(a) A De-centred Self
All respondents with the exception of reader R.P. revealed that a form of
daydreaming was important to them, that they engaged in it unashamedly and
frequently and all, again with the exception of reader R.P., said that they also
experienced vivid dreams. This indicated an essentially reclusive personality type.
For instance, the readers, and the shamans too, were unanimous in their conviction
that reading was one of their great solitary pleasures; that it was healing but,
moreover, that it returned them to otherness; that imaginative literature is, indeed,
otherness. A common experience to the respondents was that of being in an
altered state of consciousness; hovering between the fiction of the novel, aware of
the present but of being in another place, vicariously, throughout the period of
reading, regardless of the diction, characterization, plot and setting.
This is not to say that readers unequivocally enjoyed this associative state.
I ndeed, they sometimes found themselves in the company of fictive characters
whom they thoroughly disliked and in fictive places in which they felt completely
alienated. These fictive characters and places were still, nevertheless, the terms of
reference that seemed to define their reading identity. For example, Reader 1 wrote
of one text that, ... the images presented ... draw the reader into that sense of
falling into a narrow cone of chaos ... an anarchy similar to the situation in Kosovo
today is envisaged and the feeling of horror seems as real as it is repugnant, all-
encompassing and doom fraught. The mind and emotions are in free play,
associations are made, the flesh crawls and the mood stays for hours and is
recurring.
Reading precipitated a changed self-identity and often separated them from
a world they did not really like and wanted to get away from. When the shaman
Rebbe said of his reading, ... so I became somebody else ... but I think this was also
the beginning of my creativity and spirituality, he exemplified the general responses
of the group members. Shaman Maureen described reading as sometimes
facilitating a state of ecstasy, ... or the ability to step outside of oneself ... a key
feature of shamanic consciousness ... and where in writing her own mythography,
she was not ... present in it, but rather ... as a god-like observer who is simply
recording what she sees and hears. This response also typified that of the
respondents overall in that in reading, they entered a myth-like elsewhere-place.