Tzombi Consciousness and Other Matters

I apologize if my last post offended anyone. While I try valiantly to keep emotion out of my entries, it seems to creep in anyway, like the voles at night in my office, chewing through my heart as if it were nothing more than a pulsing collection of live wires.

In any case, I’m happy to report that certain imposters have disappeared into the proverbial woodwork.

And now I can return to more serious matters.

I would like to publish a brief excerpt from Dr. Teresa Morgan’s article in Sentience: A Journal of Consciousness from March 20th, 2004 entitled “Dead or Alive? The Post-Deceased Consciousness”:

The zombie psyche is a study in contradictions. Though technically dead, high-functioning zombies are in general more emotionally alive and sensitive than their Pre-Deceased counterparts and suffer from a range of emotional afflictions, including Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Depression, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Though most of them have lost their identities, they often have a more keenly developed sense of self, occasionally to the point of megalomelancholia. In the lower-functioning zombies no such afflictions are observable, though it may be possible to draw parallels between the sheer will to exist -- a will which doesn’t even take into consideration the possibility of suicide -- and the will of the higher-functioning.

Dr. Morgan has an interesting background in that she started out counseling veterans, specializing in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder treatment. Her even-handed, compassionate documentation (totaling 13 journal articles in the past five years) of Tzombi psychology has gone a long way in “normalizing” the field. I have sent her some of my own research and hope that we may open a dialogue in the very near future.