with my dreams.

Ron Price

12 June 1996

One day I will integrate my dream experiences into my autobiography. Dreams have their own language and are, as Freud put it, a royal road into one’s inner life. But the process is not simply and easy. There is a certain tangle of dream experience which is difficult to untangle. Dreams helped Jung overcome the egotism inherent in the autobiographical act They help us contact what Jung calls the shadow self or what Frued cals the unconscious. I’m not so such what they help us contact but they certainly give us a taste of the afterlife, of the eternal. Inner vision sometimes can explode into the outer world and the writer tries to give it meaning. Dreams offer glints of immortality, fragments of a fable, a myth, which is never fully revealed. I would argue the fullness of the revelation of the modern myth for modern man lies in the metaphorical nature of both physical reality and Baha’i history and here, rather than in dreams, lies the fullness of vision we look for.`

Dreams offer for some a type of access to the child, to some kind of lost harmony, some immortality, some wholeness that consciousness separates. But my inclination, though, is to place dreams on the perifery of my autiobiography due to their powerful emotive content, a content which can unbalance the reader and arouse "expectations of significance that remain unfullfilled because of their private and indirect nature."(The Inner I: British Literary Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Brian Finney,. p.206)

But I would not want to ignore the dream life because there is significance there. There is a connection with some eternal, universal man and the experiences simply enrich the story, hopefully meaningfully.

SETTING AFLAME THE WORLD

You can do anything in poetry you want to. -Robert Frost in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets, Donald Hall, Tichnor and Fields, N Y, 1992, p.40.

A writer holds his reader by his temperament. -Ford Maddox Ford in Alan Judd, Ford Maddox Ford, Collins, 1990, p.4.

To unite or not to unite: that is the question.

In this intricately complex world of endless

slings and arrows what will be our source

of order? And when we die will there be a

dream beyond that hole where we speak no

more, beyond this mortal coil? And what of

dreams in these multifarious states? What of visions?

The native hue of will and resolution is fatigued

with pale thought and action’s name is sullied

by the poisonous winds of greed. Will our

universe be darkened with the dust of death

forever? Will these desolate lands see

no rain of grace? Will it grow green again?

So few are the champions to kindle these veins

and set aflame the world, but it will be done;

it will be done.

Ron Price

5 October 1995

TESTING THE BEST

The Book of Daniel was composed about the year 165 BC. Chapter VII was one of the earliest visions or dreams of an apocalyptic nature, composed during the Maccabean revolt of the Jews against the Greeks. There are four beasts in the vision, symbolic of four world powers who would rule in Israel until the time of the end: Seleucid-Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Western.-With thanks to Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Granada Publishing Co., 1970(1957), London, for a helpful overview of millennarianism over two millennia.

All these biblical verses are so arguable,

aren’t they Norman? The four beasts

have been given such different names

as men have sought the millenium,

the time of the end, a golden age,

a messianic kingdom, the last days.

He would come, it said in Daniel,

should serve him.*

This is no phantasy

some obscure revolutionary

eschatology-although

it has been since 165 BC-

this is the New Jerusalem,

the kingdom of the saints,

the beginning of the kingdom

of God on earth,

millennarianism’s true home,

after such a tortured road,

most people got lost by the wayside.

Absorbed in some tradition or heresy,

cult, sect, ism or wasm:

egalitarian, communistic,

self-immolating, peasant revolt,

urban insurrection, all elaborating,

interpreting, vulgarizing

the apocalyptic lore to transform

and save history, in cataclysm,

in quasi-religious salvationism,

deviant medieval mysticism,

self-divinization and anarchism

in secular dress: it is not surprising

you missed it since it grew up quietly

in an orgy of violence and complexity

that would test the best as it still is doing.

Ron Price

26 September 1995

*The Bible, Book of Daniel, Chapter VII, verses 2 to 14.

If this unearthly Love has power to make

my life immortal and to shake ambition

into some fitting portal where I brim

my measure of contentment and with merest whim

search, poorly, after fame, then ‘tis a Love

that I shall keep ‘til the call from above-

and then...

-With thanks to John Keats, Endymion, lines 843-47.

These things of beauty will be joys forever

and their loveliness will increase far down

the centuries and ages. Eras will not see these

wonders pass into nothingness. Dreams and

quiet places sweet and still will fill these

marbled-flower gardens binding us to

primal points of holy seat made for our searching.

Such beauty moves us far beyond incipient sadness;

takes this young sprouting freshness canalized

in energy-lamps everywhere in the vineyard.

Such grandeur cools in the hot season and

sprinkles our air with musk-rose blooms,

strengthening our loins in submissive worship.

And such wonder, too, for and with the dead

who have entered the garden of happiness

and now circle ‘round us in mystic intercourse.

It is all so dear, now, all that circles here;

even the moon which haunts then cheers as light

and seems to bind our very souls clear and tight.

This place, I prefer it have no name, its music

brings a joy to valley, mountain, plain.

The early buds are out now, milk in pails

is coming down the lane while lush juicy

fruits are being brought in by sail

in little boats-I’ve got one-I steer

in many quiet hours down deeper streams

where I hear bees hum in globes of clover.

Autumn brings its universal tinge of sober gold

to this world on mountain side wherein I hold

such thought that can only be described as bliss.

The trumpets have already blown and, now, my path

is dressed in green, in flowers, indeed a marble bath.

Those assembled ‘round the shrines had looks of veneration,

‘twould be here for many years to come, each generation

would have its awed face, companions in a mountain chase.

And I had been drawn into gardens of such fruit, such orient lights.

For here is the heavenly abode in the Centre of earthly realities

and here I am, as if led by some midnight spirit nurse of

happy changes toward some magic sleep, toward some

soaring bird easing upward over the troubled sea of man.

The words found here sound a strange minstrelsy, have

tumbling waves in echoing caves: a silvery enchantment

is to be found in this mazy world with its new song,

its upfurled wings which renovate our lives. Try them!

You may open your eyelids with a healthier brain.

Some influence rare goes spiritual through this Damsel’s hand;

it runs quick, invisible strings all over the land.

Ron Price

26 May 1995

VAPOROUS ILLUSION

...The full dimensions of his being were not to be found even in private...dreams were too unreliable, too sporadic and uncontrolled. -Thoreau, Journal, Vol.1 in Dark Thoreau, Richard Bridgman, U. Of Nebraska, Lincohn, 1982, p.3.

I saw him run away so clear,

way off across a field.

The field was white; he had a gun.

He did not like what I had said.

He disagreed most violently,

but in a dream, ‘twas done.

I wondered long what it had meant,

but could come up with no answer.

So much of life is like this dream,

like some mirage in a desert.

You wish it water fresh and pure

but all it is is vapour.

There is no need to chase it far

across the white snow down there.

No need to worry about that gun;

it has no power to hurt you.

‘Tis only a fleeting shadow in your mind,

more like some illusion.

So I put the dream down on the sheet

and wonder if one day it shall tell me

something deep and meaningful:

right now it seems like not.

The memory is there; I won’t forget.

Perhaps one day it will reveal

some sweet insight on this desert;

and perhaps it will remain as is

some vaporous illusion.

Ron Price

11 June 1995

RESOLUTION

Part of my purpose here is to resolve the tension between the trivial and the serious, the light-hearted, facile optimism that denies tragedy and the heavy-souled realism that knows tragedy and searches out an appropriate spirituality. Part of the resolution is in the comic, the self-mocking, a necessary detachment; part is in a poetic vitality and variety. Part is in my vocation, my avocation, my solitude and my community. For it is in these places that I dwell with my dreams, test out their substance, attempt to resolve those tensions that are resolvable and accept the unresolvable. -Ron Price with thanks to Peter Raby, Oscar Wilde, Cambridge University Press, NY, 1988.

The mind bites on with a familiar fatigue:

been this way before it says knowingly.

A thousand times I’ve sat there giving

it my best shot and still missing the target.

How many times do you keep going on

trying, always trying? Forever, with the comic

and the necessary trivia, the self-mocking

wearing the ego down, keeping it down,

learning that detachment through a series of

infinite steps, largely unseen. Here, here are

my dreams and their acid test, the tensions,

resolved and unresolved. Do I have

the wisdom to know the difference?

Ron Price

24 February 1996

The metaphor of imprisonment haunts Australian literature. -Randolph Stow, West Australian Novelist.

We’re used to being ill-at-ease,

we in Canada and Australia,

in our garrisons and prisons¹

from sea to sea, wall-to-wall,

fated by our history, preoccupied

un-beknownst with distant echoes,

resounding into the present,

in our strategic locations,

especially the pioneer, archtype,

putting down roots,

roots that go all over a continent,

in a new prison

of our coursings through east and west.²

You don’t escape the prison of the past

that easily even in these days of tourism,

candy-floss, take-aways and endless engines.

It’s fitting really: a new prison

can now be found across this land,

this hall of mirrors and vapours in the desert,

far from those old prisons and forts,

far from those Indians, the indigenies,

who were hardly-not even-human,

from exile and expulsion, here on the verandah,

here where new dreams are born,

where strangeness is removed from the heart

and laid with gold,

brought by a loyal lover’s caravan.

And around this house, its intimate space,

place of dreams, sign of new spirituality,

home for a new Revelation, no darksome well,

but place of burning desire, hazardous, tortuous,

narrow: no facile pop-psychology here,

no pseudo-political jargon--

one level above the ordinary

with the lover seated in the heart³

and one level below the ordinary

where we court restlessness, failure, difficulty,

more and more urgency and eagerness,

quicksilver-like, astir, aflame.

Ron Price

2 November 1996