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David Wilson didn't know where to turn when his wife, Chris, was in the depths of clinical depression, brought on by chronic fatigue syndrome and anorexia. In despair he entered an empty church and said a simple prayer: «I have no power to affect anything in my life, but you have the power. If you help me, I will serve you.» From then on, their lives began to change. A prayer group contacted them and through the power of prayer, Chris's condition began to improve. At the same time she found herself developing remarkable gifts of prophecy. The author embarked on a theology course, enabling him to look at what had happened to him and to Chris with a new perspective. Is there, he wondered, a link between depression and spiritual awareness? The author looks at the lives of Elijah and other Old Testament prophets and notes how signs of depression coincided with spiritual insights. This fascinating and thought-provoking book is the story of a couple's spiritual journey, as well as a profound meditation on the connection between depression and prophecy.

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David Wilson's initial research into the phenomenon of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible suggested that many of the passages featuring prophets, and hitherto considered to be bizarre myths (or much-edited collections of traditions) were, in fact, sequences of dreams. Moreover, it was possible to compare the structure of these sequences with the structure of a night's sleep (hypnogram)–as revealed by modern sleep research–to demonstrate that the «sleeper» was depressed. This characteristic, depressive sleep architecture was then used to show that three characters in particular, Elijah, Jonah, and Adam–compared in the New Testament with Jesus–were all, in fact, depressed. Quite naturally, this raised further questions concerning the nature of Jesus himself: Was he merely a prophet? If he wasn't, how did he differ? If he was depressed, how was he able to function (and succeed in his mission) when Elijah and Jonah clearly had such great difficulties? These and other questions are raised throughout this book, and many of them are not new, but they are, however, changed forever when asked against a contextual background of altered states of consciousness (ASCs), and dreamform in particular.

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