The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893 © 1999 The Munch Museum
When the Dream Becomes Real...
One morning as you look out the window, the city seems more ragged than usual. A nearby building appears to be on fire. There's a sulphurous stench in the air. Broken glass and rubble litter the streets. People lie on the pavement and in doorways, seemingly dead. Your terror turns to panic when you notice a rat gnawing on a corpse. Screaming, you rush to the bathroom to throw up. From your skeletal reflection in the mirror, you realise you too have died: empty eye sockets stare back at you from a hollow skull.
The end of the world? Not exactly. Hallucination? Yes. The vision of death described above is typical of the onset of the psychological condition known as the Acute Schizophrenic Break Syndrome.
According to official statistics of the World Health Organisation, between one and two percent of the population is thus affected (i.e. 66 to 130 million people in 1994), depending on the method of clinical definition. Broadly speaking, this represents from one to two percent of the general population – one in five hospital beds – who have been brought to a mental hospital, diagnosed, and chronically medicated. Most will forfeit their job, their friends and their family. Many lose their home. They constitute thirty-three percent of the homeless in America today.
Whether in the hospital, at home, or discharged onto the street, these are ordinary people whose normal lives were suddenly interrupted by the unexpected, spontaneous, and powerful onset of a dramatic non-ordinary state of consciousness.
The vision typically begins with Apocalyptic scenes of death and world destruction.
Let's go back to that scene for a moment. As you are hysterically rushed through the traffic, away from family and friends in a screaming ambulance, how could you possibly know that it is not yourself who has come to an end, only your precious personality that has died? When you arrive at the hospital, the admitting psychiatrist informs you that you've had a Nervous Breakdown, and that you are in urgent need of immediate medication. From the dead look in his eyes, you get the feeling you may be here forever. While you gulp the goblet of Lethe he proffers, you wonder whether you will ever return to the land of the living. Soon, the Lithium or Thorazine takes over like a dose of deadly nightshade. Then you collapse into a dreamless sleep. When you wake up much later on, the vision is gone. But there is a great emptiness, a hollow feeling, as if the lights went out. For years afterwards, perhaps till the end of your days, your life is reduced to a kind of limbo in which you eke out a meaningless existence, popping pills to keep the vision from coming back to haunt you, a pathetic shadow of your former self.
There is, however, more to this than meets the outer eye. Over half a century ago in Küsnacht, Switzerland, the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung came to feel that psychological health is a dynamic, on-going process of personal development into greater maturity and spiritual awareness. This process – which he called individuation – is, he said, nourished by a continuous flow of symbolic insights transmitted from the unconscious Self to the conscious Ego, in a variety of ways including dreams, insight, and flashes of intuition. Should this inner communication flow get blocked for any reason, one may find oneself increasingly frustrated, for the simple reason that one has lost touch with the built-in guiding system of one's deeper Self.
In Jung's view, if such a blockage persists in time, one becomes alienated – in the sense that one may no longer be able to use the considerable resources of one's innate common sense to adapt effectively to one's social environment. Alienation, of course, also happens on a collective level within the family, society, and civilisation, in which case the context one may have trouble adapting to includes not only the social, but the ecological environment as well. Whether individual or collective, a chronic blockage of the psyche's inner communications process may lead beyond a mere sense of ennui, and eventually jeopardise the ability to be responsible for one's health and survival.
What really took Jung's colleagues by surprise, however, was his declaration that the so-called acute schizophrenic break phenomenon is actually no disease, but rather a natural (and temporary!) healing process – which automatically activates itself in response to the underlying blockage which I have just described. Jung maintained that the spontaneous onset of the visionary state of consciousness is nature's self-organising way for the alienated psyche to become whole again. In his view, when the Ego has become cut off from the rest of the psyche to a point of real distress, the Self "comes to the rescue" through a temporary, but complete overpowering of the conscious personality by means of a vivid upwelling of hallucinatory voices and visions from the deeper levels of the unconscious. The conscious Ego, that is, falls apart and comes back together again, renewed. If one understands the essentially life-affirming nature of the visions which occurs during this metamorphosis, appreciates their symbolic relevance to the problems at hand, and integrates their deeper meaning, the result is a healing of the alienated condition which prevailed before the onset of the so-called illness itself – and a rebirth of the personality as a more integrated, invigorated whole...
Source: When the Dream Becomes Real
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