We use categories of judgement to hold off, control, understand, and defend against an experience of reality, i.e. against knowing reality (being in the flow). I have had several occasions of going to the doctor
and immediately feeling better when I am given a diagnosis. Naming is powerful! It creates just enough distance from the unknown that we can know something, now appearing “over there” as a static object of knowledge. We emerge out of the flow just enough to “arrest” reality and know it as a static object, which we can then manipulate to our own ends. But of course we are no longer “in the flow of life”. This is our technological civilization.
So when the enormity, grandeur, beauty, and at times, horror of life, “assaults” us, our asking “what is it?” becomes a frantic attempt to halt the flow by naming the unknown and thereby to gain some measure of control. I still remember well the smiles on the scientists’ faces when they announced that they had finally come with a name for the virus: COVID-19! With this category of judgement, they hoped to gain some control in order to begin shaping future events, such as steering us away from blaming China for the outbreak.
This use of language for purposes of social manipulation is well-known but less well-known is the eventual fatal effect of such technological engineering of our experience. Some years ago I wrote a little essay on this theme in response to the GFC of 2008. But, having learned little from that event, twelve years later, we have arrived at the tipping point where our technical language has so separated us from reality that reality is giving us its perhaps final response to such linguistic abuse, in the form of vivid nightmares, or other images of horror! As Leonard Cohen says, “You want it darker?!”
Let me get specific now.
It’s named “ICU Delirium”— a condition in which COVID patients in ICU are subjected to nightmarish intrusions of images of horror, reminiscent of PTSD visions:
I thought one of the nurses had taken a circular saw and just buzzed my arm off and then just buzzed off both of my legs another circular saw came through the wall and just cut my head in half I was positive they were trying to kill me.
the hallucinations were just unbelievable it’s so real they’re not nightmares; they’re memories even when you are sedated
nobody said anything to me about the hallucinations that I would have once I withdraw from all those drugs. This doesn’t end when you walk out the door.
this chapter of your life happens and it changes every chapter after that.
These sample quotes are taken from the video, “The Waking Nightmare of ICU Delirium”. COVID-19 patients are reporting horrible nightmares invading their minds while partially awake, even though sedated.
These reports are a (last-ditch?) warning note! As our control is lowered, by the symptoms of the virus, or simply by heightened emotions like fear, then we become more subject to horrifying invasions of the mind from “the other side”, i.e. reality. Names like ICU Delirium magically protect us from this horror by creating enough distance for us to “study the object” so to speak. We can even reassure patients that what is going on is simply an instance of the syndrome. Such apotropaic moves (magically warding off the danger) are matched by recent mad advice I saw in another video about COVID induced nightmares, where the speaker endorses methods of simply getting rid of the nightmares:
Thousands of people are having nightmares since the start of the pandemic. Here’s why – and how to get rid of them.
Getting rid of, or denying images of horror, is a move only made possible when a culture denies reality! I am not saying that reality is only a horror but I am saying reality presents many faces to us through the language of dreams, visions, nightmares, according to our receptivity to reality’s “speech” . The nightmares that many people are experiencing with COVD-19 are the face of horror that reality HAS to present to us, in order to get through to us with its essentially life-affirming message. Our utter denial of life and death today as determinative presences, is now probably terminal for our species and we are bringing along most other species with us in our fatal tilt towards annihilation. Nightmares are reality’s way of getting through to us in one last attempt to align us with life and death.
It may well be too late but we can still prepare, even now. Put up a welcome sign for the other who comes every night. Start paying serious attention to your dreams, nightmares, or other “intrusions” into the routine of your life, no matter how bad they seem. Welcome anything that comes. Let the message sink into your vitals. Nothing less is required of us now.
There is no return to normal.
