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3:55pm December 11, 2011

Dreams out of nowhere

I just had a dream that I came from a culture (in the USA but not the mainstream culture) that had these public festivals from time to time. And one of the things that happened while I was attending one, was that two people who’d had prolonged contact with the psych system got up and talked about their lives. One had been diagnosed with severe chronic depression, the other with severe chronic schizophrenia. Both had really struggled to stay alive. And the whole point of this part of the festival was to show both of them, who had been given very little hope from mainstream society’s standpoint, that their entire community was backing them and would do everything possible to assist them with anything they had trouble with, for as long as they needed it. And that anyone else in similar situations could expect the same. And somehow disabled people in general, from our culture, managed to fare a lot better than disabled people in the USA in general.

I don’t know where these dreams come from. When I was 14 and had just been in a mental institution I had an elaborate and fairly realistic dream about a large network of safehouses for helping people who wanted out of institutions in general. Despite the fact that I had no conscious conception of what an institution was in general, the dream managed to include every kind of disability institution as well as the foster system. (In the dream, in fact, the whole thing was explained to me by a girl in our house who had been rescued from the foster system long before I’d been rescued from the psych system.) The house I’d come to worked in a way where everyone’s abilities were complementary (and duplicated) so we could assist each other without the need for the huge power imbalances that crop up when you have a hierarchy of staff over clients. People could stay as long or as short as we needed to. The whole thing was somehow secret enough the system wouldn’t find us, and yet known enough to really help people get out of terrible situations.

In both of these instances I’ve never even thought of the possibility of anything resembling these things, let alone planned them out as thoroughly as they came out in the dreams. It’s really strange to just have dreams like this out of nowhere.