Mad Madness

(For USA meaning of mad see anger)

This sometimes represents fear of the unconscious drives and images. It can also represent the torment of a difficult birth, or the search for identity amongst shattered perceptions of the world and people. The dream madness is often a partial expression of feelings that might be sane if we could allow them expression in their fullness. Pain and inhibition tend to twist and malform what might otherwise be healthy. See: Idiot.

Until recent times madness was an enormous threat. It seemed to attack people without warning, and people couldn’t deal with it except by awful incarceration. There was awful fears that it might be catching and people would often put their relative ‘away’ from them in one form or another.

A dog running across a busy road to chase a bitch isn’t acting rationally according to human standards. He is still acting on old drives which have not integrated, so no fresh information has been learned n about the environment – the traffic.

Being mad or irrational in a dream, or meeting a person or animal which is mad or insane, usually shows us facing urges to behave, or emotions which feel very threatening, or we cannot understand. Perhaps like the dog, they are drives which were sane in a past environment. The dream madness is often a partial expression of feelings that might be sane if we could allow them expression in their fullness. Pains and inhibition tend to twist and malformed what might otherwise be healthy.

Also often people who do not understand what is happening to you judge you as insane.

 Example: Suddenly I realised that I had had an unconscious fear of insanity for many years. It had only cropped up occasionally, once here when some very rational Americans visited me. I remember this event very clearly. They had come to look at my collection of spiritual books. The meeting left me feeling very shaken. It was, I think, because contact with them led me to look at myself from their viewpoint, which was that I was a loser and to be interested in such things pointed to being crazy. Sometimes this also occurred in earlier years. It usually revolved around my interest in the occult and irrational, when a sudden feeling of being wrong, unbalanced, or mad, came upon me. Its cause was not that I was mad, because later events proved I was sane; it was because the men had acted so sure of themselves it caused me to question my own sanity.

Example: I shrieked, screamed and contorted as these powerful words and fears came out of me. Madness was the last thing I had expected to come up. I saw how love had been so painful that I had almost cracked up when relating to S. I had to use yoga, fasting, prayer, to stop myself going over the edge. At the time I had read a comment about not editing what one allowed into consciousness. I started doing it but felt such terrible urges and feelings that I clamped down on it again. Also I saw the same pattern with P. When she left I had been near to a breakdown.

“So much pain. Nobody knows. Don’t love anyone, you might go mad. Don’t come near me, you’ll send me crazy. Love drives me mad. Mad! Don’t show it, no. Don’t tell anyone how you feel, or they’ll think I’m mad. I’ve got to hide it all. Hide it so no one knows. Find my feelings, how I’m going mad. Cover it up.”

Example; There is a tendency on the part of the public to minimize such reports because it is commonly believed that “miracle drugs,” particularly tranquilizers, have worked all miracles available and that there is no longer need for serious concern about the mental health problem. Actually, this is not the case.

What has happened is that tranquilizers have made it possible – to dispense with strait jackets, padded cells and other means of physical restraint. Also, these drugs and the energizers have made patients somewhat more accessible to psychotherapy, hence enabling them to be released in shorter periods of time than before. In New York State, which uses tranquilizers on a large scale, the average hospital stay has been cut from eight to four months.

When the patients return to their communities, they are able to obtain adequate maintenance therapy, primarily through prescribed tranquilizers and energizers. (Despite complicated side effects, the anti-depressants —monomine oxidase inhibitors—are now being used in the treatment of over four million Americans per year.)

But for all this, hospital admission rates for the mentally ill continue to rise. Therefore, it is clear that these drugs now in use, and some three hundred others being clinically tested, are not solving the problem.

With LSD, however, the psychiatric profession for the first time seems to have a means for dealing effectively with some of the deeper problems of mental disease which elude the tranquilizers and energizers. Medical reports indicate that LSD dramatically reaches into the roots of the disorder, rather than merely disposing of the symptoms and easing the patient. In some cases—with catatonics and autistic children, for instance—the therapist finds himself able to make contact with the patient for the first time since onset of the illness. As Dr. Gordon H. Johnsen * puts it: “During the first two years of our work with these compounds, LSD, we were in doubt of their value . . . We now consider that they give us therapeutic possibilities in areas where we were formerly powerless. In fact these drugs are of such great importance in our psychiatric instrumentarium that we can hardly think of doing without them. Indeed, this is a great step forward in psychiatry.

Except, a controlling government since this was written has banned all such use – so the mentally ill still are basically suppressed. But  recently there is a move to reinstate its use. See Scientists Find LSD Makes The Brain More Complete; 

Being confronted by a mad person or people: Meeting parts of ourselves which have not been integrated with our present situation; cultural fear we have about meeting the unconscious.

Being mad: Feeling threatened by the irrational and perhaps disintegrated aspects of the unconscious.

 Example: My cell mates called a warden because they thought I had gone mad. They stood looking at me as I experienced radiance so strong I felt as if I must be shining. I was aware my joy poured into them, although they thought I was possibly insane.

Example: I dreamt I was involved with a place like Atam. It felt like a human swamp. If you got involved in it you became sucked down into an animal condition of loss of self. Feelings of hopelessness, pointlessness, and a cancerous attack filled those in the place. I walked alone. On the right were a pile of slabs. One of the inmates – because it was also a mental hospital – prison – (i.e. there was no cure. Once in you stayed mad) pulled out some slabs. Inside the pile were bodies of people who had been drawn into the place. Awful things had been done, like putting one person’s head on another body.  I was both an observer and an inmate. Lost in madness, the only drive was to draw others into the same state. As I was entering the place a couple walked past with their young boy. I looked at the child, and the madness in my eyes – terribly infectious – entered the soul of the boy. I felt he would eventually become an inmate.

Inside however, amidst the dirt and human wreckage, three young men, who were perhaps themselves inmates, were singing and playing a piano to the others. I felt that they had begun a healing process that was the only thing which would transform the place. They sang from their own pain and degradation, yet with a feeling one could change.

In exploring the dream the dreamer wrote that: I worked on the dream with my wife. It expressed a fear I have had of becoming a drop-out. During the past year, in sessions and life, the terrible power of pointlessness, of the human condition, of our inheritance of fear, pain and illusion, has been at times almost unbearable. I have often felt I would crack, and give up to become a drop out. I said to Anne that the price of failure to meet oneself in and out of life is to drop out. The urge to do this in the last few months has been strong and persistent – to run away from the difficulty and pain into an acceptance of being a smashed human being.

What has helped me avoid this is that: 1) I can see I have actually come through many problems, so I feel it is possible I can work through those that remain.

2) Running away does not remove the misery of the condition, it only removes ones reminder of it. Our problem is wherever we are.

3) As I wrote in a recent session, I see we are those disillusioned primitives. There is no way back. There does seem to be the possibility of the freedom I glimpsed in a session – not bliss, not worldly dulling, but aloneness, consciousness, self responsibility. It offers the joy of rising above all through the veils of illusion, pain, fear, ignorance and habits to a point where we can begin to create our own life. It does not seem to be easy, but it does offer some sort of real existence. The dream was a facing of this fear and a step toward moving beyond.  (The dreamer has managed to move beyond this state into peace.)

Idioms: boiling mad; don’t get mad – get even; don’t go away mad – just go away; get mad; go mad; hopping mad; like crazy/like mad; mad about; mad as a hatter; mad hatter; rip-snorting mad; spitting mad; stark raving mad

Useful Questions and Hints:

Where does my fear or dream of madness stem from?

How do I face such feelings?

Have I ever seen beyond such madness?

See Life’s Little Secrets – Martial Art of the Mind – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams