Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Sleepwalking. (Article 20 of the history of my epilepsy.)


Like probably many epileptics and neurotics, I thought that in my mind, there was a demon, or at least a dark and evil force. However, as my ability, to feel and make connections with  traumas even before birth, has evolved, the only thing I could find has been repressed pain. Sheer pain that was the result of unfulfilled needs that at crucial times hadn’t been met. The pain, either it has been mental or physical, has been there and acted out its inherent power in a symbolic way. It has happened time and again, over decades. Through neurotic unreal needs, in epileptic seizures, in sleepwalking, in elevated blood pressure and high pulse, etc.
For a little child pain, above a certain limit, is unbearable and too much to handle and therefore the mechanisms of repression are nature's survival functions. They give us, however, physiologically no peace but act out their tensions in all possible ailments. This affects  the brain, heart, stomach, liver, kidneys, lungs and wears them out prematurely and shortens life and lowers the quality of it. Due to my suffering from epilepsy, I got strong medication that eliminated the need for other drugs and stimulants, which many for or against their will were forced to take to keep their "demons" in check. At a price, that society may falter.
By having been fortunate enough to have access to the principals of “evolution in reverse”, I have subsequently gained knowledge and become older and stronger to be able to cope  with the pain. In this way, much of my neurotic behavior has dissolved and become comprehensible. There were no demons.
My way out of the uterus was difficult and painful and took much time. Only the birth process in Landskrona BB took 48 hours. This time, however, I have later had to multiply to feel and relive all the pain, terror and panic that the death panic during the birth struggle meant. The sum of the time that my birth and my therapeutic re-experiencing has brought together, however, has been a fraction of the time I have used for decades to find symbolic emergency exits through dreams and nightmares. Many times I have woken up in a cold sweat confused over how, close to madness, I have struggled to get out of the imprinted dilemma in my dreams.
During the years when my defenses, which includes both the intellectual, the physical and the medical, fulfilled their duties, I had occasionally a tendency to walk in my sleep. During these walks, sometimes climbs, I was often looking for an exit. Some of these adventures in sleep walking, somnambulism, were quite dramatic. The drama was similar to that prevailing in my birth. Three occasions, I remember specifically. They have over the years proved an entertainment and attracted much laughter. My own laughter has, in reality been a way to avoid crying.
The most dramatic sleep walk that enters my memory took place in 1977 in Denmark. I worked as a manager of a toy company but had just tied me up for a new project in Sweden. My partner and I had a relaxed evening with some wine and good food followed by sex. I fell happily asleep. I woke up a couple of hours later when I became brought down from a tall oak tree, which I had succeeded, during the sleep walk, to climb with the help of a more than 7 feet high fence. It is quite a performance even for someone awake. I was helped down by my partner, friendly neighbors and called paramedics and was transported to our Regional Hospital in Roskilde.
At the hospital, I was given an injection the same way they had drugged McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) in the movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo Nest. The doctor was not thinking primarily on my well being. He acted robotically and according to the principles upon which to address the mental patients in the early 1900s. His goal was to protect the environment from the effects of an epileptic. If it were to prevent me from falling down and being hurt his behavior was too late. His written report on what occurred was written in an anachronistic, technically oriented manner and I still shudder when I remember the man's total lack of sympathy and mercy. I had not even had a grand mall seizure. I had just gone sleep walking and climbed up a tree and was treated like a fool. Fortunately, I did not have the soul destroying lobotomy surgery that was deemed necessary for McMurphy.
According to his neurological duty, the doctor instructed in writing the Danish Public Prosecutor immediately to cancel my driving license. The police received the decision and sent out a couple of detectives in a few weeks to my home and in the door they asked for my name, which I confirmed, and they formally read out the court order and asked to see my license. The powerful drug injected into me in Roskilde, the day of the sleepwalk, had long since lost its effect and my brain found in a flash a way to pluck the Danish Queens men outside the door, and I gave them an old license, which was no longer valid, which the constables in their haste to fulfill the mission never verified. The sum of all this stupid and inhumane behavior was that my feelings of being an underdog and of being further stigmatized were enhanced. This to my sorrow happened in my old favorite country Denmark.
Next, slightly less dramatic sleepwalking took place almost 20 years later, in 1996 in Frankfurt, Germany (when I still took Tegretol / carbamazepine). I stayed at the Hilton Hotel at the international airport, and between 01 and 03 p.m. I stepped out of my bed and began looking for exits. I left my room on the fourteenth floor only wearing blue shorts, and probably, after first having examined this floor, I took the elevator to the top floor and continued my fruitless searching. Finally, after various lift exercises I ended up in the impressive reception at the bottom floor.
There I stood in my nakedness just wearing small, blue, shorts when I woke up to the receptionist kindly calling my attention. I was surprised but not particularly shocked, not even when she told me about the information which had come from several floors of the hotel regarding my tour. The receptionist got my name and helped me find my room, and I put myself to sleep again. I had an early morning plane to catch and was off on an important meeting. One of our subsidiaries was in a serious situation. Luckily there was no doctor available who was eager to give me a Cuckoo nest treatment against my repressed, epileptic feelings from my birth 56 years earlier.
A third adventure of the sleep walking model occurred during the late winter of the year following the hotel hike in The Fatherland. This time the incident occurred in Ramlösa, where we just had moved and lived right next to a several acre park with a long ravine. It was the same time as last time, at between 01 and 03 P.M.,  (when my dream sleep occurs) I got out of bed and began the search. As often happens when I sleep, I was wearing my blue shorts (from El Corte Inglés in Valencia) and so I walked out of the house. I had no shoes on me, and it was below the freezing point and there was ice on puddles. I walked around the park for 1-2 miles but did not find what I was looking for. Suddenly I met a man who spoke to me, and I remember him vaguely saying that he thought it looked cold ,and he wondered if I froze. I remember that I said no and could not understand the question. Then I woke up and realized I was in the wrong place. It took a little time and effort to find back home because we only recently moved to Ramlösa. Strangely enough I did not freeze, and I did not get a cold afterwards. My body's protective function had done its job. As one of the consequences, of the sleep walk in the park, the front door was locked in such a way that I would not get out without my wife woke up.
Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why the illness was bound to come upon you, and you will perhaps thenceforth avoid falling ill.  Sigmund Freud

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