I am writing in a hotel room because we had to evacuate our home due to water damage. Our home is my safe place, and the only place where I can feel comfortable and even somewhat relaxed. So, while some might find it an exciting staycation to get to live in a severely overpriced hotel in Helsinki, I am anything but excited. I feel tortured and having had the ground ripped from under me.
But our ground is never only our physical world. The perhaps only true ground is our consciousness that adapts to the circumstances best it can. When I am under severe stress, I experience unusual states of consciousness — states where I become alienated from reality. Dissociation is certainly something I have experienced like anyone who lives with severe trauma. In dissociation you lose contact to reality in different ways. Time can slow down or be simply lost, you might get thoughts that seem alien to you, and you may not temporarily recognise or understand how to act in your surroundings.
Some people think dissociation is scary, and surely a sign of madness. I don’t look at it that way at all. Viktor Frankl says that abnormal reactions to abnormal situations are normal. And I agree. Dissociation is simply a way to disconnect from reality, when the reality is too much. It is a beautiful miracle of nature and being human, and I feel that my life is richer for it, and dissociation has saved me from losing contact with reality altogether by switching on unusual states of consciousness for short periods when there is nothing else to do to survive.
Not all unusual states of consciousness are scary, and I look at them all with a phenomenological interest. I try to get into the experience and understand it. And so I sit taking turns with crazy experiences and then analysing them with the philosophical and psychological tools I have in my toolset.
Today I experienced one silly and one touching state of consciousness here in the hotel room.
I tried to sleep because I desperately need rest, but I couldn’t fall fully into sleep. My nervous system won’t let me sleep willy-nilly in an unsafe place. But I drifted in and out of that unusual state of consciousness where you’re neither asleep nor fully awake. You get to witness consciousness organising symbols while witnessing them clearly. I hallucinated I was an American guy called Barry, drinking in a bar. Breaking news caught me: Australian prog guitarist Plini tells the world that Trump will be American president for the next two presidential terms, after which Plini himself will become the president.
I will have a nice Jungian time deciphering the symbols. There is so much to work with there to understand what my unconscious needed to tell me.
The more significant state came when I thought about how stressed out our rescue cats must be, because they react to stress just as badly as I do; they also live with nervous systems rewired by complex trauma. This brought a lived moment clearly to my mind, where I had to keep our late cat Nakke still while the veterinarian put him to sleep. I wasn’t in my hotel room anymore — I was at the animal hospital emergency room feeling exactly what I felt then. And so tears run down my face, and I feel helpless and alone in the world, about to lose a truly loved being who has kept me loyal and loving company for years.
That moment of watching him lose his life has had a profound impact on me. It has taught me what extreme personal losses we may have to experience to do what needs to be done. I have not overcome that loss, and I am not going to try either. I live with him as a part of me, and he will be living to me as long as I live.
I have learned to accept the loss by finding some, any, meaning in it. And we did by deciding to open our hearts and homes to our current rescue cats, Peikko and Kurre. And our lives are better for it.
But back to the experience itself: why does my consciousness torture me with images of a devastating loss and make me relive it in this already trying moment? I believe that even difficult conscious experiences carry an inherent logic and meaning. Here I see the logic being simply to bring around the tears I am unable to shed in this moment of extreme stress, because harsh Vikings do not cry.
And so I weep, and my body gets the recovery tears provide. And the process is triggered by an unusual state of consciousness, which in turn is responding to overwhelming upheaval in my life situation.
That is how we are; beings with multiple intertwined dimensions and we experience a plethora of interesting and useful — even when unusual — things in our holistic being. I am a keen student of that holistic whole, and have just written a book about it called A Good Life Despite Everything. While I weep here in our hotel room, the book is hitting online book stores. It gives me a sense of meaning in life in this strange moment.
Arctic Search for Meaning 