Boy having a seizure

Dreams Unfolding

I’m back stage at a high school concert band performance and suddenly the music stops.  The musicians leave the stage but as they pass I am unable to figure out what the interruption is about.  No one seems particularly concerned. I work against the stream until I arrive where the conductor is kneeling next to a boy having a seizure.  The conductor looks to me and simply says “Epileptic.”

my response:

While I do not have any personal relationships to the disease of epilepsy, I do have associations through literature.  In the writing of Dostoevsky, I’ve always been fascinated by his attribution of the clarity, the “eyes” he would gain directly preceding the seizure.  Prince Myshkin in the Idiot describes the onset of a seizure with an ecstatic aura.  ’He was thinking, incidentally, that there was a moment or two in his epileptic condition almost before the fit itself (if it occurred in waking hours) when suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments….His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning.  His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light.  All his agitation, doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of understanding…but these moments, these glimmerings were still but a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) with which the seizure itself began.  That second was, of course, unbearable.’ 

Dostoevsky credited his insights into the meaning of things which he wove through his novels to the sight that was one of the symptoms of his disease.  The ancient world was attuned to this as well, honoring many who were burdened with the seizures as seers.  

The other association that comes up for me in relationship to this dream image is Melville’s Pip, who goes mad in Moby Dick after believing he was abandoned in the sea after jumping from a whale boat. Of Pip’s ‘holy’ sight, as Ahab noted: “I do suck most wonderful philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!” 

In Jungian typology, one of the four psychological functions is intuition. These reflections reveal intuition pushed to it’s extreme.  One of the challenges of my path these days: wrestling with identification to the intuitive function, my primary function.  The performance of the dream, and its of note that its a musical and not a dramatic performance, has the conductor pointing out to me the source of the intuitive eyes.  While intuition, like feeling, thinking and sensation, is a tool of the ego, it’s source comes from elsewhere.