Concerning Dreams

In the film, David Brent, Life on Road, Brent, who suffers from serious depression, visits his unsympathetic psychiatrist and is asked, "Have you had the dream again?" He says "No". Then she spends about five minutes writing notes. After the consultation, upset, Brent tells the documentary crew his feelings, that he has no idea what his doctor thinks of him, worries that she might consider him a loser – or even a pervert. The scene is profound. It really shows Ricky Gervais's understanding of issues in the world that he probably has little contact with.

At least Brent's psychiatrist asks a question from time to time. Mine usually doesn't.

I have written about dreams a long time ago in this blog but I want to revisit this topic. I concede I will be covering material I have already gone over. I have suffered from nightmares since I was a small child and awake from dreams these days every morning. I can remember a dream I had when I was about four. It was edited in scenes like a television program and set at Sesame Street. The dream transitioned from shots of a chemist's laboratory, all bubbling pipettes, alembics, and test tubes, to shots of the street, a large puppet dog (one of the main characters then) and a human woman. The sky behind them was dark with thunderclouds. In the dream, I knew that the dog had rabies. I was the only one who knew though and was terribly afraid, felt that I needed to warn someone but didn't know who.

If I were to interpret this dream, I would note that one of my favourite books at that age was The Value of Believing in Yourself, about Louis Pasteur. I would also note that I watched Sesame Street every day. Aside from this, it is to long ago to establish what this dream meant or foreshadowed.

I wish to describe and interpret three dreams I have had since first becoming 'ill', all dreams I can remember vividly. The first happened in the middle of 2007. In the dream, I was sitting on a hill with my best friend from my days spent studying at Otago University in 1998 and 1999, Caleb Edwards A helicopter convoy arrived and took me to a house in the shadow of Mount Smart stadium, the air echoing with the bass beat of a rock concert. Inside the house, bedecked with Christmas decorations, I found myself in the presence of a number of ghouls and vampires, one of which even lacked a face. After I saw the faceless ghoul, I woke up.

Mount Smart stadium was the venue for the Big Day Out in January of that year. As I described in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" it was right after the Big Day Out that I had my meltdown at the radio station and maybe a month and a half later that I became psychotic. (The exact dates are in the post "Dates, Dosages, and Other Matters.") I want now to describe something that happened at the Big Day Out that is highly significant to the stories I've been telling but which I haven't told before. A bFM tent was set up on a grassy knoll in the stadium: I saw Jose Barbosa sitting there and approached him. I asked him if he wanted to go watch some bands with me. He leaned towards me and said, "I wish I could!" Something about his body language suggested he was attracted to me, that he meant something more than what he said. It was this moment that I knew for sure that he was gay but I immediately repressed this knowledge, clapping him on the shoulder in a matey heterosexual way. I suspect also that his inability to come watch the bands with me was because he was officially in the closet. Later that day I took Extasy and smoked a lot of pot with a mate from the Big House and, stoned nearly insensible, watched Tool play. People familiar with Maynard Keening's personal life (I wasn't then back in 2007) may rightly intuit that in my drugged state I may have picked up some slightly fucked up vibes. The reason for my meltdown the next Tuesday had something to do with aftereffects of the drugs but also the fact that the girl I liked, Caroline, had disappeared and I was stuck in a radio station with only Jose. A month later I saw the Chilli Peppers perform and was witness to Anthony Kiedis's indirect 'coming out' as queer – no wonder I decided that the world was full of closet homosexuals. It was all a perfect shit-storm.

Before I get back to the dream, I need to say something more about my first psychotic episode. I have said that a rumour went around my flat that I was gay but haven't offered any evidence. One of my flatmates was a girl called Kristy, a cool nice girl – I think for some reason I don't know she decided I was gay. Oddly enough I think she warmed to me more, was more friendly, when she had decided I was gay. I was walking with her once, after I started working at bFM, and she told me that there were places macho gay men could go to pick up people. I didn't know why she was telling me this and wondered if she was referring to the radio station. At a party in the interval between my leaving bFM and becoming psychotic, one of the enormous parties the Big House held,she introduced me to an obviously gay young man. He wanted a tour of the Big House and I took him around, even showing him the attic. When I showed him the attic, he said, in an innuendo rich tone, "I've heard of the attic." The only reason I was taking him for this tour was out of good-manners and friendliness but I felt uncomfortable and after this short perambulation got rid of him and found a straight male friend to talk to. When we parted company, the young gay man said, "Crazy."

To repeat myself, the reason I became 'sick' and remained 'sick' was because people around me had decided I was gay without ever asking.

I'll get back to the dream now. The reason the dream begins with an idyllic scene in which I am sitting on a hill with someone who had been my best friend for a long time when I was young, I think now, is because in the dream I was harking back to a time when my friends were straight, when male-male relationships were uncomplicated. The allusion to the Big Day Out marks my break with the past. And this is when it gets weird. The house full of ghouls and vampires I believe was a version of a Respite facility I spent at least a month as a day-patient in around December 2007 and January 2008. A house in Titirangi called "Mind Matters." During this period I spent a lot of time with other psychotics but much more time sitting doing nothing or leaving the facility for walks around Titirangi. I hated being there; in fact during the first week at the place I thought I was going to be the victim of human sacrifice. I can remember I was there just before Christmas when the staff hung fairy-lights along the balcony balustrade. My time at this Respite facility deserves a post for itself. The reason it's so weird that I dreamed about Mind Matters is because I had the dream some months before I became a day patient at the place. So the dream represented a kind of fore-knowledge or prescience.

Taken as a whole the dream describes a move from my former life, when I had been happy, to my hellish life as a patient of the Mental Health System.

Another dream I had in 2007 has stuck with me ever since. I dreamt I was in a subterranean grotto. Hellish firelight flickered over the walls. In the grotto with me was George W. Bush and the then New Zealand Prime Minister John Key. Bush said to me, "We try to keep our club quite exclusive." I was intimidated that the President was talking to me and I remember Key turning to Bush as if to say, "See how he is with us? That's how I feel with you." I left the cavern and outside, in a vestibule, stood with Tim Robbins, Nicolas Cage and a third slight figure I couldn't identify. Cage put something like a communion wafer in my mouth and immediately I was stuck in the mouth by a bolt of lightning. Cage said, "How do like that acid?"

Again this dream can be interpreted. I think now that Bush and Key were metaphors for my father and brother respectively but that they also represented themselves, the real leaders. The cave was Hell, a place of perdition, of guilty consciences. When I woke up I had no idea why Bush had said, "We try to keep our club quite exclusive." In 2007 I believed, stupidly of course, that Bush was gay and that there were more homosexuals than heterosexuals in the world. His statement made no sense. Years later I worked it out. Bush (obviously) is heterosexual but the heterosexual community is exclusive in the sense that if person comes out or is outed, even if wrongly, it is almost impossible to get back in again.

The communion wafer was I think code for Olanzapine, even though I didn't start to take this medication until late 2009. The fact that I was struck by lightning in the mouth represented the experiences I had in the months shortly after I started taking it, particularly in December 2009 and January 2010, when I thought I could telepathically communicate with Jon, Jess, Obama, and people from bFM among others. The third shadowy figure in the dream I think now was Jon Stewart. The reason I couldn't recognise him at the time was because I didn't start watching The Daily Show until the next year.

In Easter 2013, I approached the psychiatric profession again and, for the first time, identified and spoke about my parents' divorce when I was seven, the childhood trauma I believe made me vulnerable to psychosis later in life. Around this time I had another significant dream. I arrived at the Auckland University Human Sciences building and took an elevator to the top floor. I found myself in a dark space full of open-plan plywood cubicles, a little like many offices, except far more sinister. A malevolent clown patrolled the room. In the dream, I somehow leapt up, escaping the space and standing on top. Looking down into one of the cubicles, I saw my ex-girlfriend Maya, dead. In the cubicle was a chandelier. She had slit her wrists.

The reason this dream was set in the Human Sciences building was I believe because this is where the psychology department is located. Maya used to have an obsession with chandeliers and even did some art installations about them. I had always believed, if subconsciously, that her obsession wiht chandeliers was related to some kind of repressed trauma. When confronted with this trauma, in the dream, she had killed herself.

This is where it gets weird again. The layout of the dream-space greatly resembled the layout of a Market Research Company at which I worked performing telephone surveys in 2014 and 2015. I hated this job, partly because it was horrible work and partly because I was often physically and mentally very unwell during the period I worked there. It's weird because I had the dream at Easter 2013 and didn't start working at Infield until the end of 2014.

All three dreams I have described have elements that could only have come from the future. Some of my readers may think this is pretty cool, to have visionary dreams. I also used to think it was cool. Logically, if all the laws of physics are time-reversible, as they are, we should be able to remember the future as well as the past. Recently, though, I have found these dreams and other experiences I've had profoundly depressing and upsetting. It makes me wonder if my entire life, which has been mostly shit, was predetermined from the beginning. It was all fate.

Like I say, I dream most nights. I sometimes have dreams so horrible that they are comparable to the film The Human Caterpillar. One theory of dreaming has it that dreams are epiphenomena occurring when memories are shifted from short-term to long term storage. This hypothesis obviously can't apply to my dreams – my dreams, especially the memorable ones have meaning, they are messages. However in saying that dreams can be interpreted does not mean I am endorsing Freud – Freud's theory, that dreams are coded wish-fufillment fantasies, can't explain nightmares, especially the kind of nightmares I have.

I'll finish this discussion of dreams by describing a good dream. In 2013, I had a number of dreams about Jess. In one, she was a superhero capable of changing shape, and turned into a puddle of water. Obviously this dream does have a Freudian interpretation.

In this blog I often talk about my life and now I need to describe something significant that happened just yesterday. I saw my psychiatrist yesterday; she decided to double my dosage of Olanzapine. Now, she can invent any reason she likes for this change (ignoring the fact that I have been free of psychotic symptoms all year, ever since or before I wrote the post "Concerning Jess) but the real reason for her decision is that I lodged a complaint against her and Tony Fernando with the Health and Disabilities Commissioner. Psychiatrists have that much power. I know a young woman called Katrina who had a psychotic episode in her teens, was well and off the drugs for over ten years, and then had another one. She told me that the cause of this episode was that she became fascinated with the Illuminati. When she saw Fernando, he prescribed her fish-oil capsules. She was taking fifteen a day. Now, I don't believe in antipsychotic medication but to prescribe a dietary supplement for a psychotic episode is not the soundest of scientific practices. I told a friend this story and he opined that it might have had something to do with the pharmaceutical companies but I think the real reason that Fernando did this was because he could, on a whim. Psychiatric diagnoses are all arbitrary.