The commute to school is sometimes spiced up when a homeless person catches my attention. They usually mutter incoherent, disconnected phrases on the streetcar, and take on different characters. The rest on the streetcar try to ignore them, but usually there’s no need to. These schizophrenics are lost in their own delusions and auditory, visual hallucinations. They’re in their own fantasy world.
It’s really hard to figure out a seamless, integrated storyline of what they are verbally trying to convey, unfortunately. I once came across an old woman who started muttering something about Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter. She was talking to herself, or perhaps to someone else who didn’t objectively, concretely, exist within space and time at that very moment. Then she went on to discuss something else in a very derogatory tone of voice. The woman went off tangent and spoke of Michael Jackson. She was angry. Which is another thing I notice about schizophrenics-they are always charged up and very emotional in their tone of voice. Wow, there must be some intense conversation going on, coupled with the purging of fiery feelings.
I’m sure you all think to yourselves during these moments-“wow, this person is craaazy.” Then to assuage yourself, you remind yourself, “heh, I know I’m not like that. I’m sane.” But here’s the fallacy. What you don’t realize is that the capability to fall into the trap of disordered thinking is inherent in all of us. Disordered thinking is a capability every one of us with a normal human brain possesses.
Have you ever thought to yourself that you succumb to disordered thinking, yet at the same time this disordered thinking comes off as rational, subjectively, to you? The frontal lobes, the very part of your brain that lies inside your forehead, responsible mainly for regulation of conscious thoughts, shuts down, and the rest of your brain is allowed to roam free. The frontal lobe is like the mother hen. It keeps the other hens in check. But once it’s gone, thoughts from your subconscious come to the surface. Chaos ensues.
Thoughts you possess come to the surface, but these thoughts don’t tie in together. You’ve entered into your own fantasy world. These are illusions that somehow make sense every night-in your sleep. While you’re dreaming, you may be kissing Brad Pitt, elated in bliss and joy and lust, then whisked away to Hawaii one second later, all of a sudden to confront an evil cartoon character like Wiley E. Coyote who chases you around. This provokes the sensation of being scared out of your wits. The random switching of locations and emotions just doesn’t make sense. But wait a minute-of course it does, at that very moment you are experiencing it.
When you’re in the moment of a dream, it is coherent. Dreams are also extremely emotional-because your subconscious mind is trying to purge out any deep-rooted emotions that are bothering you in your dreams. It’s only when you wake up to remember your dream that you realize how twisted it really was. Indeed, hallmark features of what makes a dream-well, a dream-disorder, and emotional intensity.
This is what schizophrenia is-a condition that most people refer to as “dreaming wide awake”. Our dreams mimic schizophrenic like symptoms, and if you think about it this way, you can come to understand how we aren’t that distant from schizophrenics. Their symptoms manifest when they are awake, but most people don’t realize how we all engage in this type of delusional thinking all the time. Only, our eyes are closed while we are doing it, and our conscious, self-regulating mind is absent. Some people even go so far as to talk in their sleep. Others sleepwalk.
Something happens in the minds of schizophrenics-the conscious, waking part of themselves that can control disordered thinking shuts down and malfunctions. They start hearing things that aren’t there, they start seeing things that aren’t there. With the rest of the population, we keep that type of thinking in check. Self-consciousness takes over, and we have the ability to control that unconscious side of ourselves whenever we are acquainted with broad daylight. Come night time-that’s a whole different story though.
So are we really that distant from schizophrenics? Are they alien creatures who mutter silly things on the streetcar? Are they lowly creatures, similar to lower-ordered primates, including dogs and chimpanzees?
Just remember that we are all human beings. The brain machinery exists so that we have the capability to experience the same things as every other person. Each and every one of us has the preset ability to delude ourselves in the moment with subjective rationality. Realizing this endows you with a sense of understanding of this phenomenon called “dreaming wide awake”-their frontal lobes are always in the “off” mode-unable to get out of the funk that it’s in and “wake up”. Maybe we’re more alike than we all think.
Bibl3.0 