Hallucinations and Visions

Can we include a number of central biblical figures, including Christ, among the severely mentally ill? Three psychiatrists in their article “The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered”  argue that Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul all exhibited what we would now call psychosis. As just one example, Moses reported seeing and hearing God in the form of a burning bush.

These psychiatrists have a point. If someone told a psychiatrist today that they saw and heard God in a burning bush, he or she would be on their way to a diagnosis. For a couple years, these psychiatrists had me convinced. I thought there was some sort of link between schizophrenia and religion. I still do, but I doubt these figures in the Bible had what we now call psychosis. Rather, I think they had visions, and there’s a difference. I know because I have had both psychosis and visions. Based on my personal experience, they are very different.

Today, I believe that when Moses saw and heard God in the form of a burning bush he had a vision. I don’t believe any bush was “really” burning in the sense we mean today. Rather, he had a vision that was outside what we today call "reality," but may have been considered a kind of sacred supplement to the reality of the ancient Hebrews. Moses saw and heard the burning bush in this supplemental reality. The ancient Hebrews, I assume, didn’t make the hard and fast distinctions we moderns make between ordinary reality and visions. They had more supple and complex categories than we do. With our modern, hard and fast distinctions between mental health and mental illness, we are depriving ourselves of the wealth of experience traditionally called visionary.

In medieval times, people believed in the importance of delusions. In André Vauchez's biography of St. Francis, he describes St. Clare, a woman, as having a vision of suckling at St. Francis' breast. St. Francis was a man. This gender-bending vision was considered valuable, epistemologically legitimate, and not weird. In its historical context, this vision had nothing to do with sex, as we might imagine today. It had to do with receiving spiritual sustenance from the male saint. In the 1200s, when these figures lived, they had a category for such an experience. Today, we have only one: mental illness.

I don't believe St. Clare was psychotic. I have been diagnosed as having psychotic delusions. They occur when you hear, see, smell, taste, or touch something that is not actually there. The classic auditory hallucination is hearing voices that are specific to only you. Visual hallucinations include seeing people who are not there or seeing splotches of color on substances or any number of variations. This is crucial: a person having a hallucination believes them to be true.

            

Visions are also known to me. And they are not hallucinations. A vision occurs, for me, in a variety of situations. The least complex ones happen in the course of the day when I think of something that may frighten me, or potentially frighten me, and I picture it happening. For instance, I recently thought of hiking at a state park that I assumed had trails on bluffs high above the river. I pictured the trail in front of me giving way and falling way down into the river. The vision articulated my fear about being in danger while hiking. But I was quite aware while having it that I was just imagining it, that it wasn’t “true.” And this is the difference between visions and hallucinations. Visions are assumed to, in some way, be separate or apart from what we normally think of as reality.

            

Fear often motivates my everyday visions, and I assume I am not alone in having them. Many parents probably have visions about their children. I have visions of my daughters getting into some sort of difficulty at least once a day. There is even a TV commercial that features parents having worried visions about their children getting in awful car accidents. A car brand then promises to be the safest and the fearful imaginings go away.

            

But my visions get much more complicated than those motivated by fear. In this way, I think I am unusual. Some people have the gift of vision. This gift has been valued by various cultures in different ways. Some consider those with visions to be important people who add crucially to the knowledge of the group. Other cultures pay them no heed at all and may even consider those who have them to be mentally ill. Mainstream American culture is one of those. For me, things are complicated because I have a diagnosed “mental illness.” Whether or not this condition helps me in my visionary experiences is an open question.

            

What are these visions I have? Before I get into them, I need to give a warning. These visions are extremely weird relative to what is considered normal and real in mainstream culture in the USA. Get ready. In these visions, for instance, I have traveled to the moon; been transformed into birds and, in one instance, a drop of water; survived fire; been able to breathe underwater; and been transported long distances in the mouth of a giant fish. This list is only the beginning. These visions are not symptoms of my schizoaffective. I know they are visions that do not accord with normative reality, so they are not hallucinations.

            

I develop these visions when I get an image in my head that I can’t shake. Recently, I kept thinking about the brown eye of a fawn I saw eating leaves while I was hiking at a nature center. So I got that image of the eye in my head, lay down on my living room floor, closed my eyes, and waited to see what unfolded. I was carried into the brown eye itself, which opened into a whole new world. I was a bird, perhaps a crow, flying across a prairie ringed by woods. Suddenly, I was attacked by a larger bird, perhaps an eagle. It got me in its talons, and I was being flown by it towards the woods when it dropped me. I landed back in my human form in a downtown with skeletons walking about. It went on from there: at one point in it I was eaten by a giant and traveled through its intestines until I came out the other side. I’m not kidding. This whole vision eventually dramatized a disturbing and pessimistic take on humanity. A voice that never identified itself said that we humans destroy the balance of nature and that we are the worst invasive species. The whole experience left a sour taste in my mouth, and I felt a little sad for a few days afterwards.

            

These visions last about 20 minutes or so. I usually record what I am seeing and hearing by narrating the experiences into an audio program. Later, I will sometimes use the vision as raw material in writing poems. Occasionally, the poem will be close to a transcription of the vision itself. (A book of these poems is scheduled to come out in 2022 under my real name.)

            

These visions have convinced me that some of what is reported by religions is based not on miracles but on taking visionary experience seriously. For instance, several times I have been given rides in the mouths of giant fish. This recalls the story of Jonah from the Bible. He was thrown into the sea, only to be saved by a giant fish. Where did the unknown author of the Jonah story get the idea of riding in a fish? I suggest that it may have come from a vision similar to the ones I had.

 

Many cultures believe that the beings encountered in visions are spirits and angels. I do not hold this view, but I certainly don't look down on people who do. My not believing there are spiritual interventions into physical reality makes me an extremely unusual human being. The overwhelming majority of people believe in spiritual beings, including all the various gods. I don’t because of the circumstances of my birth, upbringing and education—not because I know better. I just don’t feel as if spiritual beings are there. The reason, rather than the feeling, that I believe this is because, eventually, all the apparent aberrations of nature have been explained by physical science, from earthquakes to lightning to eclipses. 

            

If this is true—there are no spirits—then who are the people and skeletons and trees and animals and, in one instance, rocks that speak to me during visions? One explanation is that they are just the waking dreams of an extremely active imagination and mean nothing. I am quite aware that this perspective may be the correct one. I may be having waking dreams that are vivid and exciting and nothing more. But I don’t buy this. Why? Because they FEEL so meaningful to me. And things happen in them that are surprising and against my will. For instance, I once was attacked by a pack of wolves and attempted to turn into a bird and fly away from them. I had done this in earlier visions. But this time, I remained human and was eaten by them. While this was happening, I opened my eyes for a second to make sure I was, in ordinary reality, lying on my living floor. Once I felt safe, I returned to the vision. After they finished eating me, in the vision I stood up in my dead and decimated body and limped away.

            

This visionary experience of being eaten is not unique. In Siberia, shamans in training often experience dismemberment of one sort or another, according to Mircea Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Of course, I don’t consider myself a shaman. I am neither a healer, a religious figure, nor do I come from a shamanic culture. I am just a guy who has visions. My point is that the visions I have are not unique to me. They partake of some of the general patterns seen in a variety of cultures. The 13th century zen master Keizan had visions. As did St. Francis. As did the poets Coleridge and Blake.

            

I am claiming that these experiences are meaningful even though I believe they have no spiritual component. Where does the meaning reside? And where do these surprising events come from? I have thought long and hard about this, and I believe that these experiences come from outside me because consciousness is outside me and comes from my relationships to other things and beings. I don’t believe we are conscious because of some chemical reactions in our brain. I believe consciousness suffuses all matter, and that inspiration for these visions comes from outside me, just as Greek poets believed that their inspiration came from outside in the form of the muses.

            

Panpsychism is the academic word for the belief that consciousness suffuses matter. This is fast becoming an acceptable philosophical position in the university system. Largely, this is the result of quantum physics showing that observation and measurement necessarily affect physical systems. Consciousness, according to physics, plays some role in physical reality. But I am taking panpsychism a step further. Most panpsychists believe that the brain is the seat of human consciousness. I believe the seat of human consciousness, and all consciousness, is diffused through all matter and space, in the ways we beings and things relate to one another.

            

I have come to this conclusion because of my visions. Things happen in them well outside my will and imagination, such as when I tried to escape the attacking wolves. In short, I am not in control of these visions—except insofar as I am free to abruptly end them by opening my eyes and standing up. Not only that, but in the “plots” of the visions themselves I am rarely in control in any conventional way. I am pushed and pulled and even eaten by forces will beyond me, as we all are in ordinary reality. Most of our lives are well beyond our control. We just attend to that small bit we do control and leave the rest alone, unless it forces itself upon us. 

            

What these visions offer me is a dramatized enactment of the forces of the universe. By this I don’t mean natural laws such as gravity, since in my visions, gravity is violated all the time. The forces are transformation and constant regeneration. I was once told that on average we breathe six atoms that were once in Caesar’s body with each breath. This fact begins to get at the forces I am talking about: the way things grow and transform and become other and then something else.

The food chain is a theme that keeps coming up in my visions. I am repeatedly reminded that I am a part of this chain, and that I will provide food for others, perhaps just bacteria and mites, not only at some point, but right now. Mosquitoes and flies and various parasites already eat parts of me. This strikes me as a central metaphor. We beings all feed each other. And this constant transformation is who we are.

            

In the visions this can happen in the blink of an eye. In a few seconds  of ordinary time, I once watched a burned-out forest regenerate over hundreds of years. In that case, I did not age. Other times, I have watched seasons come and go, the snow come and go, in a flash while I did age. I became so old I could barely move. Spacetime becomes radically relative. And death doesn’t seem to happen. I’ve been eaten many times, in many different ways, and turned into fire, but in each case I survived—in the latter case, by becoming the ash and speaking from that perspective. Perhaps death is just the last, and most far-reaching, transformation. When we die, we may just merge with the vastness of consciousness. I don't know for sure, of course. But I do know these visions have caused me to think of death quite differently.

            

Is there something that does not keep changing? Perhaps. Sometimes I think consciousness itself goes on, taking various and sundry forms, but ultimately always unchanging. And this consciousness is not an add-on or underneath what we see and hear every day. It is inherent in all. My visions have shown me that consciousness is more me than me.