The Strange Thing a Person With Schizophrenia and Bipolar Dreams of While War Rages On in The Ukraine

Be Sure To Read the Last Paragraph to Learn How to Control Your Dreams

Cold War Dreaming:

Good morning readers. It is 5:25 am and I just woke up. As per usual, I had a disturbing dream. This one was interesting though, so I thought I would share it in the hopes that someone with knowledge of dream meanings could give me feedback

First of all, during the Cold War that ended when the Soviet Folded, I used to have a lot of bad dreams. Now, whenever a war flares up that relates to Canada, I get ‘War’ dreams, and this morning was no exception.

I forget how some of the dream started, but it seemed I was in a class of some sort. It was near the now reclaimed land our municipal airport used to sit on. They are building houses there and there is an aviation museum and gathering place for large sales and such. In the dream, for some reason, my teacher was laughing and joking about small planes. I kind of took offence to this having been formerly a student pilot who loved flying small planes. She then said something to the effect that she only thought it was funny because it was so rare to hear them overhead.

So Now the Critical Part of the Dream Came

I dreamed about a jet plane. Not just any jet plane, but an old Korean War era jet. My old Air Cadet Squadron used to have one, or a shell of one as a monument, with our squadron numbers on it. I start to realize I am dreaming when I see jets in my dreams. My Dad told me that when Denmark was enslaved by the Nazis in WWII, the sky went dark with planes overhead. So now when I dream about WWIII, I dream about planes. But now there was just one.

As the teacher or group leader said, it was rare to see a plane there, so I took careful notice of this jet. The pilot flew past where I was, then flew past us really low. I could see that he was missing part of a wing and was in trouble. Still, somehow, the pilot was able to come in for what looked like a smooth landing, and then did a touch and go. This is when your wheels touch the runway, but you add power and take off again. The plane then circled around and crashed right in front of me without exploding.

This is where curiosity got the best of me and, knowing he was dead, I went to look at the pilot. He was still moving a little, but after the way his plane crashed, I knew he was dead. Other people from the class came to look too, and I tried to shoo them away. Then there was my bully from junior high. He was much taller and larger from me and from experience I knew he was mean and aggressive. But I did everything I could to keep him from seeing the body, even locking him in the classroom and running around to make sure he did exit another way.

All this may seem just a little strange, but I am thinking that of course, once again I am afraid of a global war, that is obvious. But I am also thinking I am having problems with self-esteem and the loss of my Mom. I think the dead body was partly a symbol of the last moments I spent with my Mom when she was taken off life support. I didn’t want the bully to see because it was a personal, family thing (even if I still considered him a pilot-pilots are a very cliquish bunch).

Taking Charge of Your Dreaming

I would encourage my readers to write down their dreams and if they have a psychiatrist, to talk about some of the more vivid or upsetting ones. As per usual, I also suggest people keep a journal, which is a great place to keep dream content, and that they write down everything they want to discuss with their doctor when they see them and, if they are unable to talk about anything, at least give your doctor the note. The funny thing is, once I was a formal patient for 6 months in a psych hospital, and one day I went to the computer room, typed up a list of what I wanted from my doctor, then printed it up and the doctor for some reason was very amazed that I was able to use a computer and printer and even asked for a copy of the note to show my nursing staff. Though I had a very tough go of things that hospital visit, after I saw that doctor it was few short weeks until I was able to leave.

I just want to say one last thing about dreaming. I learned once that if you want to control your dreams, fly and all that, all you have to do is ask yourself five times a day, “Am I dreaming?” Soon you will be able to tell whether you are dreaming just by using your senses. As that happens, you will be able to take control of your dreams because asking yourself that will increase your dream awareness.

Interesting Things About Dreams and Schizophrenia, Bipolar and Schizoaffective disorder

Dreams. There are different kinds. There are day dreams we all have of the ideal, perfect life, of accomplishing our goals. Then there are the dreams we have when we close our eyes and sleep. I would like to talk a little about both today.

As far as accomplishing our goals or dreams, many of us feel that one day we will get to our goals, that there is plenty of time. The truth is, this is one of the worst ways to approach something you want to accomplish. What a person needs to do is to have written, set goals/dreams that they can take immediate steps towards accomplishing. One of my dreams is to travel, especially to the UK and maybe to Mexico. My main barrier right now is Covid-19. I don’t even know if I went to the UK if I would be able to come back. That actually might not be such a bad thing as I have distant relations there but part of my set, written dreams is to be able to go visit somewhere and return to everything I need without having gone bankrupt. When I was 19 I did this kind of travelling, and I admit it was fun and there was a sense of freedom to it, but I ended up in dire straits in the middle of California one time and it took everything I had to get back (I had no money, it took my health, my sanity, and my physical well being).

So what I am left with now is the strong desire to travel but not the ability. What I have been doing over the past months is saving all that I can. It is becoming a fair bit, and I have heard of people travelling the whole world with less. One of the cool things is that now I have finally taught myself how to save, it isn’t hard at all to adjust my spending to have an excess I can depend on. For anyone who finds this idea interesting, I strongly recommend a very short book, maybe 110 pages called “The Richest Man in Babylon” by Richard S. Clason. This book will give you all the knowledge you need to set goals, build a stable life, work harder and invest wisely.

The other kind of dreams I wanted to talk about are the ones we have when we sleep. I have always been fascinated with sleep and what it is like to go without it. (During my California mishap, I went as much as five days without sleeping or eating). When I finally did grab a small chance to sleep, I konked out but woke myself up and then slowly drifted back to sleep and was actually hallucinating.

If you have bad dreams, possibly because of trauma, I do have some advice for you. I have to give the credit to a guy named Carl Murphy who I knew many years ago. I was over at his house and was sleeping and had a bad dream. He came to see if I was okay, and when he saw I was fine, he gave me a multivitamin. I took it, and for some reason I didn’t have bad dreams again that night.

Over the years, I have learned a lot of little tricks for insomnia or bad dreams. Insomnia can often be treated with warm milk with a little sugar in it to remove the bitterness of warming it up, along with a banana. Another trick I have learned regarding dreams is that if you ask yourself five or six times a day if you are currently dreaming, you train your mind to automatically check if you are dreaming, and when you actually are and you do that automatic check, you realize you are in fact dreaming and you get the ability to control your dreams.

This ability is called lucid dreaming, and is interesting because I just read that people who have lucid dreams actually display the same type of brainwaves that people in psychosis have. Just by itself this may seem like a useless bit of trivia, but I personally find it amazing when breakthrough knowledge is discovered about schizophrenia and psychosis. Lucid dreaming can be taught, and it can also be forgotten about. What if this new knowledge actually teaches us how to modify, improve, better deal with or even eliminate psychosis in patients with schizophrenia? Myself, I would like to see it happen, and am encouraged when I hear that things like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can train people with schizophrenia to better deal with the symptoms of their illness.

Merry Christmas Dear Readers, and a very Happy New Year!

LG

Are There Alternatives to Psychiatric Medication?

 

What a beautiful summer day to lie in the grass and watch a soccer game. When I was younger, I really didn’t factor in the fact that your body decays (in most people) as you get older. I had read a few articles about people in their 80s running marathons, and athletes having comebacks at 50. I started to decline a long time ago, and it likely had to do a lot more with my bull-headedness not wanting to listen to advice like not running in excess of 5 miles, not running on pavement, getting proper shoes for every type of exercise. That was the beginning, I destroyed my knees at the age of 20 years old. But what really got to me was not just this disability, it was also the medications I took. They made me drowsy, lazy. They made my hands shake and messed with my balance. Getting through this was one of the more difficult times of my life. I was good at a few sports as a youngster, I was a decent basketball player, but for all of my teen years I was a smoker which made this nearly impossible. I also loved to play pool, going to the pool hall every morning instead of the second half of my Law 30 class. I dreamed about one day having a pool table at home, and I think I could have been on my way. But medications derailed me. What could I do?

Medications have gotten better since then, and I even know of a few people who take what I do and it works for them and also their hands don’t shake at all. I really don’t ever want to recommend people to go off medication, but there are instances where a person can be on too much, a Doctor can usually spot this in a moment. This is why sometimes it is useful to get a second opinion, especially when you find your medication side effects debilitating. My mom, near the end of her life, was on a lot of medications, but my parents put a lot of faith in her psychiatrist. It hurts to think she could have had a better mental state or a better quality of life if she had been on less. One thing I want to emphasize is that in her final years, she would never miss a psychologist’s appointment because in her mind and my dad’s, that was the only treatment that helped anything.

There are two sides to this coin, one is that I have encountered (and I am no therapist or doctor) studies that said therapy alone is better than medication alone. Of course as I said, I don’t recommend going off meds, but if you can somehow combine your treatment there are chances of feeling better than you are now and any time healthy means you are headed towards a time when new and ‘better’ medication can be developed. My former Psychiatrist, an amazing man named Bishop, whenever I asked about a new medication he would say that what I had was working well, he didn’t like tinkering with people who were doing well, but left it up to me, emphasizing the question, “do you want to take a chance at going back where you were?” Well, for me that was no option. Last time before I saw that doctor that I had been in the hospital I was in a terrible state, being beligerent and abusive, deluded into thinking the world revolved around me and having people respond in kind with everything from flat out insults and threats to a severe beating from a guy who didn’t like the way I crossed the street. No, I did not want to go back there.

Some time later, with a doctor that my old doctor recommended, a decision was made to try a newer medication, and I got very ill and spent a month in the hospital–after I had worked so incredibly hard to build my life back and show stability and such. All at once I was delusional and paranoid to the extreme again. Sadly, this is something anyone with a mental illness must come to expect and prepare for. For more information, look into something called “The Wellness Recovery Action Plan” or WRAP. They have an app for phones that allow you to outline things like trigger warnings, ways to help with symptoms and more. The app is based on a course that I found very helpful, and attribute my quick recovery from the relapse of my condition too. It also helped that I had gained a great deal of knowledge about my condition, perhaps mostly by being a part of the Schizophrenia Society.

So, today’s blog is getting pretty long, I will sum things up and try to explain more in a future blog. First off, look into funding or affordable therapy. In Edmonton there are even free therapists as I am sure you can find in any major Canadian city. You drop in, fill out a form, and wait and see someone confidentially who is qualified. But this is a quick fix. When you find you care stable enough, I recommend things like the WRAP course and others, but I also recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Just as a warning though, I believe they state that it takes a commitment of around 16 (if I remember correctly) sessions to read benefits. If you are having any problems finding resources, please email me and I will see if I can help connect you. Look for services you are insured for, and also for services operated on a sliding scale. I once spoke to a hospital counsellor after my mom passed and she wanted me to pay $20 or $30 a session, not so much because she needed the money, but she wanted to make sure I was able to commit and consider my treatment a priority.

I will just sum up and say, if you are having mental health difficulties, first try and contact your psychiatrist, then any psychiatrist, then a medical doctor, learn all you can about your illness, get active in learning (books) and groups (Wrap and many others). Find out all you can about your medications, then find out about counselling. And don’t worry if you seem to take one step forward and two back in your mental health journey, we all have good days and bad days.

Leif Gregersen

viking3082000@yahoo.com

Link to my first memoir:

Through the Withering Storm

 

Second Mental Health Blog Video

The Trap of Mental Illness and Disability Benefits: Do You Want To Risk It?

               A View of Downtown Edmonton From Outside My New Apartment

     Hi, I wanted to talk a little about disability benefits today.  This is a senstive topic for many reasons.  One of the big ones, as I know a good deal of my readers are from the United States, is that people on Welfare or even Social Security Benefits are looked down upon.  The tax burden on Americans is great, plus the cost of health care and this ends up worsening the problem from both ends.  People with mental illnesses are faced with costs that can’t be managed for medications, hospital treatment, doctors, housing and on and on.  The way the American system seems to be set up to work is that each person is responsible for themselves, and when someone has a severe mental illness, this can be just about impossible.  I can recall being in the US and simply knowing a guy who applied for foodstamps and then discussing it with an older gentleman and he literally stopped talking to me after we had travelled together for 3 days.  It seemed a harsh judgement and pretty ignorant, but this is the way many people down there think and there are valid reasons for this attitude.  I feel very fortunate to live in Canada and to have a disability benefit program plus health care and on top of that I get heavily subsidized housing and free fitness and leisure access.  It almost seems like paradise, but it definitely has its drawbacks.  One of them is that if I do go out and get a job, I have to limit my income to less than a minimum wage job or lose my benefits completely.  With the cost of psychiatric medications this would be a staggering blow.  At the present point I’m at I don’t honestly know if I could hold down a full-time job for any length of time, but I also don’t want to live the rest of my life with no improvements in my standard of living.

Some 27 years ago I found myself in a homeless shelter, mentally ill and penniless due to prolonged hospital admissions.  There were very few options left for me and so I made an application to join the military.  This would have provided me health benefits, an income, and a purpose in my life.  My application process was interrupted by a fight with my dad that sent me to the shelter, and I decided that since I was working towards something that I could do something I thought was unthinkable-I would apply for welfare benefits.  I will never forget the words of the social worker when I applied, as she looked up from the forms she was filling out for me, “Don’t get caught in the trap.”  I think she meant more along the lines of the trap of drug abuse or alcoholism and circle of poverty.  But whatever she meant, due to my mental illness, I was never able to join the military, and I later failed a concerted attempt to complete commercial pilot school, and was unable to hold down a full-time job.  For me the trap wasn’t in getting money for nothing, it was in that every time I tried to do something, either I was told I was ineligible as a person with a mental illness, or that I would try and do a job set before me and the incredible pressure of working up to acceptable standards was simply too much.  I was caught in a trap, and in some ways I still am.

Things are improving in my life though, I have found a part-time job that I am good at and that I enjoy.  I give talks to students about mental illness for the Schizophrenia Society, and I have written a number of books.  The books give me little income, but together I manage to put food on the table.  One thing I often think about is that despite that numerous times I went over the brink into madness, I now have a good life with stable housing and income and something to do, but I have a lot of regret that I have no life partner.  This is another trap that people with mental illnesses have to be aware of, the isolation factor, and it has a lot to do with receiving benefits.  If you don’t have to force yourself to get up and get out and look for work, you may just sit inside and watch TV and never care if you have friends or a significant other, and years will fly past and a person will have nothing but regrets.  One of the reasons that people end up isolated like this besides recieving benefits is that there is a lot of stigma surrounding mental illness.  One thing with me is that I used to try and hide the fact that I have a diagnosed illness, but now I am very forward about it.  So many people, when you stop trying to hide things, will tell you they suffer, they have a family member or close friend that suffers.

Anyhow, a lot of that is beside the point I was trying to make.  How do you avoid the trap that going on benefits causes?  You may not be able to, but you can make your life as full as possible.  I always like to say that the first thing you need to do with a mentally ill person is get them proper treatment, proper medications.  Then you need to take some therapy that will help you understand yourself.  After that, a life skills course or Wellness Recovery Action Plan course can help a great deal.  From there, even if it just means taking one course, get some school under your belt.  While you are doing this, find ways to keep fit and healthy, in what you do with your body and what you put in it.  Quit smoking if you smoke.  Then, try and find work, even part-time.  Spend as little as possible, and save, and keep taking your medications, work on your mental health on an ongoing basis, and before you know it, you may forget you ever were sick.  It isn’t an easy process, and it isn’t a simple one, but it is one that is worthwhile.  I like to keep telling people that you need to have goals and direction, specific ones.  “I want a bachelor’s degree in six years.” would be an excellent one.  “I want to be stabilized and back working in two years, earning enough to drive a car and rent my own apartment.” is another good one.  Once you have goals, you have a direction to move in, and if you are having a hard time, you can end up feeling so much better about yourself from just working a little bit each day towards your goal.  Take care Dear Readers!