Run-on Sentences and Run-on Thoughts

When I taught English for one year to teenagers in Central Wisconsin most of whom really didn't want to be there - I taught that a run-on sentence (one with no clear beginning, middle, end or focus) - excessively punctuated with anything and everything except for an occasional and necessary period was not a good thing and ought be avoided by literate people when trying to express their thoughts in writing, but then came later training in the admittedly soft science of psychotherapy wherein, as it is traditionally approached (or at least was at the time) from a Psychoanalytic point of view, patients were given one Golden Rule of instruction, i.e. "Say whatever comes into your mind without censoring it" in a processes called Free Association - a run-on sentence of thought as it were, highly valued and considered the heart of the grist for the mill of the psychoanalytic process - thereby creating a conflict of sorts bringing into question the relative merits and faults of both run-on sentences as they are used, perhaps legitimately, to express run-on (uncensored) thoughts.

That was one of them and here is another:

A run-on thought, one without focus, clear intent to communicate and confusing even to the thinker may be a sign of a mental disorder characterized by what clinicians call 'racing thoughts' not because they are necessarily going fast - although they frequently are - but because they violate all the same rules as those assigned by English teachers past and present to run-on sentences; I suppose that readers and lovers of the works of such authors as Virginia Wolfe, for example, are fortunate that not everyone so instructed took those pedagogic requirements entirely to heart although in her case, her style escaped some of the predictable criticism by being labeled 'stream of consciousness' rather than 'run-on' writing and isn't it both odd and interesting that what we call things seems to make a rather substantive difference in how we experience them so that I would take issue with another author/poet of great renown said, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" I disagree because if someone put a bowl of chocolate ice cream in front of me and I saw it scooped from a container upon which was printed "Frozen Dog Poo: I doubt it would taste the same to me as chocolate ice cream generally does'

And for real word gluttons, here is one more:

It was a dark and stormy night, the kind when it isn't raining but feels as though it is just about to and no matter how big the fire in the hearth is no one really feels anything but bone-chillingly cold and naked and on just such a night two elements of the one-in-the-same person met face to face for the very first time each looking over the other with the suspicious eyes of an experienced investigator who actually knows the answers to the questions s/he is about to ask before any words leave his/her mouth let alone are responded to by the subject of their interrogatives but that matter less, I suppose, that the fact that one person is drawn and can live as two consistently and stubbornly unknown one to the other, in my case the English teacher and the therapist who, while inhabiting the self-same physical body, have only a passing resemblance to each other unless, of course, one were tempted to look a tad deeper whereupon it would be evident that what first appear to be differences are actually only slightly distorted mirror images of something essentially the same much as two identical twins who, while not really identical at all, do have a rather obvious if not superficial similarity to each other.

My apologies for any headaches generated. (THAT was NOT a run-on sentence!)