Coming out of Intensive Care Crazy: Dreams of Affliction

Abstract

The impetus for this article was the author’s experience of illness, necessitating 5 months of hospitalization, 7 weeks of which were spent in a coma in an intensive care unit (ICU). The origins and general characteristics of ICUs are noted. A pastiche of illness narrative is constructed to allow for the author’s own comment on his experience. The intensive care syndrome (ICS), a permeable category, continuing the aftermath of surgery and the social, psychological, mechanical, and pharmaceutical effects of the unit itself, is discussed. Dreams of affliction, a component of the ICS, are explored; the prior sociological history of the neglect of dreams, an essential universal, is also pointed out. The author’s dream forms and their shamanistic parallels are explored. In Foucauldian language, they are considered a product of the fragmentation of the cosmological spirit, whereas the author was a medical object and mechanical appendage. Nursing is in a strategic position to make patients’ dream narratives their own as an aid for understanding illness.