The trip from metaphor to reality and back

Abstract

The focus of the present paper is the relationship between metaphor and altered state of consciousness (ASC) characterized by trance. I reconsider two somewhat old ideas that might well have been premature for their time. One is that the mode of thinking in an ASC characterized by trance is metaphoric-symbolic. I argue that this is itself reflective of a heightened physiognomic perception. Furthermore, in such an ASC, an alternative world “becomes physiognomically alive”, and it is this alternative world which is expressed in poetic metaphor. In line with three major ideas expressed in Gestalt psychology, this is so because that is the way we think and perceive in a trancelike ASC, and because that is the alternative world that we now encounter in the trancelike ASC.