Hallucinations In Kindred

Dana, from the novel Kindred, experiences these so called “hallucinations” or as she would call them, “time travels”. There is no specific data showing what the real explanation for why these episodes occur but one possibility could be that Dana has the ability to time travel to past years meet people that had an effect on her in present day. When someone time travels, there body and mind goes with them and they disappear from reality. Time travel is usually by choice and the time traveler is aware of what they are doing, but for Dana’s case, she could be forced to do it with no control over it. There has been research done and some might say she suffers from schizophrenia, which is is a long-term mental disorder that involves the uncontrollable
Immediately she rushed into the water, fully clothed, to save the child. Dana says “Before me was a tranquil river and near the middle of that river was a child splashing, screaming…. Drowning! I ran down into that river, fully clothed, and swam quickly to save the child” Dana has no idea how she got there but she knew why. She was sent there to help the child from drowning and essentially saving her life as well. Because she is fully clothed, explains why her husband found her back in their house, muddy and wet. If she was just imagining this was happening, she wouldn't have actually been muddy, but just experiencing an illusion that she was. Another instance where we can justify that Dana time travels is when her arm gets stuck, or crushed in between a wall. Although we have no explanation for this the author leave to interpret it for ourselves, in the prologue of the book, the first thing we read is “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm”. The way Dana uses the phrase “my last trip home” elaborated more on Dana’s time traveling trips. If we think about the whereabouts Dana is in, if she was just suffering from illusions, how would she come to the extent of getting her arm stuck in a wall. For her to do that, she would have to physically blow her arm into the wall, intentionally, and the probability of that happening is very slim. Now if it were in the sense of time travel, an explanation of this could be that she got lapsed in between times when she was returning to her present day and because of that, her arm was chopped off. Although some factors could lead to the assumption that Dana suffers from the long-term disease, Schizophrenia, like uncontrollable hallucination, withdraws from reality, and faulty perception, when we elaborate deeper into Dana’s