Word Salad

Psych's got me thinking: how abnormal do you have to be before you becoming pathologic? How messed up do your thoughts have to be before you are commitable? How eccentric is too eccentric? It's interesting to look at each patient and think about the parts of their personalities that are normal, and how the abnormal parts could be consider normal in other circumstances. For example, the bizarre thoughts and ideations of the psychotic patients could sound very similar to the bizarre reality of someone's dreams. I mean, I know in my dreams I can do just about anything, and some of them are completely off the wall. Yet, when I wake up I know they're dreams and that I'm not going to act on them. Sometimes I think I do hear my name when walking down the street, but it doesn't mean I am psychotic or becoming paranoid. Yet, in another person with a different psyche, that's exactly what happens. They act on dreams and become paranoid of nonexistent voices. They believe the dream world is a reality they have to survive. We are somehow incorporated into their worlds, and to us, it's scary. It shows us that our dream worlds could also become a sort of reality if we let them. It opens our eyes to a world we only ever imagined but never thought could be real. It's like Alice falling into the rabbit's hole. It's her reality but it's not the reality of anyone else. In the end, it turned out to be a dream even though it seemed so real to Alice. What happens when we wake these people up to what we consider to be the true reality? To the patients, does it just seem to be an alternate reality? Do parallel universes exist and we just choose the one universe that everyone else seems to be living in? Yet, are these "sick" patients really just living through one of their other parallel universes? And when we medicate them, and make them "better", are we just ripping them from the universe they are in and bringing them back to ours, the "correct" universe? And when they react angrily, should we think we failed or realize the pain involved in being pulled through space and time into a completely different arrangement of thought and ideas? Do they appreciate the tug? Do they want to be dragged back from their higher point of view? Do we really, truly understand what the world is like for them? And if not, why do we expect them to understand and accept our world as their new one?