experience
In my lifetime I've learned by my experiences and my experiences with others in working with them as their priest and pastor, that we learn by experience better than any other way, including by our Past experiences that we can make it through our Present and, if we have sufficient life's Time remaining, into our Future.
Just so, having experienced, in my ICU confinement at Cleveland Clinic, what my medic friends told me was "ICU psychosis," a very real thing, I recognize what burst out of me last night as what for the moment I'll call "cataclysm psychosis" or "storm psychosis."
Coming out during overnight relaxation and mental release when I had no control over it, it was equally unpleasant, distressing, in that it kept happening, repeating every time it woke me up thrashing about, to realize that I was awake from it and, after about the second or third repeat, to realize that it would continue recurring and awakening me with its nightmare nature, even as I tried to keep from going back to sleep and back into it.
By a dream that I vaguely remember details, I got into an enormous old family house that had been built by a family bishop generations earlier, that was in a high up location overlooking the sea. In the dream, I was already anxious arriving there, knowing that a hurricane was imminent and that it was too late to leave. With increasingly ferocious winds, and driving the sea ashore, whether it was the storm surge wasn't an issue in the dream, but there was extreme wind force and water, the house began shifting whole in its entirety, violently shaking, moving, seeming to begin to disintegrate with me inside it, as did some structures in Mexico Beach during Hurricane Michael; but moving toward the drop into the sea. The jerking, shifting as the old house in which I was trapped, was forced toward it's collapse into the sea, was the part of the dream that kept recurring each time I went back to sleep after it woke me up. I knew that it would wake me again within seconds or minutes. While awake, I knew that it was too early to get up and turn on the coffee, and that I could not keep myself from going back to sleep, even knowing that the dream would - - not resume, but - - recur. This recurrence, repeat of the high anxiety part of the dream, happened easily half a dozen times before I managed to escape it. It was so fierce and the anxiety so tense that even in my sleepiness I was concerned it would bring on a heart attack; which is not unusual for such a night terror.
It's my hurrication psychosis experience. What brought it on? I think, several things. Going to check on my 7H condo, a complete torn apart mess with flooring and walls and ceilings gone. Looking out its front window across the sea. The feeling that comes on every time I drive across Hathaway Bridge and into Panama City. Crushed homes, their occupants gone, destroyed businesses, their owners finished and their employees moved away. Main roads cleared but neighborhood streets piled high with refuse, debris, brush and tree trunks. My Old Place, denuded of the ancient trees that used to make me think of it as Cedar Hill. MLP, the sight of My Laughing Place that once loved me as much as I loved it.
That even after more than two months, it isn't going away.
Yet, experience helps me know that even this will move on and become yet another strengthening experience of my past.
T
Just so, having experienced, in my ICU confinement at Cleveland Clinic, what my medic friends told me was "ICU psychosis," a very real thing, I recognize what burst out of me last night as what for the moment I'll call "cataclysm psychosis" or "storm psychosis."
Coming out during overnight relaxation and mental release when I had no control over it, it was equally unpleasant, distressing, in that it kept happening, repeating every time it woke me up thrashing about, to realize that I was awake from it and, after about the second or third repeat, to realize that it would continue recurring and awakening me with its nightmare nature, even as I tried to keep from going back to sleep and back into it.
By a dream that I vaguely remember details, I got into an enormous old family house that had been built by a family bishop generations earlier, that was in a high up location overlooking the sea. In the dream, I was already anxious arriving there, knowing that a hurricane was imminent and that it was too late to leave. With increasingly ferocious winds, and driving the sea ashore, whether it was the storm surge wasn't an issue in the dream, but there was extreme wind force and water, the house began shifting whole in its entirety, violently shaking, moving, seeming to begin to disintegrate with me inside it, as did some structures in Mexico Beach during Hurricane Michael; but moving toward the drop into the sea. The jerking, shifting as the old house in which I was trapped, was forced toward it's collapse into the sea, was the part of the dream that kept recurring each time I went back to sleep after it woke me up. I knew that it would wake me again within seconds or minutes. While awake, I knew that it was too early to get up and turn on the coffee, and that I could not keep myself from going back to sleep, even knowing that the dream would - - not resume, but - - recur. This recurrence, repeat of the high anxiety part of the dream, happened easily half a dozen times before I managed to escape it. It was so fierce and the anxiety so tense that even in my sleepiness I was concerned it would bring on a heart attack; which is not unusual for such a night terror.
It's my hurrication psychosis experience. What brought it on? I think, several things. Going to check on my 7H condo, a complete torn apart mess with flooring and walls and ceilings gone. Looking out its front window across the sea. The feeling that comes on every time I drive across Hathaway Bridge and into Panama City. Crushed homes, their occupants gone, destroyed businesses, their owners finished and their employees moved away. Main roads cleared but neighborhood streets piled high with refuse, debris, brush and tree trunks. My Old Place, denuded of the ancient trees that used to make me think of it as Cedar Hill. MLP, the sight of My Laughing Place that once loved me as much as I loved it.
That even after more than two months, it isn't going away.
Yet, experience helps me know that even this will move on and become yet another strengthening experience of my past.
T