Minnie, our "Girl of the Golden West", is a keeper of other people's gold - she banks it in her Gold Rush saloon - but has none of her own. When she encounters Dick Johnson, the bandito-in-disguise, he adoringly reminds her: "you deserve something better" than such a second-hand existence. And something shifts within her in response, something mysterious: "I don't know what it is, but in my heart I feel unhappy at being so tiny...". Dimly she senses her life is too small. She wants a bigger one.

Gold comes in many forms, and handsome strangers may don a range of masks. But the human heart is the same, whether it's Minnie's or Puccini's or yours or mine. When it is stirred and begins to dream, watch out! In fact, if you were to tell me something like what Minnie says, I would be tempted to urge you to grab a beer and a pizza and get lost in some televised fluff. Because if you don't, if your heart really gets dreaming in technicolour, you will find yourself launched on a harrowing quest with nothing guaranteed except a lot of pain and suffering. Maybe it is better not even to start; but, if you do, you had better stick with it right to the end, or the Big Life you seek will be stillborn and your Small Life will be gone. And you will be left stung with the knowledge that you failed the calling of your soul.

The favourite colour on the heart's dream-palette is gold. Most hearts from time to time dream of literal gold, cold hard cash, the alleged "real thing"; all else is fool's gold. And money can sure help in stretching life's frames to brace a swelling soul. But the world is not flat, and neither is the soul. In its depths there are other golden dreams - in fact, the beginnings of opera itself arose from the Renaissance dream of the Golden Age of antiquity. Scholars attached to the aristocratic circles in cinquecento Italy looked back to the ancient world as a time of long-lost wisdom, prosperity and marvels. They knew the antique legend of Arion, tossed off a ship into the sea but saved by dolphins who were moved by the farewell song he chanted as he walked the plank. They loved to ponder the tale of Amphion, mocked by his brother Zethos for being a layabout who did nothing but strum his lyre; Zethos changed his own tune when the brothers had to build a protective wall around the city of Thebes, and Amphion was able to levitate and position the stones through the power of his music. But most of all they were fascinated by stories of Orpheus, for whose songs the forest beasts would gather, the brooks would cease babbling so they could listen, even the trees would uproot and sidle closer. It was said that the sounds of Orpheus could even disarm the guards of the underworld so he could fetch his dear departed wife's spirit. Now these Renaissance scholars observed that the music of their own era seemed feeble indeed in its effects compared to the tones of the ancients. The very first operas - including the first really famous one, by Claudio Monteverdi - recounted the journey of Orpheus. It is thought that the innovation we call opera began as a deliberate attempt to revive the musical magic of the Golden Age. And what opera lover can say that the genre's creators failed? Maybe we have never heard an aria that could hoist a rock, but certainly fine opera can buoy the soul.

Another golden dream is found in the tradition known as alchemy, which started in the temples of ancient Egypt around the second century B.C. and ran like a glittering thread through Western history to the present. Misunderstood throughout its career, most moderns view alchemy as an oddball fossil in the museum of dismissed ideas. Its central theme is the transmutation of lead into gold, which can literally be accomplished - but it requires a gigantic contraption of modern physics called a cyclotron, and can only be done an atom at a time. All those hunched figures in alchemical laboratories through the ages who fiddled with bellows and furnaces and steaming alembics could only manage to delude themselves, get stoned on the vapours that fogged their chambers, and as often as not, blow themselves up. Such is the opinion of outsiders. But the world is not flat... The texts of the alchemists hint that the fantasy of material transmutation is not the whole story. There are references to "the Gold of the Wise", and to "our gold", distinguished from ordinary lucre. Accounts of the quest for the transmuting agent - the famous Stone of the Philosophers - are thick with symbolism, lurid and haunting. A bird with a crowned human head devours its own wings; a huge green lion lunges heavenward and tears the sun; a woman and a large snake lie sexually entwined in an open grave. On one level, such images act as coded instructions for operations in the laboratory. But on another, they are fragments of a dream-transmutation that occurs not inside a vessel in the alchemist's lab, but within the vessel of the alchemist's soul. Lead, the starting point, is not just a heavy, dull metal, but the dullness of a life that is too tiny for the immensity of the soul it cradles. When the pinch is felt, the soul begins to dream of an endless sky stained crimson and gold by the radiant promise of dawn, spacious enough to bear every wing. There is oppression in the lead of the "same old" - the routines and rules and staleness that can encrust the self. But there is comfort in lead too. It anchors one to the ground, and shields against invisible rays that can cause disturbing mutations. The dream of that dawn calls the soul to risk, to slip naked from her grey armour into a faintly moonlit wilderness seething with the unseen, where that bird, and that lion, and that serpent await, and things that even the alchemists did not dare to picture.

It is tempting to bring some pocket change at least. And so easy to fall into a confusion of golds. A thousand years ago a Tibetan named Marpa was dreaming in gold. He crossed the wilds of the outer and inner terrains looking for a spiritual sunrise. Finally he heard of a guru, Naropa, who was said to know the way. Naropa was a filthy beggar who lived alone in the woods. Marpa offered him a rich present in exchange for the teaching, but Naropa told Marpa to go away and not return until he had collected a large sack of gold dust. And so he did, selling all that he had to buy the gift. Marpa handed it over - and watched in horror as the beggar proceeded to throw the precious dust into the air by the fistful. "Stop, that's gold!", he shouted. "I don't need this!", Naropa shouted back. "To me, everything is gold." At that moment, Marpa attained enlightenment.

Marpa was lucky - he hit the jackpot when he found such a skilled guide. Because there are no maps or tracks you can trust, in either the Wild East or the Wild West, when the wilderness is that of the soul. And no certainty that the golden dawn will not remain forever as elusive as a distant glint of lightning. Nothing is as it seems - the beggar is a buddha, promises turn into pitfalls, helping hands help themselves whenever you turn your back. And sometimes, a lone speck wandering in the vast, roaring stillness, the crisp edges of the self start to blur. What are you? What are you not? What is madness?

We are on the turf of the trickster. Minnie's suitor Jack Rance knows this well: "What a damned country this Golden West is!", he exclaims. Like every soul drawn to the Gold Rush, he wants more than his old Small Life, whatever it was. And in gold he trusts - "It's the one thing that's never deceived me". But what sort of gold? Through his desire for Minnie, he intuits something infinitely more precious than nuggets - "for a kiss from you, I'd spend a fortune!". He glimpses a truer gold in Minnie's soul. But he does not know that the soul of the Beloved can be a burnished mirror reflecting the treasure that hides within himself. This is veiled to the eye of lust. Until another eye opens, Jack Rance will keep on stumbling through the crazy dreamland of the Golden West, chasing the lightning, vainly trying to hoard and spend the stars in the night.

Minnie has come here from God knows where, with her Bible and her kind heart. She is a virtuous woman, which is why she is entrusted with the prospectors' loot. She is no gambler or liar or cheater; she holds Bible study in the saloon, reminding her rough-hewn pupils about "the supreme truth of love". But when she meets Johnson / Ramerrez, his soul becomes the burnished mirror for her own; she sees the ill fit of her present life, and begins dreaming in gold. And so does her bandito lover. The rest of the opera centres on their journey toward the flash of a golden dawn, the most glorious dawn of all - the rising of a love in which each soul reflects the other, unfurling the luminous spaciousness that only love can embrace.

To thread the wilderness that lies in the way, Minnie must leave her armour behind. Her codes of upright behaviour won't work out here. She must learn to gamble and lie and cheat, and quickly, because her soul-mate lies bleeding to death in the loft above the card table where she and Rance are wagering his life. Her deceptions prevail, she wins the game, and a reprieve for Ramerrez. Minnie has broken about every rule in the book during a single game of cards. Her life just got a little less tiny. But in that shifting landscape between the darkness and the dawn, where living too stiffly means dying too young, there's lying... and there's Lying. Minnie's fibs and cheats were not aimed to fleece Rance of the gold in his pockets, but to redeem the gold in all their souls. And when Ramerrez is recaptured and is about to be strung up, Minnie strikes again, her heart beaming so brightly the chance of salvation for every benighted soul in the lynch mob, if they would only remember "the supreme truth of love". Gambling, lying, cheating - all quite spiritual activities, when they are done in the service of love. As Saint Augustine put it, "Love, and do what thou wilt". We must recall that Christian alchemists identified the Philosopher's Stone with the Christ. And there is one rule that Minnie never violates as she fights for her lover and her soul - the Golden Rule.

In The Girl of the Golden West, Puccini has given the world a sublime entertainment. The Vancouver Opera Society is providing a great joy for our city's opera fans by staging it. But can a Puccini opera be more than a pleasure? Does something in your heart start to rustle as our Girl pushes through the leaden walls and risks it all for the "Gold of the Wise", for the treasure that grows the more you spend it - for true love? On opera night, what colour will you dream in? Don't ask me. Ask your soul.

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