You see a vision of the firebird, spreading fire across the world

You are out of your body as you get messages from higher life forms, no self to rely on

You remember the details of a past life, then another

You access the gears and wheels of heaven, tasked to run heavenly affairs from earth

You are stuck in a deep horrific hell in your hallway, replete with tortures and defilements

You are always dying and your sense of stable identity is annihilated at each moment.

There is nowhere to stand.

Your mind has ways of assessing the importance and meaning of events. Psychosis hijacks all of them. Even after it leaves, a residue around your memories remains -- that sickly sweet call of psycho-nostalgia: "Maybe it meant something. Maybe it meant something."

This is the Dreaming.

I've heard but am not convinced that the psychotics functioned as shamans in an idealized past. Maybe our ancestors saw some value in the Dreaming. Maybe they perceived that some people were predisposed to liminal states, where they could intercede with the dead or make new, meaningful stories. But maybe a neurotypical who merely pretends to experience liminal states or uses substances would be a more stable pick.

Psychosis is such an inward turned and inexplicable state of being. Have you ever tried describing a dream to someone else? It's like that: "No, like that but more transcendency. More 'upness'" and so on. The phenomenology of madness is wide and varied. Voices call you to participate in an inward-facing loop. In my experience, you become inured to the outside world, which I imagine would interfere with any hypothetical shamanic duties, at least until the end of the episode.

Is our society set up in a way that supports madness? No, but for me it's hard to imagine how to go about that. Madness isn't the softness that it is sometimes implied to have at its center. Some advocates argue that psychiatry is a prison and a better environment is all that's needed to bring out a different experience. But my experience revokes that. I had as much support and care as I can imagine anyone having, and my madness still took its toll on those I love. Isolation, verbal abuse when delusional, and even violence. All things I would never do "sober." Involuntary psychiatric care, regardless of its flaws, was the only backstop that worked.

So what is the weight of a psychotic episode (in this case over a staggering three months)? All of the experiences listed at the start occurred during this period—and more. And they call me. Now sober many months, I am still haunted by the premise: "Did it mean something?" Even recollecting these experiences is enough to trigger a meaningfulness cascade of sorts, the end result of which is a dull longing. A longing for the state which nearly destroyed my marriage—my life.

Is this what the shaman does? Go into a trance for many days and become untouchable? Perform amorphous spiritual labor and come away with hard-to-understand stories to tell? Is the value of these stories self-evident to the community? Is the erratic, even violent psychotic the best choice for the job? Is this what Saul knew in the depths of his madness—that he would be replaced by David, pure, stable, untouched by sorrow? Is this the Dreaming?

Or are we all stuck in the longing, hoping--trying to imagine some way that these experiences make sense, that this Dream has meaning.

Perhaps these experiences touch the divine. I don't know if there is a God, but I long for him. A dull ache that drips with the desire for meaningfulness.

I don't know if there's any meaning in the Dreaming, but I want there to be. Yet I pray that I never go back.