Hi. I've been trying to understand experience of time in bipolar. I think there is something fundamental here - especially since mania is so often precipitated by travel across time zone.. something with our clocks... Seems like depression is easy to grasp - there is no future, the future is blocked, all there is is the agony of what happened/is happening and brought me here. Mania seems more complicated, though. On the one hand, the future is now.... What I might hope for, dream about, long for -- has already happened... It is here! Now! So in this way I am living in the future - my dreams and hopes are achieved. But on the other hand, there is a constant shadow - that same old depression - that I am running away from. So in a way I am on the running -- running into the future - so I achieve it now, already - so I can stay ahead of the present - make the present past...
The problem with this is that if you read the real classics – for ex Binswanger – he says: “these patients live almost entirely in the present and to some degree still in the past, but no longer into the future. Where everything and everyone is “handy” and “present” where distance is missing, there is no future either, but everything is played off ‘in the present’ in the mere here and now. This also throws light upon the self of such patients. A self that does not live into the future moving around in a merely playful way, in the here and now and, at best, still lives only from the past, is nothing but momentarily “attuned”; it is not steadily advancing, developing or maturing, is not, to borrow a word, an existential self” So this seems very difference from what I am experiencing myself… Is the good old doctor Binswanger right?? Have I got it wrong??