The Evil Hours by David J. Morris

towards War.”
    This sense that the life-threatening experience is “unmastered” or somehow beyond the survivor’s control is one of the central problems of post-traumatic stress.Normal, nontraumatic memories are owned and integrated into the ongoing story of the self. These are, in a sense, like domesticated animals, amenable to control, tractable. In contrast, the traumatic memory stands apart, like a feral dog, snarling, wild, and unpredictable. This is, in part, what the psychoanalyst I interviewed meant when he said that “trauma destroys the fabric of time.” These unincorporated memories insist on being noticed, and in their insistence, they come to haunt the minds of survivors, destroying their perception of time.
    In
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about World War II, it is the main character’s near-death experience during the bombing of Dresden that causes him to “come unstuck in time.”Over the course of the book, which one VA administrator described as “the ultimate PTSD novel,” it is as if the space-time continuum has been destroyed along with the city of Dresden. As far as the protagonist Billy Pilgrim is concerned, that is certainly the case. The novel opens: “Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between . . . Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”
    One of the perceptual mechanisms that can cause people to become unstuck in time, preventing the incorporation of experiences into the normal web of memory, is what psychologists call dissociation, essentially a splitting of the mind in two. An altered state of consciousness, dissociation allows you to distance yourself when a life-threatening situation occurs, as when a driver suddenly sees his car from a distance, almost like a spectacle in a theater, with a sense of being an observer rather than a participant. This was, in fact, a common refrain I’d heard from soldiers in Dora when they described the combat they’d been through—“It felt like I was watching a movie.” One particularly bloody day was insistently referred to as the “
Black Hawk Down
day,” as if the only way it could be recalled was through the narrative frame of an action movie. Curiously, this distancing seems to hold even after the event. “Our own death is indeed, unimaginable,” Freud wrote in 1915, “and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators.”Such existential threats must be mutated, converted, or otherwise altered so that the mind can continue to exist.
    One of the most commonly reported forms of dissociation is that of time seeming to move differently, as if the brain is processing the world at a different speed than before. For most, this begins at the moment of maximum danger. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced trauma describes the world beginning to move in a kind of “slow motion.” Aron Ralston, a hiker exploring the slot canyons of southeastern Utah in 2003, was trapped beneath a huge boulder. He wrote about the rock rolling toward him, saying that “time dilates, as if I’m dreaming, and my reactions decelerate,” and in his memoir,
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
, Ralston describes the entire process as seeming to happen in “slow motion.”One Marine I interviewed from the Gulf War recalled being under fire and how the tracer rounds seemed to be crawling through the desert air toward him like