Here’s Part 2 of a piece of flash fiction about a Jungian analyst, a desperate young man, and digging too deep into the unconscious. This second part is very short, only about 230 words and has an estimated reading time of 1 minutes. Let me know what you think!
About a year ago, I got a call in the middle of the night. It was Peter, calling from a psychiatric ward in lower Manhattan. He sounded terribly distressed.
“I just can’t do it anymore,” he said. “The pain is … it’s overwhelming.”
When he returned home, I asked that he see me immediately. It was then that we tried something different in therapy. I knew about the efficacy of EMDR, but I was not a specialist in that. And I doubted if Peter could afford a professional who offered those services. So, I decided to ask Peter about his dreams.
Dream psychology has always been an interest of mine, though I’ve used it rarely in my practice. I was doing an experiment, but it was a dangerous one. At first, it seemed to be going well. Peter kept a dream journal, and we’d decipher their meanings. He started to improve and do his own independent studies of dream psychology.
But it didn’t last. The dreams became stranger, more violent. I feared that psychosis was imminent. So, we slowed things down, or at least I tried. But unbeknownst to me, Peter was digging too deep into his unconscious.
He began experimenting with psychedelics and modern shamanism. He said it was helping, but he seemed more frazzled than ever. Thus, there was more psych ward stays and, finally, a suicide attempt.
To Be Continued
