The power of a song

I had a two horrible dreams as a very young child. I had them both in the space of a year somewhere between age three and four. I have spoken of them to a select few, and I don't wish to delve into them at this time. But they have left me quite shaken to this day. I have always had very powerful, realistic, creative dreams that serve well to confound what one might expect of children. Now as an adult, they are fairly normal. But the things my mind has invented of its own still astonish me. This is meaningless back story, but it hinges on this point. During one of these dreams, a song was playing on the radio and I since get a visceral, sick feeling when I hear songs like it. Namely songs in a minor key. It brings the emotions from both of these dreams to mind.

This is one of those songs.



The lyrics don't help it. But I adore it.

In middle school, when I really started listening to music, a song became popular. I'm sure you've heard it.



It wasn't just when I started listening to music, but it was around the time I reached sentience. Now, I call it sentience, but what I really mean is that I started truly interacting with the world around me. It's hard to explain. My place in the world felt different then. Maybe it was just puberty. I don't fucking know. Anyways, this song. I remember the first time I heard it. I was lying on my bed and this horrifying, gut wrenching, sickening sorrow washed over me. This horrible, awful dream that I'd certainly never forgotten was suddenly as real as it had ever been. But this emotion was so present that I couldn't help but pick at it and feel it again. I could have avoided it, this reaction and the source of it, but I didn't. I listened to that song till it dulled. It's been a few years since I've played it, and it's fresh again. Raw and terrible and wonderful.

Back to Mumford and Sons.

Thank FSM for the satellite radio my husband decided to purchase. My mental radio was stuck in 1997 (with some precious exceptions). It's a good place to be stuck, but man is there some good stuff coming out now. And this song. It's like the ballad of the depressed. And here we come to the point of this post. The other day, Neuroskeptic made a post that I'm certainly not qualified to truly discuss. But I commented anyways, as I've begun to do occasionally. Read what he says

But take a look at the very next sentence:

A tendency to blame yourself and feel guilty can transmute into depression.

Now this sounds much more plausible. The very influential cognitive-behavioural accounts of depression propose that self-critical tendencies are a major risk factor for depression. Even if you're not familiar with CBT, you'll recognize that depressed people tend to blame themselves and feel guilty or inadequate all the time. That's got to be their underlying problem, right? It's common sense.

Followed closely by

I think it's because when you're depressed, you seek psychological explanations all the time: depressed people worry, ruminate and obsess endlessly about their "problems", and think that what they're feeling is a normal response to them. Of course I'm depressed, who wouldn't be in my situation?

This makes it very easy for psychologists to come along and offer a reappraisal which is in fact only slightly different: you're looking at things too negatively. Things aren't really as bad as you think, it's not really your fault, things really can and will improve. This is, certainly, often very helpful, and it's almost always true - because things generally aren't as bad as you think they are when you're depressed. Depression makes you see things negatively, just as mania makes you see them positively. That's kind of the point.

But this cognitive approach implicitly accepts the depressive notion that depression would have been an appropriate response to what you thought your situation was. It says that your feelings of depression were based on a mistake, but it does not dispute that depression is a healthy emotional state.

I think this is a tricky issue. There's discussion right now about the DSM V and about removing the bereavement exception to depression. For those who don't know, there's a bereavement exception to depression. Namely, if your loved one just died, you're supposed to go through this life-altering sadness. It's normal. I completely agree. But there must be a limit. Following are the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder, highlighting the aforementioned exceptions.

Feelings of guilt not related to the loved one's death
Thoughts of death other than feelings he or she would be better off dead or should have died with the deceased person
Morbid preoccupation with worthlessness
Sluggishness or hesitant and confused speech
Prolonged and marked difficulty in carrying out the activities of day-to-day living
Hallucinations other than thinking he or she hears the voice of or sees the deceased person.

My father died of cancer. Why should I have felt guilty?
I was nine. Why should I have thought I was better off dead?
What about losing a parent makes hearing or seeing said parent acceptable when the same experiences involving anyone else would get me locked away?

I think it's absolutely normal for all of these things to happen. Death affects us profoundly. It should. Life is important. It's literally everything. Without it, we simply cease to exist. Consciousness is the only interface we have with a universe that will never remember us and may have already forgotten countless generations through phases of expansion and contraction, making, destroying, and remaking itself. Our existence is less than a breath in the grand scheme of things, and yet it matters so very much because we're here to live it. To die cannot hurt because existence ceases. But to lose someone to that blackness, to The Nothing, that is the source, the very essence of pain.

For the record, when my father died, I did feel guilty. Because of another dream I had. When I was in hmm second grade? Anyways, a year or so before my father was diagnosed, I got lost in a store. I wasn't very lost, but I became very upset. I found a clerk and we called my parents over the intercom. All was well. I was still very upset. Chalk it up to clinical overreaction, eh? That night I had a terrible nightmare. I was chased around caves by a dinosaur, a sauropod of one sort or another. I startled awake. It wasn't over. I then heard the terrifying sounds of great, tromping steps coming down the hall of our 3/2 ranch with addition. When I dared open my eyes, there was the shadowy figure of said sauropod right there in my doorway. HOMG SCARY! But I was a sciency kid. I knew dinosaurs were extinct. So I got up and turned on the light (the switch was right next to said shadowy sauropod). And POOF! gone.

But whatever was eating at my brain wasn't done with me yet. The next night, I had another dream. This one featured Kirk Cameron (before the world I knew he was crazy, come on, this was 1990ish) and a big, horrible, scary monster with a large head and loads of spikes all over him. Awful thing. The dream was really terrifying. Then I woke up. Guess what happened? Guess what didn't happen? Now I know dinosaurs are extinct, but even in my budding rational mind, monsters lived in the shadow of possible. There are no records of monsters, therefore they cannot be extinct, therefore one might be coming to get me!! The house had a weird addition on it, and so my bedroom had a sliding glass door that led to my parents bedroom and office. They had bookshelves backed up to this door, but there was enough space for a small, terrified blonde child to sneak through. And sneak I did. Shoop! into bed between them. But, and this is the worst part, it wasn't over. The monster followed me to that door. And he stood there. Waiting. And when I fell back to sleep, he sneaked back into my dreams.

The setting was that very bedroom. My mother on my left and my father on my right. The horrible monster stabbed my father in the leg as he slept and he bled out. The blood filled the floor and came right up to the edge of the mattress. I have, thankfully, mostly forgotten what the monster looked like --other than shadowy death-- but I never forgot the dread I felt. It wasn't until a few years ago that I dared to tell anyone, and then only my mother. She had the reaction you would expect. And, certainly, I know and knew then that getting lost in the store does not warrant such punishment as the death of one's parents. When I told her, really, my concern was more that I had foreknown that we would lose him. But that, too, is silly.

Now, this sounds like a night terror, but it wasn't. I could clearly move. I don't know how to classify or explain these hallucinations (and that's surely what they were when the dreams entered reality). I've never experienced them again. And I hope it stays that way.

I did not wish to be dead when my father died. I also didn't think I saw or heard him. I was depressed, but not exceptionally more than I had been prior. It wasn't later (though I don't know how long) that I lost my smile. I certainly do smile now, but not consistently, and not the way I used to. I've said before, I am covered with a wet blanket. For clarity, I am not a wet blanket, I'm just punished of one. This post has traveled far from where it started, but I promise I'm near arriving at the point. Something inside of me is susceptible to The Grim. It gnaws on me. The Nothing waits at my door, waiting to envelope me. Nothing I do changes that, nor does any action or inaction on my part allow them in. But sometimes things I do deepen the despair when they've gotten in. I can listen to Little Lion Man and enjoy the song and feel fantastic. Or I can listen to it and feel myself falling from some long-gone emotional cliff. I guess what I'm getting at is this. Depression seems like something we should be able to control. Just stop wallowing! If only the wallowing had anything to do with it at all. But it doesn't. It really doesn't. And I wish more people understood that, mental health professionals included.