Dimensions
Chattering, whispers, sometimes benign, sometimes malevolent. Disordered thought, tangential ideas, and delusions of grandeur, persecution and paranoia. This piece focuses on what it is to experience psychosis, but more importantly what it is not: it is not split personality, it can exist in otherwise 'normal' people, and it does not give rise to a culture of violent people, unable to function or be connected to the 'real' world.
Director: Andy Glynne
Voice: Chas
Animation Director: Rob Chiu
Music: D.O.S.C.
Transcript
Initially the experiences were quite positive.
I was living outside consensus reality….You know a very heightened sense of awareness... Umm kind of delusions of grandeur which are quite pleasant…
So I’d open up a newspaper and I’d think it would all refer to me. if I was listening to the radio in the car I’d assume that the DJ was talking directly at me and that every song had a message to myself and at one stage I was experiencing reality as if the whole of London was under a 100 metres of water which was pretty extreme.
It was a pretty strange reality to be in. A very distressing one was experiencing… umm… a nuclear fall out I mean for me nuclear bombs had gone off I was feeling radiation. I was feeling radiation sickness and this kind of thing happened several times. I mean the first voices I started hearing a lot of was my family so my Mother, Sister, Brother, Father, but later on they were very persecutory that wasn’t pleasant and it wasn’t something I wanted to continue. I do find it amazing the power of the human brain that it can recreate you know 10, 20 voices perfectly. I mean the voices were very distressing the, the, the impression is they were encouraging me to self harm or commit suicide. They were getting pretty nasty. I remember writing in my Journal God I could never imagine the old normal reality coming back I suppose taking on some of the medical interpretation that this is psychosis gave me some more options to get out of a very unpleasant situation.
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