Dreamy States and Cosmic Wanderings

Abstract

The medical model attributes religious and spiritual experiences in epilepsy to delusional or hallucinatory events, sometimes diagnosed as a form of ictal psychosis with its causation lying in epileptic symptomatology. Individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy rarely discuss experiences with medical professionals, fearing judgment and pathologization. I problematize understanding these experiences in a strictly biomedical manner. A medical case study is replaced by autoethnographic narrative to describe and analyze spiritual experiences from a nonmedical perspective. This approach emphasizes the phenomenology of the experience and its meaning for the life of the experient. Themes of illness, disclosure, and stigma become transformative.