Perhaps the most disturbing espisodes of all are those of having visions, hearing voices, or having extended spontaneous reveries. These can be creative and enhancing, but they are often negative or even suicidal. You may be left shaken and confused. The voices may deliver ultimatums or instructions that raise the question of whether they should be followed. Because thee experiences carry an authority, as if from a power outside yourself, they can be deeply disturbing.
I am often asked in my workshops what to do about the instructions delivered by vision or voices or in extended reveries. If you are frightened and worried, you should report the episodes to your neurologist. Some change in medication may eliminate these episodes entirely. If you find them disturbing but interesting and perhaps of value to your life, then you can addres them in a variety of ways. A psychotherapist who is fluent in dream imagery and symbols will be immensely helpful.
First, ask yourself if teh instructions indicate a course of action that in the cool light of reason you want to take. Then, look at teh instructions not so much literally as metaphorically. For example, if you feel suicidal during an extended reverie, ask yourself if there is something in your life you want to be free of. Treat suicide as a metaphor, not as an imperative.
Not every voice speaks from fear and negativity.
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Behavioral neurologist tend to reduce these experiences to their neurological basis in the temporal loves and the limbic areas of the brain. Initially they called such experiences psychomotor and temporal lobe epilepsy and now call them complex partial seizures Because thesse seizures lie in the borderland between epilepsy and mental illness they are now being called temporal limbic syndrome or TLS. It is difficult for people trained in scientific, materialist modern medicine to deal positively with these varieties of epileptic experience.
My own view is to value the experience, to treat it as a dream for its symbolic and metaphorical meaning and posible personal direction, and divest it of fear and anxiety. Often when this kind of experience is addressed, it does not recur.
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Although the strange experiences discussed here are commonly part of certain types of seizures, they are not exclusively the province of epilepsy. Othere people have them, too, even though they do not have seizures. They do not prove that you are crazy, nor are they necessarily undesirable events, even though they are beyond our society's usual bouncaries. An appropriate openness to and examination of these experiences can lead to a real enhancement of your self-concept. You may be able to discover and alleviate deeply entrenced fears that have limited your growth and mental outlook.
But i still know how to stop them, 