Oh God, I just had the most disturbing dream I’ve had in a long time.
It all started with a recurrence of my Manic / Paranoid symptoms. I started to behave quite oddly and my family members were concerned about me. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I’m invited into my Dad’s Office (he has an Office for some reason) and he presents me with an order for my committal to a mental institution. He says he has a legal order rescinding all of my rights and assigning them to the institution. He says he thinks this will be best for me.
I start screaming at him, “Why? Why are you doing this?”
And all he can say, with a curious smile on his face, is that he liked the treatment plan they offered because it was based on singing songs.
My family takes me to a large, bleak looking hospital and I go inside. The hospital serves as an emergency care facility as well as a mental institution, and I somehow find a way to slip out of the admission process and into a line of “normal” patients headed for a cafeteria. I am not wearing hospital scrubs or pajamas, just normal clothes, so I pull my hood over my head, put my hands in my pockets, and try to blend in so nobody will notice me. In this way I hope to make my way to an exit and to escape.
As I am shuffling along in the line, I notice on one of the walls a huge board with the name of admitted mental patients. My name is on there, including the date of admission, April 24th. I somehow get confused and realize that I am not in a line for the cafeteria, but for the office of the Admistrator of the
mental institution. With this realization comes the sudden awareness that I never managed to “escape” at all, but that I have been admitted to the facility for hours and that they have put me on extremely powerful drugs, rendering me nearly incapable of comprehending my surroundings. It is then that the sensation of being drugged hits.
It’s hard to describe. It’s like your entire mind slows down, like there’s a heavy blanket covering all of your senses. There’s a sense of wooziness and absolute loss of the ability to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. All these sensations, in the dream, are very powerful and lend to an absolute conviction that you have been heavily drugged. The dream feels real, you feel like you are drugged . . . except it’s only a dream.
Eventually it comes to be my turn. I step up to the Administrator’s office door. I can see a Nurse explaining my complaints to the Administrator, who is out of sight. “He’s complaining about his medication,” she says with scorn. “He says he knows exactly what the pills look like and these aren’t the same. He says it’s too high a dosage.” The Administrator waves me in or something and I enter the office.
I am very skeptical of meeting her, very afraid of what she will say or do, given that she has already obviously over-drugged me to the point of incomprehensibility. I sit down in front of her and she is a kindly looking old lady with a sagging face and lips that draw in around her mouth. I recognize this woman from somewhere — in the dream reality, this is the woman who first admitted me to the hospital when I got sick, and I have been at this facility before. Immediately relief washes over me and I feel that no matter my fears, this woman will make everything all right, because she has helped me once.
She explains that my outpatient Mental Health Pharmacologist, which is the one I have in real life, has not been prescribing me enough drugs to truly “solve” my mental problems. She has kept me on a “maintenance dose” of drugs, extremely minor by comparison, in order to simply prevent the recurrence of more severe symptoms. I ask her what drugs she has decided to change me to, and she explains that I’m on a higher dose of Risperdal in addition to a second drug I can’t remember the name of, but it was something like Oviate. I maintain to her that the drugs she is giving me are too powerful, and by way of explanation I state that I don’t even remember being admitted and that up until I entered her office I was wandering around in a daze, convinced I had escaped from the institution! She just laughs at me, a little giggle.
It is then that I notice a person on fire outside of her office. This person is screaming and writhing in agony on the floor and several people are crouched around him. I am alarmed and start paying attention to the spectacle. I quickly come to understand that this is some type of farce, that the flames are fake looking, and the people around him are moving about their daily responsibilities without any concern.
“Oh,” I say to the Administrator, “you’re having some type of play.”
“Oh yes,” the Administrator says, “you don’t need to worry about that.”
After a little more talking the Administrator stands up and says, “It’s time for Church Services.”
This must be the singing part of the therapy, I think to myself.
“Don’t worry,” the Administrator says, “I’ve got you a seat on the front row.” She smiles at me with what seems to me to be a malicious little grin.
Outside her office I see mental patients filing by on their way to the chapel and I can hear some type of Latin chanting going on in the distance. It’s very deep and choral, foreboding in its ominous tones. The Administrator leads me to the chapel and cracks the door a bit so I can peek in. Absolute horror confronts me. There is some type of body lying on the altar at the front of the chapel, and the stomach has been carved out and people are standing around it, eating pieces. Blood is splattered across their mouths as they sing these ancient Latin hymns. “I can’t do this,” I say, “I can’t be a part of this service.” The old lady is grinning like a madman as she says, “But you have to participate in all of our activities; don’t you want to get well?” It is then that I realize that this administrator is not trying to make me well at all — she is trying to drive me further into madness. I start to fake an illness, nausea or something, and eventually the Administrator says, “Fine, you can wait out the service in your room.”
I make my way through the corridors, past her office and back toward what I think is the dormitory area. The walls and ceiling start to become decrepit — plaster is scattered across the floor and there are holes in some of the surfaces, exposing wiring and duct work beneath. Staff becomes less and less frequent as I become more and more lost, and I start to understand that this entire building should probably be condemned. It doesn’t even meet the bare minimums of construction required for an adequate mental facility. The entire experience is similar to the one in Jacob’s Ladder when the main character is being wheeled through the nightmare hospital strapped to a gurney.
Eventually the Administrator finds me. “Where do you think you are going?” she asks, grinning wildly. “I told you to wait in an adjacent room, not in your room.” I explain that I think this entire process has been a mistake, that I don’t need to be here, I don’t need such huge dosages of medication, and that I think she’s trying to make me worse, not better.
“What’s wrong with you, caco, is that you fail to address your own problems.” A loud, intermittent sound begins pounding through my consciousness, like some type of grinding machine filled with gears.
“Don’t you ever want to be independent?” The administrator asks.
Staff come up and surround me. “Don’t you want to stand on your own two feet?” Her smile is practically insane by this point as she is flashing me with all of her teeth.
The staff grab my arms.
I realize I’m going to be here a long time, and when I am finally released, I will have no shreds of sanity left.
It was then that I woke up.