Covenant's Experience.

[peter]

We all know what happens to TC in the first Chrons. What I'm interested in here is, are there any recorded cases in the anals of psychiatry/psychology where an individual has suffered [and come back to report] a delusional state, that was as far removed, as rich in texture and detail, as populated with people and individuals anf finally as long lasting - as that which Covenant experienced.

I mean imagine being Covenants therapist when he came back from his third [no fourth] visit. Have such cases ever occured, does anyone know. Sure people get into weird altered states at times and imagine stuff - but TC's experience was of a different order. Could we take the degree of Covenants experience as being indicative of it's 'truth' as having really happened. [What by the way was happening to TC's earth-bound body while he was away with the fairies.] What would TC's therapist have diagnosed - schizophrenia maybe? Catatonic delusional synesthesia? How would this have gone - and has it ever happened or did SRD just make it up?

[Vraith]

We all know what happens to TC in the first Chrons. What I'm interested in here is, are there any recorded cases in the anals of psychiatry/psychology where an individual has suffered [and come back to report] a delusional state, that was as far removed, as rich in texture and detail, as populated with people and individuals anf finally as long lasting - as that which Covenant experienced.

I mean imagine being Covenants therapist when he came back from his third [no fourth] visit. Have such cases ever occured, does anyone know. Sure people get into weird altered states at times and imagine stuff - but TC's experience was of a different order. Could we take the degree of Covenants experience as being indicative of it's 'truth' as having really happened. [What by the way was happening to TC's earth-bound body while he was away with the fairies.] What would TC's therapist have diagnosed - schizophrenia maybe? Catatonic delusional synesthesia? How would this have gone - and has it ever happened or did SRD just make it up?

Well, I suspect there is a lot more up the butts of much of psychiatry/psychology than they'd like to admit...no telling what's there.

But in the aNNals...I don't think so on that scale/magnitude and across domains. There are always, AFAIK, violations of integrity--ways that time, space, perceptions don't mesh into a consistent whole.
OTOH, quite often the delusions have a fairly coherent internal logic/narrative if one can find the "key."

[lorin]

**

[peter]

Ok V. Well, spelling never was my strong suit [can't think for the moment what actually was but...]. I read in a book* once about a guy who used to halucinate every night that the floor opened up beneath his bed [in the mental hospital he was incarcerated in] and he used to be pulled into a subteranean realm and sexually abused by numerous goblins and demons etc - pretty strong stuff [he cut off his 'todger' in the end to outsmart them] but not in TC's league.


*[Odd little story but true. The book was called The Surgeon of Crowthorne, about a long term and reliable contributor to the making of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary [all carried out by volunteers], Dr W C Minor - a retired army surgeon who served with the Union forces during the American civil war. The editor in charge of the compilation, Sir James Murray, was so impressed with Dr Minors contribution over the years, which arrived like clockwork each month, that he resolved to go and see Dr Minors to thank him in person.
Taking a train to Crowthorne, a village some miles outside London, he gave the adress taken from Dr Minors headed paper to a Hansom driver and asked to be delivered to the adress. he was impressed to be taken to a large and imposing edwardian building set in rolling grounds. Shown into a large study he percieved a man seated at the far end behind an expansive mahogany desk. "Dr Minors I presume", he said walking forward with his hand out stretched. " There seems to be some misunderstanding", said the man, "This is Broadmore Hospital for the Criminally insane. Dr Minors has been a patient here for the last fifteen years."]

[peter]

What happened to your post Lorin? It came in while I was typing my reply to vraith and I quickly scanned it to see what it said. It sounded very intersting and I was going to give it the attention it deserved this morning.

[lorin]

Wasn't sure it was appropriate. Didn't you know I am the reigning Queen of Self Doubt. Here it is.


Well, not sure how this relates to your question but here goes. There are about 7 places I remember. I can describe them in great detail. I know these places. And they are not 'special' places.

For instance, There is a place under the Throgs neck bridge in Queens, a marshy grass land at night.

There is a supermarket in a shopping center where there are actually two super market across the center from each other, also at night.

There is a road along a lake that has pine trees in the snow, also at night.

There is a service road along a highway entrance. I know it is a shortcut to a road, entering a bridge that goes over an island I go to often.

Yet to this day, I am not sure if I have ever been to these places. I am not sure whether these are memories or my imagination. I go over and over it in my head. I know these places well, yet I know, deep down, these are not real places........I think. My therapist used to say I had dissociative disorder, that I 'split' under stress. I think he was just inventing a diagnosis because he was bored. But I know I was there, somehow. I think.................

[shadowbinding shoe]

I don't know any case files but during dream states time-scale can be vastly distorted making one believe he experienced a thousand years of galactic empire history during a single night for example and although the details of this dream would be very sketchy of course, they can and will be retroactively expanded during the retelling of the dream making one believe he experienced more than he actually did. Serial and repeated dreams are also not uncommon.

[Vraith]

Serial and repeated dreams are also not uncommon.

Don't have that many repetitions...a couple here and there...but I'd say that around 1/2 of my dreams [the ones I recall, anyway] are part of various ongoing series....where I'm the same "person," and other characters [often] and locations [once in a while] show up as regular cast members. Even a couple loose story/plot lines that tie them together [though they have lots of gaps/inconsistencies, they still connect/refer].

I even have nine series "named," with dumb titles...I started doing that after someone started some dreams thread a year or two ago...[a couple others I haven't come up with titles I like for yet.] Like the "Lounging Lizards" [even though most of them are actually amphibians and mongeese]...but I won't get all off-track.

What you say about dreams applies to delusions/hallucinations...time and events have distortions...and when we TELL them to people [or even to ourselves], they get even MORE distorted by attempts to correct the flow and fill in the details/gaps. [it actually applies to REAL memory/experience, too...especially when pondering/retelling].

I'd heard that story, peter, back a few years when the full OED was getting ready to come online for subscription...[when was that?? right around 2000, I think]...I thought it was just one of those internet legends, never actually looked it up.

[peter]

Wasn't sure it was appropriate. Didn't you know I am the reigning Queen of Self Doubt. Here it is.


Well, not sure how this relates to your question but here goes. There are about 7 places I remember. I can describe them in great detail. I know these places. And they are not 'special' places.

For instance, There is a place under the Throgs neck bridge in Queens, a marshy grass land at night.

There is a supermarket in a shopping center where there are actually two super market across the center from each other, also at night.

There is a road along a lake that has pine trees in the snow, also at night.

There is a service road along a highway entrance. I know it is a shortcut to a road, entering a bridge that goes over an island I go to often.

Yet to this day, I am not sure if I have ever been to these places. I am not sure whether these are memories or my imagination. I go over and over it in my head. I know these places well, yet I know, deep down, these are not real places........I think. My therapist used to say I had dissociative disorder, that I 'split' under stress. I think he was just inventing a diagnosis because he was bored. But I know I was there, somehow. I think.................

Thats a very interesting set of experiences Lorin. It's not quite [as you said] what I had in mind by virtue of it's 'discontinuous' nature - but clearly the experiences have real 'concreteness' in your memory of them. One thing I have tried on a few occasions is to take a 'real memory' I have and set it against an 'imagined memory' that I create to order [of a similar nature eg seeing a band or kissing a teenage sweetheart or something] and trying to winkle out the qualitative differences between the two. And I find it really difficult. By the time an appreciable amount of time has passed it's almost as if our real memories are imaginatively reconstructed for us anyway. In respect of your analyst inventing a dignosis - I'm sure the condition he cites exists, but these guys love to pigeon-hole people. They have to have a name or they are not happy. I recently read a book [well half of it - see thread 'What are you reading in general', page 66 in 'General Literature' forum to find out why only half] called The Examined Life in which a psychoanalyst gave accounts of cases from a life in the couch business - and as he recalled how he arrived at his explanations for the conditions people suffered from, I became increasingly convinced that he was basically making it up as he went along [ie he would probe peoples pasts in depth and then latch onto something that he could twist into an explanation for what was going on. Sometimes the connections were so tenuous as to be virtually non-existant, but this man seemed to be brim-full of his confidence to nail every neurosis and foible to it's scource with 100% accuracy. This takes massive self-belief and no small degree of ego thrown into the mix in my book.