Very soon after, auditory hallucinations began to appear. “A voice fell from heaven,” speaking out the unconscious wishes which the king craved to gratify.
In a siege of dementia praecox, Nebuchadnezzar ate grass like oxen and his body was wet with the dew from heaven; his hair grew like eagle’s feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.
After a period during which he, like all cases of changed personality, led an easier, simpler, more primitive life, without any responsibilities, Nebuchadnezzar recovered and related thus his return to reality:
“My reason returned unto me; for the glory of my kingdom, mine honour and brightness returned unto me; and my counsellors and lords sought unto me; I was established in my kingdom and excellent majesty was added unto me.”
In the meantime he had become reconciled with reality and had given up his paranoid attempts at being the mightiest factor in the world.
By accepting as a possibility the existence of a mightier power, he protected himself against the ignominy of a possible defeat. Against an omnipotent God, even he could not prevail.
Freud writes: “The overestimation of one’s mental capacity, which appears absurd to sober judgment, is found alike in insanity and in dreams, and the rapid course of ideas in the dream corresponds to the flight of ideas in the psychosis. Both are devoid of any measure of time.
“The dissociation of personality in the dream, which, for instance, distributes one’s own knowledge between two persons, one of whom, the strange one, corrects in the dream one’s own ego, fully corresponds to the well-known splitting of the personality in hallucinatory paranoia; the dreamer, too, hears his own thoughts expressed by strange voices.
“Even the constant delusions find their analogy in the stereotyped recurring pathological dreams.
“After recovering from a delirium, patients not infrequently declare that the disease appeared to them like an uncomfortable dream; indeed, they inform us that occasionally, even during the course of their sickness, they have felt that they were only dreaming, just as it frequently happens in the sleeping dreams.”