Maclean's

My long, desolate journey TO HELL AND BACK

I AM A WRITER by trade, forty-three years old. If this revelation seems less than earth-shattering, let me add that this is the first writing I have done in twenty years while not under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Of course, during those twenty years there were long stretches when I did no writing at all, when my only occupation was tortured self-analysis as I tried to understand why I had exchanged a promising career for a course that led to several prison terms; and why I had chosen a way of life so irresponsible, so blurred and distorted by addiction that for weeks at a time oblivion was my only happiness and death my sweetest dream.

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THE REAL MEANING OF DREAMS

SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME, men have regarded dreams as a sort of by-product of sleep, often pleasant, sometimes frightening, as in nightmares. Ancient soothsayers believed—as do some modern psychiatrists—that the content of dreams can be significant. By BEN ROSE

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QUEBEC’S NEW POWER ELITE

BELOW THE POLITICAL surface of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution is a small group of men who seldom make speeches or appear in public, are wholly unknown to English Canadians — and known to few even of their fellow Québécois. Yet they, even more than the politicians they serve, are the architects of the New Quebec — the men who have fashioned its structure and given it both its shape and its motive power. By BLAIR FRASER

The enigmatic chores of a man named Smith

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MR. COMMONWEALTH

The enigmatic chores of a man named Smith

WHEN THE COMMONWEALTH prime ministers sit together around a table the atmosphere is at times charged with antagonism, even outrage. Yet once the dust has settled around these family-council meetings, they are generally found to have agreed on something, even if it is only on what not to say in public. By TERENCE ROBERTSON

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HELLO! out there in space

AS MAN penetrates farther into space, the next-to-ultimate achievement becomes a practical possibility rather than a figment of science-fiction invention. The ultimate is. of course, the actual meeting of earthmen and the inhabitants (if any) of other worlds. By N.J. BERRILL

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SWEET SONG OF SUCCESS

THE FIRST THING I noticed when I got off the Fifth Avenue bus in New York's Greenwich Village on July 4 — well, not quite the first thing: after all, there were all those groovy little girls in their stretch pants and their French-striped tank tops — was Ian and Sylvia Tyson, the folk singers from Toronto. By JACK BATTEN

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Is the Canada Council squandering your money?

WITHIN EIGHT YEARS the Canada Council appears to have grown from infancy to respectable middle age without experiencing the prime of life, let alone flaming youth. We have come to imagine it as a bureaucratic Santa Claus, unobtrusively keeping shows on the road, artists at their easels and scholars buried in books. By JANICE TYRWHITT

Nobody left at the altar? / Dr. Spook, please get lost / Who needs McLuhan? / Or English fads?

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MAILBAG

Nobody left at the altar? / Dr. Spook, please get lost / Who needs McLuhan? / Or English fads?

In your Editorial The Hopeful Vision Of A Quiet Revolutionary, you quote at length from a newly published book. Sous le soleil de la pitié, by Brother Pierre-Jérôme. He says, “To be against revolution is not to bless the OPR." He believes that “the welfare of Quebec will come through Quebec, not through Ottawa.”

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MACLEAN’S REVIEWS

TV HIGHLIGHTS

GENERATION: features an interview with Bill Sands, ex-convict author of the best - selling autobiography, My Shadow Ran Fast. He talks about his former criminal life, influences that turn young people to crime and the need for penal reform (CBC. Wednesday.

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MACLEAN'S REPORTS

BACKSTAGE AT OTTAWA

OTTAWA’S NEW PROPOSALS for national health insurance provide a model not only for medicare itself, but for any other federal intrusions into provincial fields of authority. Forewarned by their disconcerting experience with the Canada Pension Plan (on which federal officials forged ahead after merely perfunctory consultation with provincial premiers, only to have Quebec’s Premier Lesage pull the rug from under them by announcing a plan of his own) the federal people this time have proceeded with the most elaborate concern for provincial susceptibilities. By Blair Fraser