These dreams and visions are from The Story and the Fable by Edwin Muir (1940), Muir's autobiography, telling of his magical childhood on a farm in the remote, timeless Orkney Islands, and his crash entry into the modern world of Glasgow, London and Prague. By story he means the events of the material world; by fable, his inner or spiritual life. His dreams are, as you'll see, the latter.

"I was brought up in the midst of a life which was still co-operative, which had still the medieval communal feeling. We had heard and read of something called "competition," but it never came into our experience. Our life was an order. Since the Industrial Revolution there has not really been an order except in a few remote places; for competition is the principle of anarchy."