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Wonderful sharing of your experience. I actually don't think too much any more about my specific experiences in mania, though my two long health facility stays were 17 days and 5 days respectively. Part of the OCD aspect of mania is seeing a linear story line each time you drop back into the rabbit hole...but the beauty of sticking with looking at the archetypes is eventually there is a kind of "whole" fabric of experience. Hopefully leading to "oh, well, already see the big picture, been there done that"...not being pulled in by every small thing.
Your word clanging "bandit the cat, and Robbin" though have a resonance with the messianic part of my earliest mania, which included "I'm one of the thieves in the night" (i.e Jesus returning like a thief in the night).
And I also had an extreme experience of "Jonah in the Belly of the whale", and the three days, then symbolically becoming five...amazing.
Much later in doing vast research, I came across some Celtiberian studies where in Spain they had ritual saunas with three chambers...a very hot chamber, then warm, then cold, which they was was either a warrior rite, or shamanic rite (called Pedra Formosa, at Briteiros)
"Neuroscience (Maclean) has recently confirmed that we are indeed three-brained beings (Gurdjieff) with relatively autonomous though intercommunicating regions, within the anatomy of the central nervous system, that separately govern our intellectual (primate neocortex), emotional (paleo-mammalian limbic) and instinctive (reptilian basal) lives. The primitive ?R-complex? consisting of the structures of the brain stem?medulla, pons, cerebellum, mesencephalon, the oldest basal nuclei?the globus pallidus and the olfactory bulbs dominates in reptiles, and has the same type of archaic behavioral programs as lizards and snakes. It controls the muscles, balance and autonomic functions, such as breathing and heartbeat; it is active, even in deep sleep. Rigid, obsessive, compulsive, ritualistic and paranoid, the reptilian brain is filled with ancestral memories. Though each ?envelopes? the following one, thus reflecting the biological evolution of the species, our spiritual life is not specifically and of necessity located in any one of these brains."
What is interesting about Jonah, and a possible link with the Pedra Formosas in Spain, is that he was headed for Tarshish, which "some" scholars say were the Phoenician/Semitic mines in SouthWest Spain called Tartessos, but that is highly speculative.
So this all could be a very common and ancient archetype, of going into and out of psychosis.
But now of course to the trained clinician there would be a cakey base of "delusion of reference" with a light frosting of "apophenia".
