A psychotic breakdown is almost always preceded by an overload of stress and severe depression ina person’s life, which, as we know, results in excessive REM sleep. We are now convinced that,when people are in psychosis, they are in fact trapped in the REM state, a separate state of consciousness with dreamlike qualities. In other words, schizophrenia is waking reality processedthrough the dreaming brain.To illustrate this, we only have to look at a number of typical schizophrenic behaviours andexperiences and see how they relate to the REM state.Patients in a psychotic state often describe weird relationships with bodily feelings. One said thather legs felt empty: another that her arms didn’t belong to her. This is a well-known REM state phenomenon and is also noted in hypnosis: patients may feel that their bodies are dissolving because, in the dream state, most sensory perceptions about the body are shut out.It is also known that people with schizophrenia are unusually resistant to pain: even more so duringsevere psychotic episodes. One patient jumped out of a second storey window of a hospital, broke both his ankles, and walked to the shops oblivious of the damage he had done — damage thatwould have caused excruciating pain for any person in a normal state of mind.Again, this imperviousness to pain occurs in the REM state while dreaming, as we are cut off fromsensory information. (Anyone who has woken up in agony because a limb, or ear, has been lain onin an unnatural way for a long period during dreaming will recognise this. The pain this causes isonly noticed after you wake up.) It is this fact that is exploited when hypnosis is used for paincontrol or anaesthesia during surgery.Psychotic patients may also talk about hearing voices. In the dream state, which is the province of the right hemisphere of the brain, people are not usually capable of independent thought, the province of the left hemisphere, because the mind is ‘locked’ into the metaphorical script of thedream. But if an individual is trapped in a waking REM state, with waking reality happening aroundthem, there is still likely to be activity in the left hemisphere of the brain.We suggest that, because the REM state operates through metaphor, the only way it could makesense of these independent left brain thoughts would be to create the metaphor of hearing voices, or being watched, or spied upon by aliens — which easily becomes paranoia.The visual illusions or delusions associated with schizophrenia are totally characteristic of thedream state, which generates hallucinatory realities that we believe in unquestioningly for theduration of the dream. Stage hypnotists make use of this when they put subjects into what is ineffect a psychotic state, and induce them to believe that they are someone else or that non-existent people and objects exist.Rapid eye movements are often seen to occur in psychotic states, which, of course, are the definingsign of the REM state. Psychotic patients also very quickly convert thought into sensory experience,with the result that they can become highly emotional almost instantly. When recalling a distressingmemory, for example, they can be instantly transported right back into that memory and re-experience the emotions connected with it. That phenomenon, too, is a characteristic of the dreamstate, when arousals from the emotional brain trigger a thought pattern, in the cortex, which isimmediately converted into a sensory metaphor — the dream.It is not surprising, then, that psychotic patients not only talk in metaphors but live them out, whichexplains their often bizarre speech and behaviour.The REM state, as we have explained, is in effect a reality generator. It creates all kinds of perceptions in our dreams, but these are illusory perceptions — vivid metaphors. One psychotic patient actually described herself as “being trapped in the land of illusion”. Indeed, we know from
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