There is something I have suspect for a long time. First, please
check if this phenomena I heard is accurate: These who had been
diagnosed with schizophrenia had boring dream. One that I remember is
all the dreamer seen for the whole night is a blackboard with the
writing ‘MAD MAN’. If this is a common phenomena across the spectrum
of schizophrenia patient, then this help me to formula the ‘Reversal
Theory of Schizophrenia’. (This is and educated guess because I am
EDUCATED!)
How do come to this conclusion? First, assume this is a common
phenomena. Then the problem become how do we interpret this boring
dream. Does boring connotate the term Reality to any of us? Not vivid,
no distortion of object, no plot, not even slightest appearance of
dream logic. Therefore, my conclusion is for some peculiar reason this
patient’s brain is giving him reality, not hallucination.
Reality, by definition of Eric Fromm, is things according to the
objectively existent physical environment. And Dream, is a state which
all sensory input are distorted, or retard-fit into the mysterious
domain of unconscious (thoughts, feelings). In a sense, it is by what
accord our mind processing sensory input? Things on their own accord,
or everything for the needs and wants of me?
Using those definition, I clear see the case for schizophrenia as
the mind REVERSE these two mode of processing, resulted in a distorted
view point of reality. In other words, Schizophrenics are living in
their dream world during the day, and sleeping in Reality!
Of course, this is only a short form of my longer, academic
hypothesis: Due to some unknown reason, part of the
awake-sensory-interpret mechanism start working only after all sensory
input is minimize(the state of sleep), and part of the
dream-like-sensory-interpret mechanism start working while there’s
ample sensory input. This sounds like a mismatch of sensory signal
strength to the stage of consciousness as I suppose the brain use
sensory signal strength to determine what should be the stage of
consciousness.
Another conclusion we could derive from this conclusion is since
dream had such a link with schizophrenia, then the understanding of
mechanism for dreaming is VITAL to understanding of schizophrenia, and
vice versa. Theoretically, we could what we already know about dream
into schizophrenia and see it how it fit or misfit our existing data.
Assume someone dreaming with all his/her sensory input is at waking
level, what will s/he felt like? What will be his/her mental state
like? Does it bear any similarity with schizophrenia?
The drawback of this derivation is: until one day we are crystal
clear about how dream function and what dream is about, then we
probably won’t get very far with our current ‘chemotherapy’ aim at
symptomatology but not its synthesis.
