Sorry. Sorry! mea culpa!!! i meant to introduce this post with this: “David” wrote me with the following essay about his experience,which I promised to post for him on my blog. It follows: 

” I saw Lady Quixote’s story printed out at the Hearing Voices meeting in San Francisco.

“What struck me was how similar was the story she told to my story. When I was a small child I did self hypnosis as a hobby.  Later as a young teen I met a senior citizen from the Unity Church who provided me a lot of books about new-age psychic topics. She talked with me about automatic writing and spirits. I did many of these things in hopes of becoming psychic.

“Through my high-school years I continued to be interested in these things but only when the college experience overwhelmed me did I become preoccupied with the voices in my head.  I would look for guidance in things as simple as where to walk.  Since walking to class was a prerequisite to attending class, if I was guided instead to walk in the woods, I failed at college.

“In addition, throughout my psychic explorations there were instances where there were definite connections between my mind and the rest of the world.  Although the number of true experiences were far less frequent than the imagined ones, they reinforced my beliefs.

“After I returned to my parents’ home I had the typical delusional experience of believing that there was a direct connection between the universe and what I was thinking and hearing in my head.  Unfortunately what I was hearing was based on what I thought abut myself and as I spiraled downward, I was told that I had to kill myself.

“After getting out of the hospital and the halfway house with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, I returned to my parents’ home.  A few years went by with little change but I began to doubt the veracity of my voices and found that I could dismiss or ignore them.   They eventually faded away into the benign parade of inner thoughts.

“The thing that struck me after thinking about Lady Quixote and me is that there are some states of mind called schizophrenia that would better be described as suggestibility.  In the old days folks like us were seen as having been possessed by demons, and perhaps the exorcisms actually worked when the people believed strongly enough in prayer and calling on Jesus to drive the demons out.

“I think that it is a shame that this type of diagnosis has not been made by treaters because it would be helpful to folks to understand that they can be liberated from their troubles in a much more straightforward way, as  Lady Quixote was.

“Because, like her, I had some actual experiences that could be classified as psychic, having a diagnosis that labeled my inner thoughts as strictly delusional confounded matters.  The psychiatric community does not acknowledge that some of us have to deal with both real experiences and our overactive imaginations. They are trained in the practice of science, which is opposed to the various phenomena we call metaphysics.

“I am happy that my inexplicable experiences usually involve rather mild, not very intrusive thoughts, as opposed to noisy voices.  I try to practice good mental hygiene to keep the inner critic mostly at bay and avoid overstressing myself.  It has been about 40 years since I was troubled with my inner voices.

David”