UCLA

What are the mental and emotional effects of receiving a prophetic vision? The prophet Daniel may be a PTSD survivor as well as a prophet, or perhaps because he is a prophet. The basic conceit of each prophetic vision in the book of Daniel is that the angel Gabriel flies to Daniel to act as the voice of God answering Daniel’s prayers. The narrative typically describes symptoms of trauma following these angelic visits. For example, Daniel says, “I fainted and was sick for days,” following a vision (Dan. 8:27 NKJV). In subsequent chapters, Daniel describes several ingredients of trauma: being alone in his experience, loss of control over his own body and total voice loss (Dan. 10:8-17 NKJV). Within this circa 30-minute work, I explore how the text treats the receipt of a prophetic vision as a traumatic experience through investigating the relationship of Daniel’s voice loss upon hearing Gabriel’s voice.The instrumentation for the monodrama is solo soprano, flute, string quartet, piano and harp. Alluding to the Biblical simile of a heavenly voice sounding like “the voice of a multitude,” ii (Ez. 1:24, Dan. 10:6, Rev. 19:6 NKJV) I envision the composite effect of the instruments plus the solo soprano to become a musical representation of Gabriel’s voice, delivering the prophetic vision to the listener, who will be sharing the role of receiver with the prophet Daniel in the story. The libretto focuses primarily on Daniel 9:24-27, which describes the long-awaited building and catastrophic destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. However, the entire narrative of the book of Daniel serves to further my probing into Daniel’s prophetic vision as traumatic experience.