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1Abnormal intensity or persistence of visual perceptions: visual stimuli appear more or less intense or take longer to leave perception after ending.
2Increase in intensity of visual perceptions: visual stimuli seem more intense, such as light being brighter or colors stronger.
3Decrease in intensity of visual perceptions: visual stimuli seem less intense.
4Recurrence or prolongation of visual stimuli: even after visual stimuli are gone, person continues to see them.
5Blindness or partial blindness: vision is experienced as being blurry or partially or wholly absent.
6Partial seeing: person sees only part of an object.
7Transitory blindness: visual field is experienced as either partly or entirely absent.
8Disturbances involving verticality (accuracy) of visual perceptions: mis-seeing objects or perceiving visual stimuli that is actually absent.
9Visual illusions: person missees something, mistaking it for something else.
10Visual hallucinations: person experiences seeing something when nothing is there. Can seem only partially external.
11Visual pseudohallucinations: like visual hallucinations, but person while experiencing it recognizes its lack of basis in reality.
12Visual fragmentation: objects or scenes appear broken up.
13Object fragmentation: cannot perceive objects as a whole.
14Break-up of a scene: the world becomes fragmented, with different things appearing disconnected or unrelated to one another.
15Captivation of attention by isolated details: person attracted to certain details as if spellbound.
16Disorganization or disturbed object stability: visual perception of things becomes fluid and unstable.
17Disorganized object contours: object contours are distorted.
18Loss of perceptual stability (fluidity or contamination): things seem to change their form or nature before the person's very eyes. Multiple forms of a single object may be perceived simultaneously in the same place, like a "photographic double exposure".
19Changes in color of visual perceptions: things seem to be a different color from what they normally are.
20Micropsia/macropsia: things seem bigger or smaller than they actually are.
21Dysmegalopsia: things seem bigger on one side and smaller on the other than they actually are.
22Metamorphopsia: objects have a different but stable form than how they actually are.
23Disturbances of perceptual distance or object juxtaposition: distances and/or relative positioning of objects to each other is distorted.
24Objects seem closer or farther away: objects are closer or farther than they appear.
25Disturbance of relative spatial relationship (juxtaposition) of objects: the relative positioning of objects is distorted, including in the perception of 2 objects one of which is closer, with the closer one appearing farther away and the farther away one appearing closer. May have difficulty determining what is in the background or foreground.
26General disturbances in estimation of distance: person struggles to estimate how far away they are from something.
27Distorted experiences of space: space itself seems distorted.
28Diminished perspectival orientation: experiences space as isotropic, sees the world as if standing from nowhere in particular or everywhere at once.
29Loss of topographical orientation: feels disoriented in familiar places.
30Loss of spatial integrity or structure: feels as if space is inconsistent, as if pouring a jug of water down on the floor below results in the water falling onto the floor above or as if a path leads somewhere that should be geometrically impossible.
31Loss of dimensionality: perceives the world in only 2 dimensions.
32Experience of infinite space: person is overwhelmed by the magnitude of space in their location.
33Figure/ground reversal: person sees the space between objects rather than the objects themselves.
34Affective experience of space: space feels threatening or strange, takes on a negative feel.
35Abnormal intensity or persistence of auditory perceptions: sounds seem more or less intense or last longer than they should.
36Increases in intensity of auditory perceptions: sounds seem louder or more intense.
37Decreases in intensity of auditory perceptions: sounds seem quieter or less intense.
38Heightened awareness of background auditory sensations: overly aware of sounds that should remain in the background, that are less relevant than other more important sounds.
39Recurrence or prolongation of auditory stimuli: sounds last longer than they should or recur.
40Disturbances involving veridicality (accuracy) of auditory perceptions: mishearing sounds or hearing sounds that aren't there.
41Auditory illusions: mishears sounds as something else.
42Auditory hallucinations: hears sounds that aren't there, in a way that seems at least somewhat external to the person.
43Auditory pseudohallucinations: like auditory hallucinations, but person is aware during the experience that they are false.
44Other changes in quality of auditory perceptions: experiences distortions in pitch, timbre, or other qualities of some or all sounds.
45Problems localizing sounds: has trouble pinpointing where sounds are coming from.
46Disturbances of other senses: other senses, such as smell, taste, or touch, experience distortions.
47Tactile disturbance: distortions in the sense of touch.
48Olfactory disturbance: distortions in the sense of smell.
49Synesthesia or abnormal concommitant perception: stimulus in one sense brings in involvement of another sense.
50Splitting-off or isolation of sensory perceptions: stimulus is perceived as having nothing to do with what is producing the stimulus, like another person's voice seems to have nothing to do with the person who is speaking.
51Disturbances in recognizing or identifying an object of perception: fails to recognize what they are seeing or hearing, even when it is familiar to them.
52Loss of boundaries with, or demarcation from, the physical world: person experiences difficulty determining where their body ends and the rest of the world begins.
53Time or movements appear to change speed: this does not only occur when a person is bored, excited, or is engaged in activity.
54Discrepancy between internal and external time: experiences discrepancy between the time that passes for their own actions versus the time for the rest of the world.
55Internal time seems slower than external time: feels as if they are moving or thinking very slowly relative to the rest of the world.
56Internal time seems faster than external time: feels as if they are moving or thinking much faster than others and the rest of the world.
57Disruption of dynamic organization of time: seems like time no longer flows like it should. Here, there is a disruption of the unity of the present moment with the retention (immediate previous moment, "primary remembrance") and the protention (immediate next moment, "anticipation"), as described by philosopher Edmund Husserl.
58Time feels as though completely stopped, static, infinite, disappeared: feels as if time has stopped or ceased to exist.
59Time as disjointed or fragmented: each moment feels disconnected from the last and the next, as if time itself has become staccato, just a sequence of photographs, each having nothing to do with the next or last one.
60Disorientation in time: person becomes confused about the passage of time, with difficulty understanding how time flows and when to engage in events, and even what time of day it is.
61Feeling limited to or isolated in the present moment: person feels as if they newly come into being as a wholly different person with each passing moment of time.
62Various bizarre experiences of time: feels as if time is going backward, as if they are stuck in a Groundhog Day loop, as if they control time, as if they are present in multiple periods of time at once, or other bizarre experiences.
63Disturbed anticipation: disturbance of the expectation of the immediate next moment in time.
64Perpetual anticipation: constantly feels as if something very big is imminent, right about to happen. Called also ante festum experience or trema ("stage fright").
65Constant surprise due to inability to anticipate future event: is constantly surprised by mundane events that would normally be expected immediately beforehand, due to the inability to anticipate.
66Feeling that "anything could happen: feeling that literally anything, from the probable through the highly unlikely to the impossible, could happen, while not caring what that is.
67Protention (future directedness) collapse: feels as if they cannot move into the imminent next moments in a smooth, flowing way.
68Disturbed awareness of the expected future: the conception of the future beyond the imminent is distorted or feared in some way.
69Past seems accelerated: feels as if the memories are all condensed into a single moment.
70Past seems slower: feels as if memories are all drawn out and elongated in time.
71Intrusiveness of the past: the past seems to limit the person, what they can do.
72Erosion of distinction between past and present: confused about whether the person is remembering something or if they're actually doing something right now.
73Past seems disjointed: what happened in the past seems all out of order, all disconnected from each other, or otherwise disjointed.
74Lack of social understanding or interpersonal attunement (hypoattunement): person feels they cannot smoothly engage with other people at all; may feel like they must study and follow explicit rules to interact successfully with other people.
75Loss of social common sense: feels they cannot naturally grasp what other people do or how the conversation has gone.
76Bodily/proprioceptive loss of attunement: feels they are outward and cannot time their mannerisms and other actions properly (e.g. may not know when to begin speaking after another person has finished, or when to greet a person as they walk past them).
77Specific difficulty understanding non-verbal communication: has difficulty reading body language, tone of voice, and other forms of non-verbal communication.
78Sense of remoteness from others: feels cut off from other people.
79Alienated strategies for understanding others: feels they have to engage in intellectual-style analysis of social situations to understand what they mean and what to do.
80Alienated scrutinizing of others' behavior: aware they tend to analyze social situations to know what they mean, like a zoologist out in the field doing in situ study of animals.
81Algorithmic approach to social understanding/interaction: person attempts to create algorithms, a set of formal rules, to use to guide them in social situations.
82Sense of inferiority, criticism, or mistrust in relation to others: tends to feel threatened and criticized in social situations, making it hard to interact comfortably.
83Feelings of self-consciousness, self-criticism: tends to be overly aware of flaws in their appearance, interaction, etc.
84Feelings of social paranoia or social anxiety: feels people they're interacting with or are around them are constantly focusing on and judging them.
85Pervasive mistrust of others: tends to feel other people are out to "get" them.
86Torment or distress due to generalized social insecurity: mere presence of others feels extremely burdensome and unbearable, as if by their very presence they endanger the person's cold self.
87Interference by voices: feels like voices prevent them from interacting normally with people.
88Disturbance of self-other demarcation: feels like they have a hard time telling what thoughts, ideas, actions, sayings are in them, and what are in other people.
89Hyperattunement: feels like they can read minds.
90Unusual influence over others: feels like they can mind control other people.
91Pathological openness: feels like their innermost thoughts and feelings are open to being read by others.
92Experiences of being controlled: feels like they're being mind-controlled.
93Merging or fluid psychological boundaries: they feel mixed up or confuse their thoughts and feelings with those of other people. May feel like there is no clear boundary between themselves and other people.
94Universal merging with others: feels like there are no individuals, but everyone is part of the same hive mind or other collective consciousness.
95Uncertain personal identity/attitudes: feels confused about their identity when around others.
96Uncertain physical boundaries: has difficulty telling where their body ends and other people's bodies begin.
97Experience of being imitated: feels like other people are imitating them deliberately to mess with them or make fun of them, in a way that seems strange to them.
98Difficulties with the gaze: has trouble with eye contact
99Intrusiveness of the gaze of the other: feels like other people's gazes are very intrusive and make them uncomfortable, often leading to avoidance of eye contact.
100Feeling of exposure through one's own eyes: feels like eye contact exposes their innermost thoughts and feelings to the other person.
101Intrusiveness of one's own gaze: feels like their own gaze is intrusive and unbearable for others.
102Dehumanization of the eyes of others: when making eye contact, the other person does not seem to be human or alive, with their eyes and body parts being seen as like inanimate objects.
103Eyes as cosmic portals: feels like the eyes of others (or one's own in the mirror) are windows into another world or dimension.
104Unspecific uneasiness with gaze: feels uneasy with eye contact without specifying the reason.
105Depersonalization of others: depersonalization, but of other people rather than oneself.
106People seem dead: feels as if other people are dead (even though they're alive, up and moving around).
107People seem unreal/false/illusory: other people seem like they don't really exist or are fraudulent copies of themselves, without objective reality.
108People seem mechanical: other people seem like they are mere robots without a soul.
109Persons dominated by a single characteristic: focuses on a single characteristic of other people, and feels as if it defines the other person's entire being, like the other person is nothing more than that characteristic.
110Heightened intensity, aliveness, or reality of others: people seem more alive and energetic than normal, which feels fishy.
111Changes in quality or tone of others' appearance: other people look or seem strangely different from how they normally are.
112People seem familiar in a strange way: of people they've never met before, it strangely feels like they know the other person from somewhere. Like deja vu, but with people.
113People seem unfamiliar in a strange way: of people they know well, it strangely feels like they don't know the other person at all. Like Jamais vu, but with people.
114People seem disgusied: feels like other people aren't actually those other people, but are people disguised as those other people.
115People seem threatening in a strange way: there is something about other people that makes it seem like they are a threat.
116General/unspecified changes in the physical appearance of others: something about how the other person looks, like maybe their eyes or face, seems strangely different from before.
117People seem as if communicating something special or unusual (beyond the obvious): other people seem to be dropping hints intended for the person, with the intent of the other people's speech being very different from what is said.
118Paranoid significance: the hint seems to express dislike or threats toward the person.
119Grandiose significance: the hint seems to signify the person's superiority or special powers.
120Metaphysical significance: the hint seems to signify impending Doomsday or perhaps a cataclysm that has fundamentally altered the universe.
121Unknown/unsalatable significance: the person cannot express the meaning of the hint.
122Anomalous behavior/attitudinal responses to others: person is aware they are acting strangely differently toward other people, often due to paranoia or not understanding social situations like they used to.
123Active withdrawal: person tends to want to be alone and shut others out.
124Oppositional/rebellious behavior: person tends to want to act counter to other people.
125Social disinhibition: person aware they disregard social norms when they interact.
126Compulsive interpersonal harmony: the person feels very eager to please and will do anything to avoid conflict with others.
127Extreme compliance: automatic obedience or imitation of others, echopraxia.
128Compulsive clownery/entertainment of others: feels like they must always crack jokes or clown around, in a way that turns out wooden or stilted to other people.
129Basic disruptions of standard verbal comprehension: difficulty comprehending speech or writings
130Meaning/sound dissociation: difficulty putting the representations of words with their meanings when heard or read
131Distraction via semantic possibilities: gets caught up on all the different senses of a word or a statement that was just heard or read
132Distraction by individual words: gets focused on individual words instead of the message as a whole
133Unspecified difficulty understanding: it's difficult to understand what they're hearing or reading
134Difficulty understanding emotional/expressive aspects of speech: has a hard time with understanding the intonations in what people say
135Specific changes in standard feel or meaning of words: becomes focused on words because they feel different than they did before
136Focus on sound or appearance of words/phrases: very aware of how words sound or appear
137Unconventional semantic determination via signifier or fragments of words: determines words' meanings by how they or parts of them look, rather than by the conventional meaning
138Words seem arbitrary/absurd: is often so distracted by how arbitrary words seem that they do not attend to conversations
139Words or language seems alive: words take on a life of their own or feel like physical objects
140Egocentric linguistic reference: self-referencing ideas coming from the specific words or grammar that a person uses, but NOT the content of what they're saying.
141Unconventional word choice, grammar, tone, or cryptic discourse: says things in an unusual manner that often confuses people, which may be at least somewhat willful.
142Cryptic, telegraphic, or ungrammatical speech: speaks in a cryptic manner or using sentences structures that violate the grammar of the language they're speaking (even though they are a native speaker, for example), which may be experienced as intentional.
143Stock words: tends to overuse a certain few words or phrases to the point where they acquire many meanings beyond the conventional, causing their speech to feel stilted.
144Made-up words (neologisms) or unconventional usage: aware of using made-up words or using words in ways that differ greatly from their meanings.
145Mannerisms and stilted speech: tends to use very formal registers to say things in situations that would normally call for more casual speech.
146Disturbed fluency: has a hard time expressing self using language
147Unavailability of words: cannot find the right words
148Unfocused or disorganized thoughts preclude verbal expression: aware they have difficulty speaking because they cannot get their thoughts "straight", that is, their thinking has become so digressive or otherwise difficult to understand that they cannot express themselves
149General discordance between the intended expression and the expressed: aware of inability to express themselves in a way that accurately expresses what they meant to say; little things in the expression keep being off to the point the listener or reader may be left with a different impression.
150Disturbed relevance: aware of having a hard time remaining on a single line of thought while talking or writing
151Derailment: aware that they have a tendency to lose track of what they're saying or writing.
152Tangential responding: aware that they make off-topic answers to questions
153Disturbance of linguistic engagement or purposefulness: aware they speak in such a strange way that they are not engaging
154Aprosody (lack of emotional intonation): aware their speech lacks the normal intonation
155Echolalia: feels a need to repeat what the other person says
156Speech feels autonomous: feels like they are not in control of their speaking or writing
157Anomalous experience of the abstract and the concrete: has difficulty using the abstract and the concrete appropriately
158Ineffability: inability of language to describe or express: feels language cannot fully express what they mean to say
159Language inadequate to express unusual circumstances: feels their experiences are so unusual language becomes inadequate to describe them
160General feeling of the inadequacy of the language: feels language is inadequate to describe even normal experiences, or otherwise sees the use of language as a waste of time
161Alienation from self-description: when they provide a narrative of one's life, they have difficulty with even recognizing the person back them as themselves.
162Derealization of the world: sense of disconnection or unreality of the world
163Remoteness or barrier (plate-glass feeling): feels cut off from the world
164Decreased intensity or substantiality: the world seems flat
165Deanimation: the world seems lifeless
166Falseness: the whole world feels like it is a stage
167Loss of enticement quality: nothing has any appeal
168Static quality, stillness, or morbid intellectualism: looks at the world in a very static or geometric way
169Nonspecific/other derealization: the world feels strange in some way
170Loss of affordances: objects and events no longer have their normal meaning and are seen simply as fixtures on the world.
171Heightened intensity/hyperrealization: the world feels somehow more alive, colorful, and intense than normal.
172Deja vu experiences: things feel familiar somehow or like they've happened before.
173Jamais vu experiences: the familiar becomes unfamiliar and novel
174Perplexity: reality becomes confusing
175Confusion of realms: difficulty distinguishing the internal, mental realm and the physical realm.
176Unreal interferes: delusions or imaginations interfere with the ability to live in the world.
177World experienced as incoherent, disoriented: the world is no longer a fixed stable place of meaning, but has become confusing and incoherent.
178Perplexing hyperawareness of tacit dimension: things that would normally stay in the background of perception come to the foreground and are the focus of attention.
179Anomalous manner of ascribing or perceiving meaning: the way the person derives meaning from things changes greatly
180Meaning imposed on object by subject: person tends to give their own idiosyncratic meaning to things
181Meaning inherent in the object itself: the idiosyncratic meaning is perceived as soon as the object comes into perspective and is seen as intrinsic to the object.
182Proliferation of meanings from the object: perceiving the object causes an uncontrollable emergence of associations, that is, things that it reminds the person of.
183Anomalous forms of meaning: meaning given to objects tend to be very atypical, often in terms of the concrete and the abstract
184Physical or literalist instantiation of abstract meaning: things like thoughts and feelings become hard and concrete, like they were physical objects in themselves.
185Anomalous classification: tends to classify different things together using unusual criteria
186Intensified awareness of patterns or trends: increased tendency to see patterns in things
187Anomalous sense of causal relationship: cause and effect become distorted.
188All-inclusive self-consciousness/ontological paranoid: keeps feeling like they are being watched, focused on
189Diminished ontological independence of experienced world/subjectivism: the world lacks independence from the mind.
190Subjectivism/solipsism: the person feels like they are the only mind in the universe and that they are the ones who build up the universe and bring things and people into being.
191Double bookkeeping: aware of two different realities, one real and physical, the other imaginary and delusional.
192Influencing physical reality: feels like their thoughts control the world
193Pseudomovements of objects/persons: when the person is moving, it feels like things or people are moving in conjunction with them.
194Revelatory or pseudorelevatory (apophanous) mood: there is something different, special, or unusual about the world, but the person cannot grasp it, filling them with wonder.
195Uncanny particularity: something seems peculiar about various mundane happenings in the world, like they signify something bigger happening behind the scenes.
196Self-referentiality: sees mundane things as referring back to themselves in one of various ways, listed below.
197Paranoid significance: suggests someone is trying to harm them
198Grandiose significance: suggests they are superior or special in some way
199Metaphysical significance: suggests the entire universe has radically changed, with the implication that it is the person who is response, or the message is directed specifically toward them.
200Unknown/unsalatable significance: the nature of the significance is unknown.
201Unspecifiable strangeness: something has changed, the person can sense it, but they don't know exactly what.
202Quasi-mystical experiences: amazed at the very existence of the world
203Mystic union with the world: feels especially connected and united with the world, but not in a way that suggests their ego boundaries have been compromised.
204Mere being: struck by the sheer existence of everything
205Experiences of the end of the world: feels like the world is ending.
206Anomalies of mood or affect: the person has entered into an unusual mood state
207Detached euphoria: feels euphoric, but in a way that is very disconnected, different than the euphoria in a manic state which tends to involve increased energy and actions toward goals.
208Mood or emotion is abnormally present: feels like the mood lasts beyond the events or thoughts that triggered it.
209Mood or emotion is abnormally labile: mood keeps changing
210Mood or emotion inappropriate to the current situation: has moods or emotional reactions one would expect to what's going on
211Moods or emotions are mutually contradictory: very high level of ambivalence about how they feel about things
212Rejection of society or convention: the person generally chooses to live according to their rules in disregard of societal norms.
213Disinclination for human society: person rejects society and would prefer to live as a misfit.
214Antagonomia: tends to act in ways that directly oppose societal values.
215Idionomia: person feels radically unique.
216Extreme indifference or openness: person is very open to all possibilities in a way suggesting they are detached from the normal concerns of life.
217Attitude of indifference, insouciance, lack of concern: expresses "callous indifference" and that nothing really matters, in a way suggesting cold detachment, different from the way indifference is typically expressed in mood disorders where there is a strong emotional component.
218Conceptual freedom/anything goes: feels like anything could happen: as far as they're concerned, for example, apples could just as easily start falling up from trees rather than down.
219Pervasive disbelief, skepticism, or curiosity re the obvious, taken-for-granted: constant tendency to question everything that society takes for granted.
220Absolute certitude: the person is absolutely sure about their unusual interpretation of the world, and does not believe that it will ever be refuted.
221Feeling of being special or superior: person feels superior or like they have a special role to play in the universe.
222Feeling of extraordinary insight: person feels as if they and they alone understand the mysteries of the world.
223Messianic duty: person feels as if they are a savior the world is depending on.
224Intellectual/spiritual grandiosity (with invidious comparison): person feels as if they are much much more highly advanced and evolved than all other people, whom they view as vastly inferior.
225Impossible responsibility or guilt: person feels guilty over things they could not have done.
226Sense of loss of freedom or individuality: feels as if they are controlled by outside forces.
227Adherence to abstract, intellectualistic, and/or autonomous rules: person follows self-imposed "rational" rules that are quite idiosyncratic.
228Existential or intellectual change: person suddenly is absorbed by things like religion or philosophy.
229Feeling of centrality: person feels as if the universe revolves around them.
230Decentering of the self relative to universe: feels as if they are not really real, like they truly exist apart from the universe.
231Thought interference: thoughts that are not semantically related to the main line of thinking pop up and interfere with it; these thoughts are generally irrelevant and unimportant.
232Loss of thought ipseity: thoughts appear strange in that they do not seem as if they originate from the self; the person is rationally aware that these thoughts are theirs.
233Thought pressure: many thoughts appearing simultaneously or in rapid succession that lack a common theme, which the person feels they cannot control.
234Thought block: the train of thought comes to a halt.
235Blocking: the thought becomes lost and inaccessible and no new thought appears in its place.
236Fading: the thought slowly fades away with no new thought appearing.
237Fading combined with simultaneous or successive thought interference: the thought slowly fades away while a new thought begins to appear.
238Silent thought echo: a thought which is not perceptualized is repeated or doubled.
239Ruminations-obsessions: persistence or recurrence of thoughts.
240Primary ruminations: tendency to ruminate with no underlying reason.
241Secondary ruminations: tendency to ruminate secondary to another issue, such as perplexity.
242True obsessions: recurring thoughts that are not macabre and which the person attempts to resist.
243Pseudo-obsessions: recurring thoughts that tend to have violent, sexual, or otherwise aggressive content that are generally not resisted by the person. In the ICD-10's definition of schizotypal disorder these are called "obsessive ruminations", and they tend to play out like movies or series of projections in a space internal to the person's mind, located perhaps "on an inner screen" or "behind [their] eyes", that they passively watch and may also inspect.[11]
244Compulsions: rituals in relation to ruminations or obsessions.
245Perceptualization of inner speech or thought: thoughts acquire perceptual qualities, which may appear to occur in the head or outside the person (hallucinations).
246Internal: the person experiences these perceptions as occurring inside the head.
247Equivalents: thoughts appear as written text.
248Internal as a psychotic first-rank symptom: person believes the thoughts are so loud that they can be heard by others.
249External: person experiences hallucinations, which may seem to repeat their thoughts.
250Spatializaton of experience: internal experiences such as thoughts appear as if they occurred inside an internal space; the person may experience them as being like physical objects appearing in that space.
251Ambivalence: difficulty deciding between 2 or more insignificant options.
252Inability to discriminate modalities of intentionality: person has difficulty telling the difference between perceptions and imaginations and between true memories and dreams.
253Disturbance of thought initiative or thought intentionality: difficulty initiating and organizing goal-directed activities.
254Captivation of attention by a detail in the perceptual field: person is drawn to aspects of the environment which are hard to divert attention away from, even though the person has no particular interest in those details.
255Inability to split attention: the person cannot do 2 or more activities at the same time which use different senses.
256Disorder of short-term memory: difficulty keeping things in mind for a short period of time experienced as a tendency to forget things from the beginning as the person continues, such as in reading a story.
257Disturbance in experience of time: change in the flow of time, except those changes in flow speed caused by boredom or pleasure, or regarding past vs. future.
258Disturbance in the subjective experience of time flow: time seems to speed up, slow down, stand still, or become fragmented.
259Disturbance in the existential time: the future is blocked and existence seems to be dominated by either the present or the past.
260Discontinuous awareness of own action: break in awareness of own actions.
261Discordance between intended expression and the expressed: the person experiences their expression as being uncontrollable, distorting the meaning of what the person is actually trying to say.
262Disturbance of expressive language function: the person experiences difficulty in mobilizing the words needed to express themselves.
263Diminished sense of basic self: feelings as if one is, for example, ephemeral, non-existent, profoundly different from others (but unable to sufficiently elaborate on this), or that one must agree with others; this has occurred chronically since at least adolescence.
264Distorted first-person perspective: there are at least 3 subtypes.
265Person feels as if their experiences aren't their own, at least briefly, or as if they were a mere inanimate object.
266Person feels an incredible distance between the self and experience, resulting in intense and involuntary constant or recurring self-monitoring.
267Person feels as if the self were located at a specific point in space, or perhaps as if it were a physical object, or both.
268Other states of depersonalization: sense of alienation from self or one's own experience.
269Melancholiform depersonalization: melancholic mood change from which the person feels alienated.
270Unspecified depersonalizaton: other depersonalization
271Diminished presence: an increased distance from being affected by the world that is experienced by the person as originating from within the self; this is experienced as an affliction by the person.
272Specified: increasing distance from the world experienced as apathy towards specific events.
273Unspecified: sense of barrier between self and world that cannot be furthered specified by the person.
274Including derealization or perceptual change: where the sense of barrier results in a change in world perception (e.g. sense of fogginess) or is accompanied by derealization.
275Derealization: the world appears as strange, alien, unreal, or changed.
276Fluid (global) derealization: the world seems to lose its color or become lifeless, or there is some other diminution of the qualities of the world.
277Intrusive derealization: things in the world seem much more intrusive than normal, which strongly affect the person emotionally.
278Hyperreflectivity; increased reflectivity: tendency to engage in excessive reflection of matters involving the self or other things hindering the sense of being able to live carefree or spontaneously; person will engage in intense reflection while engaged in activity (called also "simultaneous introspection" in Japanese psychopathology).
279I-split: sense that the self does not exist as a unified whole beyond having a multifaceted personality.
280I-split suspected: when person's comments hint at I-split.
281Person reports non-psychotic experience of I-split.
282Person reports non-psychotic experience of I-split that is experienced in a way that the different pieces of self exist at different points in space like physical objects.
283Person reports delusional experience of I-split.
284Dissociative depersonalization (out of body experience): person experiences the self as if it were outside the body.
285Person feels as if this is occurring, without hallucinating.
286Person experiences this as a dissociative hallucination.
287Identity confusion: person feels as if they were another person.
288Sense of change in relation to chronological age: feeling as if the person were very much younger or older than they really are.
289Loss of common sense/perplexity/lack of natural evidence: person is confused about the meaning of what people normally understand implicitly and may spend a lot of time wondering why, say, the sky is blue or 2+2=4; or person may follow extremely rigid schemas that come across as bizarre to others ("morbid rationalism") or may have a tendency to obsess about the spatial or geometric aspects of the world ("geometrism").
290Panic attacks with autonomous symptoms: panic accompanied by multiple autonomic symptoms including labored breathing, heart racing, chest pain, or a sense of choking.
291Psychic-mental anxiety: feeling of anxiety without autonomic symptoms.
292Phobic anxiety: anxiety triggered by specific fears (e.g. agoraphobia).
293Social anxiety: anxiety caused by social situations.
294Diffuse, free-floating, and pervasive anxiety: intense, constant anxiety.
295Paranoid anxiety: anxiety triggered by paranoid fears.
296Ontological anxiety: pervasive anxiety experienced by person over their own existence that causes them to be more interested in survival than in self-realization; it can involve a sense as if something ominous were approaching, a sense of being exposed to others, or some other fear of violation of their own existence.
297Diminished transparency of consciousness: a sense that one is blocked from clearly perceiving the contents of consciousness which is not secondary to something else (e.g. thought pressure, organic brain disorder, or clinical depression).
298Diminished initiative: pervasive difficulty initiating goal-directed activity that is not secondary to, for example, clinical depression.
299Hypohedonia: pervasive and recurring diminished capacity for pleasure.
300Diminished vitality: sense of diminishment of one's vital energy that is not secondary to, for example, clinical depression.
301Morphological change: sensations or perceptions as if parts of the body or the entire body has changed size or shape.
302Mirror-related phenomena: frequently looking at mirrors or avoiding mirrors, or otherwise feeling as if the shape of the face has changed when looking in a mirror.
303The person only looks in the mirror to see if their face has changed, but perceives no change.
304Perceived change or distortion of the face.
305Somatic depersonalization (bodily estrangement): feeling alienated from one's body or its parts.
306Psychophysical misfit and psychophysical split: the body feels as if it does not fit (but not simply because the person dislikes their appearance) or a feeling as if the body and mind do not go together.
307Bodily disintegration: feeling as if the body is falling to pieces.
308Spatialization of bodily experiences: feeling as if parts of the body were no longer a medium for action but as if they were simply standalone physical objects, or feeling as if one can feel body parts that one normally cannot feel.
309Cenesthetic experiences: various unusual bodily sensations, including feelings of numbness, electrical sensations, and thermal sensations.
310Pseudo-movements of the body: person feels as if a part of the body is moving, but it actually is not.
311Motor interference: movements of the body intended by the person are derailed, moving in a way not intended by the person.
312Motor blocking: person feels unable to move a body part.
313Sense of motor paresis: usually temporary sense of weakness in one or more limbs, which can interfere with the person's physical movements (such as grasping an object).
314Desautomation of movement: normally automatic or partially automatic physical activities that are carried out on a daily basis or frequently, such as brushing one's hair or riding a bike, can no longer be so, causing the person to have to concentrate and guide each aspect of their movement.
315Mimetic experiences: pseudo-movements of other objects and people are experienced as if there were a connection to the person's own actions.
316Confusion with the other: person confuses their thoughts, feelings, and other aspects with their interlocutor, or otherwise feels invaded or intruded upon by their interlocutor (but cannot explain why this is so).
317Confusion with one's own specular image: person confuses themselves with their reflection, such as when they are looking in a mirror.
318Person feels threatened by being close to or in contact with another person not because of paranoia or suspicion.
319Person feels annihilated when in close contact with another person.
320Passivity mood: mood-like feeling of being at the mercy of the world, with the person feeling restrained.
321Other transitivistic phenomena: other feelings as if not properly demarcated from other people and the world.
322Primary self-reference phenomena: person feels as if outside events are connected to themselves which cannot be explained by any more primary psychopathology.
323Feeling of centrality: brief feeling as if being at the center of all existence.
324Feeling as if the subject's experiential field is the only extant reality: person feels as if only things they are perceiving exist, such that it feels as if things cease to exist when the person looks away, for example.
325"As if" feelings of extraordinary creative power, extraordinary insight into hidden dimensions of reality, or extraordinary insight into own mind or the mind of others.: person experiences a sense as if they possess insight most other people do not.
326"As if" feeling that the experienced world is not truly real, existing, as if it was only somehow apparent, illusory, or deceptive: an example includes feeling as if the person were in a movie.
327Magical ideas (i.e. ideas implying nonphysical causality): person feels that they can control things with their mind that they actually cannot, or to otherwise unrealistically control external events.
328Existential or intellectual change: person experiences a major change in their worldview, such as joining a new religion, that does not occur as part of a manic or hypomanic episode.
329Solipsistic grandiosity: person feels superior to other people and considers others to be beneath their notice or concern.
330My thoughts are pressing on the skull from the inside.
331It feels as if a swarm of bees was in my head.
332My thinking is like an intersection of freeways, with a constant zoom! zoom! noise from the racing cars.
333One thought in front of the other.
334Thoughts are encapsulated.
335Thoughts ‘spiral around’ inside his head.
336She experienced that her thoughts were in the right side of her head and felt a pressing sensation from the inside of her skull as if there was no more room for her thoughts.
337Thoughts  always  pass  down  obliquely  into  the  very  same spot.’
338She has difficulty in making decisions because she ‘considers things in many ways’. Yesterday, it took her 3 hours to decide on which gift to buy for her boyfriend.
339At the teachers’ college, she reversed her choice of subjects three times but still couldn’t make out whether she had made the right choice.
340He is ‘snowed under with options’; e.g. he thinks that he probably ought to become a vegetarian even though he loves meat. Such considerations lead him into ‘doubleness’ and ‘silly, blind alleys’.
341Each time I think of something, I get a counterthought on the other side of the brain.
342The patient may feel discordance between a sense of ‘inner stagnation’ of his subjective life and the forward movement of the surrounding world.
343It is as if I am not a part of this world; I have a strange ghostly feeling as if I was from another planet. I am almost nonexistent.
344She feels that her inner nucleus, her innermost identity, has disappeared.
345A feeling of total emptiness frequently overwhelms me, as if I ceased to exist.
346A patient felt ‘as if not existing any longer’; ‘I have lost contact to myself’.
347A patient feels as if he is a vacuum, which is motionless, while the surrounding world is in motion.
348During his adolescence, he tried hard to ‘gain human dignity’. He explained the sense of lacking dignity as a feeling that his own existence was as of a dispensable object, as if he was a thing, a refrigerator, and not a human subject.
349He avoids gatherings and discussions, because it becomes painfully apparent to him that he never has an opinion of his own.
350He feels that he does not have a stable inner nucleus and no fixed point of view. He always agrees with all the arguing parties and finally gets confused.
351He may feel as if he is an object, a thing, without subjectivity, is no longer ensouled.
352I have a feeling as if it is not me who is experiencing the world; it feels as if another person was here instead of me.
353My feeling of experience as my own experience only appears a split second delayed.
354I have had ‘slightly strange experiences of a lacking relation between myself and what I am thinking’.
355There may be a profound experiential distance (phenomenological distance) between the (sense of) experience (thinking, action, perception, emotion) and the sense of self.
356She often has a feeling that it is not herself who performs her own actions (e.g. writing) but she knows that it is not the case.
357A patient feels that she ‘disappears’, ‘fades away’, her voice appears alien, ‘as if it came from a vacuum’.
358I do not really feel as a human subject, as a person with a soul; I feel like a dispensable thing, like e.g. a refrigerator.
359My first-person perspective is replaced by a third-person perspective (further explained by the patient that he constantly witnesses his own experiencing).
360I constantly regard myself. Sometimes it is so pronounced that I can hardly follow what’s going on on TV. Even during a conversation with others, I observe myself to the point of having difficulty in grasping what my interlocutors are saying.
361My own ‘I’, as a point of perspective, feels as if it had shifted a few centimeters backwards.
362I do not feel myself, there is something in me which bothers me; I don’t know what it is, but I cannot live like that.
363I do not feel myself, I feel somehow changed.
364Everything appears utterly indifferent to me.
365The surroundings appear to me as unreal, changed.
366Things are no longer the way they used to be. They are strange, as if they only were silhouettes.
367I had to think about what to think.
368She has always been ‘self-reflective’ and thought about herself ‘in an existential way’.
369The patient experiences his I, self, or person as being divided or otherwise compartmentalized, disintegrated into semi-independent parts, or not existing as one unified whole.
370After he was transferred to a single room and left alone, he got a thought ‘now, we two old chaps are alone together’, and the thought surprised him.
371Approximately, once a week, she had a feeling ‘as if she was two’, ‘as if she was able to see herself from the outside’. ‘She splits up into two parts and flies away, composed of those two parts’.
372She says that her thoughts ‘divide themselves’, and she feels a split in herself. It is a question of negative and positive thoughts. She feels it as if there were two different parts of her which ‘carry out a war with each other’.
373He describes that he often has no contact to his left side; it feels as if he ‘was half’ only. This feeling can propagate itself into the depth of his body.
374Her right part is much stronger, and able to put up a façade. She feels ‘imbalance in the layers of the two sides’.
375She feels herself as a cranium with something inside, ‘a little man in a cockpit’, as if she had two brains. One part of herself feels somehow dissociated from her normal self and therefore strange. The thoughts belonging to her normal self are localized to the anterior part of the brain, whereas the thoughts that are strange are located in the more posterior part in the brain.
376There are two sides in her: one destructive and one positive. Once, when she was in bed, she got for some seconds a feeling that she was transformed into two persons, who were both lying in the bed.
377A young female patient explains that she has always ‘felt wrong’; from time to time she stopped eating in order to starve the wrong part to death.
378He may feel younger and in flashes he may feel like another person.
379During a conversation, she says that she feels like a 5-year-old girl. At the next appointment, she repeats that she felt like a little girl.
380The patient says that he sometimes feels as if he was ‘outside’ himself as a sort of a double, watching or observing him or others.
381‘I feel as if I were my own mother.’
382A patient was briefly able to feel as if he was another person, of whom he happened to be thinking. He does not know whether it was a physical or mental experience.
383A patient briefly felt as if he was a dog.
384All  the  existential  thoughts  have  mixed  up  the  pieces  in  my mental system. I don’t understand life. The whole image of life has changed. So many questions, so little explanation!! Why are we living?
385He states that ‘nothing is relative’ in the sense that he finds no connection between things in the world.
386Language represents for her a confusing and overwhelming sea of almost infinite variation of meaning.
387A patient started to doubt the meaning of the most ordinary words. He bought a dictionary to learn these meanings from the very scratch.
388A patient always reflected on self-evident features of the world: why the grass is green, why the traffic lights are in three colors.
389Why do we have two eyes?
390My feeling of consciousness is fragmented.
391It is a continuous universal blocking, a strain.
392I always feel ‘half awake’.
393I always have a feeling of not having slept enough.
394I have no self-consciousness.
395Frequently, I have a strange foggy feeling in my head.
396‘I have a feeling as if my brain is shrinking.’ It’s like a constant pressure inside my head, as if there was something wrong inside, and sometimes also like a ring or a strap around my head. It hinders me in thinking and in seeing properly’.
397A patient says that he is frequently affected by ‘dizziness’, which means that he is ‘only incompletely in contact with the world, only 60–70%. It is, as if there was no hole (no opening) to the world. There is a lack of transparency between me and the world’. He emphasizes: ‘It has nothing to do with perception, perceptual impressions or the senses.’
398I have lost all pleasure. Previously I loved to jog; now I’m not interested in it.
399I am unable to feel pleasure. Nothing gives me a kick.
400I have no energy, no inner spark.
401I feel completely empty.
402I always feel tired and exhausted; I saw a doctor but he could not find anything somatically wrong.
403I have lost all form of desire. I have no contact to myself, I feel like a zombie.
404I lost my feelings, making me almost another person.
405Lately, she has felt being somehow strange, not really herself, perhaps absent-minded. Yesterday she had to look in the mirror to check whether her face had changed.
406She had an experience that her face looked witch-like, and therefore she did not like to see herself in the mirror.
407She saw that her neck muscles were strangely protruding.
408When she looked at herself in the mirror, she focused on the eye, which she suddenly saw as a ball in her head. It was ‘surrealistic’, and she felt that her face was changed.
409When I look down at the lower part of my body, it constantly feels twisted and displaced to the left, compared to the rest of the body.
410I have a feeling that my left and right forearms have switched places.
411I have a strange feeling that it’s somebody else’s body.
412It is as if his body was alien. He knows that it is his body, but it feels ‘as if it did not hang together’, it feels ‘as if his head was just fixed to the body’.
413She always feels self-estranged, ‘as if there was a little man in her head, steering this big robot’. Sometimes she looks at her arms and hands, and has a feeling that they are not her own.
414He lacks a ‘healthy self-acceptance’ of his body, it is difficult for him to ‘possess, take care of it without feelings of inferiority and shame’. It is difficult for him ‘just to be in his body’.
415She has difficulty in realizing that she is in her body, and she may be thinking ‘it’s strange that I am here’.
416He talks about ‘a lack of coherence’ or split between his physical part, visible to others, and himself, i.e. all that happens in his mind. He feels that his body is a shared property, something anonymous, distanced from him.
417Her uterus feels as if it was not her own, as if it was somehow detached.
418At a party everything seemed to him to originate from him or depend on him.
419As she saw a group of passengers getting off the bus she had a feeling that they were performing some sort of parody of her actual state.
420When he was having a cup of coffee, he thought that the clouds resembled a man having a cup of coffee.
421A former doctor recalled that when working in a small provincial hospital, he sometimes had a transient ‘as if’ sentiment that he was the only true doctor in the entire world and the fate of humanity depended on him.
422A patient had sometimes a fleeting feeling as if only objects in his visual fi eld existed. Other people and places did not seem to exist. He immediately considered it as nonsense.
423He experiences other people as robots and everything as a big pot of molecules, and then starts wondering if the world is real.
424As a child she experienced that ‘the whole world was built up just for her’, like a scene.
425He had the impression as if he could control the weather, as it
426seemed to change with his mood.
427New ideas and interests that gradually overtook my life and thinking absorbed me; they left a mark on my entire life.
428Extremely occupied by thoughts about how to be good enough.
429Had to redefine and analyze everything he was thinking about.
430Needed new concepts for the world and human existence.
431Colours seem to be brighter now, almost as if they were luminous.
432What used to be green, had now become dark green. The color of a cornfield seemed different, more intense and harsh. Everything seemed different and unnatural.
433It’s a dull world, it really is. I don’t think there’s any colors in that.
434Colors are dimmer and so is the significance.
435Sometimes, I still see things that are not there anymore, e.g., a car that has already passed by. They remain before my eyes for a while like a visual echo.
436A hat, initially seen on one person, recurred, in its proper position, on others.
437I sometimes see abstract patterns I have seen some time before. They persist for days at the same place in my visual field; when I move my head, they follow.
438My vision has decreased. I see everything hazy and foggy like through a veil.
439When reading, my vision is unclear, the letters blur before my eyes.
440When somebody shows me his whole hand, I can see only the upper part of the last three fingers. The part above a line that runs diagonally down from the forefinger to the little finger is cut away.
441Whenever I want to focus on an object, it disappears before my eyes.
442The way, the hen and the room suddenly were invisible.
443Things shape themselves; the round holes in the window-frames [the fastenings] become heads and seem to be biting at me.
444On all the trees and bushes I saw, instead of the usual crows, dim outlines of pantomime figures, pot-bellied fellows with thin bow-legs and long thick noses, or at another time elephants with long trunks swinging.
445I saw people’s skins emitting fine black and yellow rays; the air too became pervaded with other strange rays and layers...
446All day I have been afraid of wild animals which race through the closed doors; they steal, slow and black, along the wall to hide under the couch and watch me from there...
447The figures grouped themselves round me 3–6 meters away.
448Grotesque human figures...The figures were there in space, but as if they had their own private space, peculiar to themselves.
449He often felt that he saw colorful objects sail through his field of vision.
450I have to put things together in my head. If I look at my watch I see the watch, watchstrap, face, hands and so on, then I have got to put them together to get it into one piece.
451For I saw the individual features of her face, separated from each other: the teeth, then the nose, then the cheeks, the one eye and the other.
452...infinite space, unreal, where everything was cut off, naked and isolated.
453...saw the environment only in fragments. ...no appreciation
454of the whole...only details against a meaningless background.
455Everything is in bits. You put the picture up bit by bit in your
456head. It’s like a photograph that’s torn in bits and put together
457again...If I move there’s a new picture that I have to put together again.
458Sometimes an object stands out. Then, my eyes have to fix this detail, like being spellbound, although I don’t want to attend to it.
459Not only the colour of things fascinates me, but all sorts of little things like markings on the surface, pick up my attention too.
460The subject may describe contours as showing “breaks, bending, curve, meandering.”
461I don’t see entire objects, things or people...Objects no longer appeared stable. They would glimmer fitfully and become
462displaced, making everything appear as if it were in a state of flux.
463Patterns released from their cage, from their “apparent” immobility; now: buckling, waxing, swelling into waves, receding and diminishing.
464The subject sees an object simultaneously as an “intact green leaf” but also as “crumpled up.”
465While one is reading, the white paper suddenly appears red and the letters green. The faces of others take on a peculiar brown tint...
466Suddenly I seemed to look through yellow glasses. And at other times, everything was intensely dark-red.
467Everything was so small and far away.
468The furniture seemed small and distorted, the room long and wide.
469I was sitting listening to another person and suddenly the other person became smaller and then larger and then he seemed to get smaller again...
470...but the nearer we approached each other, the taller she grew, the more she swelled in size.
471Objects appear as bigger on one side and smaller on the other than they really are.
472The objects appeared somewhat distorted, higher on the one side and lower on the other.
473The commodities looked peculiarly different, changed and deformed.
474Visual percepts may be seen as  “doubled, oblique, slanting, or reversed”
475For quite a while, I saw doubly.
476The houses were all so lopsided, they didn’t stand straight.
477Things seemed so far away; everything was in a distance.
478All things seemed to have got closer, as if looking through a
479telescope.
480Faint spatial irregularities distort my perceptions, deepening stairs and telescoping school corridors.
481I see things flat. That’s why I’m reluctant to go forward. It’s as if there were a wall there and I would walk into it. There’s no depth... Until I see into things I don’t know what distance they are away.
482This may involve experiencing “isotropic” space or a “view from nowhere,” as if somehow seeing from “everywhere at once.”
483I seemed to have lost a sense of perspective. So I copied the model from a schoolmate’s sketch, thus lending a false perspective from where I sat. In the gymnasium I didn’t understand the commands, confusing left and right.
484There was a time when I went for a walk and I didn’t know where I was.
485I got lost...[and felt] a general lack of orientation. I couldn’t recognize any of my surroundings, people, or places.
486Again and again I shortly saw things crosswise, confusingly displaced against each other.
487I couldn’t throw things in the waste-paper basket any more, I always aimed too short or too long. I had lost my feeling for the distance.
488The subject describes objects as “mere images on canvas” or “as if they were painted on a window pane.”
489Space seems somehow to go on forever or to be “enormous”.
490I still saw the room. Space seemed to stretch and go on into infinity, completely empty. I felt lost, abandoned to the infinities of space, which in spite of my insignificance somehow threatened me.
491...an immense space without boundary, limitless, flat; a mineral, lunar country, this stretching emptiness....
492The air is still here, the air between the things in the room, but the things themselves are not there anymore.
493When I am awake, I can look at a tree or a cat or a bird and see the air around it, sometimes it looks like water, so sometimes I paint water.
494Then I felt that the autumn landscape [was pervaded] with a second Space. It was fine and invisible, hardly detectable. The second Space was dark, empty, frightening; it was difficult to say precisely what it was like.
495I am hypersensitive to any kind of sound or noise. When I am loud that I cannot bear it.
496I hear everything too clear and torturing, more distinct...so ill, the noise is louder. All sounds irritate me.
497I cannot hear right any more. Speech sounds so subdued, music so muffled.
498Everything seems to grip my attention although I am not particularly interested in anything. I am speaking to you just now, but I can hear noises going on next door. I find it difficult to shut these out, and it makes it more difficult to concentrate on what I am saying to you.
499A subject returned to answer the door several times during a 30-minute period after the doorbell had actually rung.
500Sometimes, when I switch off the radio what I last heard lingers for a while.
501The subject hears in the ocean waves some vaguely threatening message.
502The most disturbing of [the different voice-like experiences I’ve had] is – people talking, but for the purpose of communicating or influencing me in various ways...It’s [mostly] unclear to me whether or not any of it is an exaggeration of [what] somebody is saying versus me ‘hallucinating.’ I don’t think it’s hallucination, generally, I just think I’m overhearing something in a way that I’m interpreting it in a strange way [but] it’s unclear.
503One subject frequently heard the words ‘sausage and chips.’
504Sounds exactly like someone talking to me.
505Sometimes I’ll just hear the word ‘no.’
506From time to time I hear some vague sounds, e.g., like an animal’s sound or like a knocking hissing or humming. But I know at once or a few moments later that these sounds are not really there.
507Thinking sometimes manifests as incredible noise.
508...I seem to get a little mixed up about where sounds are coming from. Several times I thought someone was shouting through the window when it was really the wireless at the front of the house.
509The feeling of touch has become most unpleasant. When I touch wood, wool or paper, I feel a burning sensation run through all my limbs.
510When I touch things or my own body, it feels different from before. When I knit, the knitting needles sometimes feel peculiarly different, somehow sticky. And soft wool, too, feels different, like straw.
511All my senses enjoy things more. Taste is different and much more intense than before.
512I could not taste anything, everything was tasteless and insipid.
513I cannot taste the soup but only its ingredients. Tasting the whole soup requires a reconstruction.
514For about half a year, I couldn’t smell any more, for instance, I didn’t smell the burned milk and was not able to differentiate vanilla and coffee.
515With every word spoken to me or near me, with every slight noise, I feel a blow on my head, producing a certain pain. ...like an intermittent pulling in my head, probably linked with a rending of part of the skull-bone.
516A bird chirrups in the garden. I hear it and know that it is chirruping but that it is a bird and that it is chirruping are two things which are poles apart.
517Things I clearly see in front of me don’t pass to my mind and I remain insecure.
518Sometimes, I pass people and look straight in their faces, but only when I have already passed by, I recognize that they are familiar, that I know them quite well.
519As I was looking at the packet of cigarettes in my hand, I suddenly wasn’t sure whether the packet was part of my body or not.
520While I was riding the bike, I suddenly felt a kind of melting into my bike, as if the bike and I had become one.
521It seems to me that everything was going much faster than before. The nurses and the patients were moving more quickly than is usual. When the doctor spoke it sounded fast, loud and at a higher pitch.
522Birds pecking much faster than realistically possible.
523Time dilated.
524Time slower, faster, timeless.
525Mouth movement and speech of other out of synchronizing: one faster and the other slower.
526Outside things still go on, the fruits on the trees move this way and that. The others walk to and fro in the room, but time does not flow for me. What does the outside world have to do with me? I only bump up against time.
527I feel like a slow, big giant.
528I felt I was moving normally and everyone was moving slowly.
529It feels as if it is always the same moment...like a timeless void.
530Thought stood still, yes everything stood still, as if time had ceased to exist.
531I continue to live now in eternity, there are no more hours or days or nights.
532I stopped to light a cigarette...I suddenly had the feeling as if
533I had been standing there for about two hours and checked my watch. I had been standing there just for a couple of seconds.
534The hand [of the clock] is constantly different...now it is here, then it jumps so to speak and turns. Isn’t this a new hand every time?
535While watching TV it becomes even stranger. Though I can see every scene, I don’t understand the plot. Every scene jumps to the next, there is no connection.
536The course of time is strange, too. Time splits up and doesn’t run forward anymore. There arise uncountable disparate now, now, now, all crazy and without rule or order.
537I was asking continuously when my mother would arrive.
538I cannot remember time.
539I looked at a clock and it didn’t mean anything.
540It was all like a story. Middle of day seemed like night.
541From moment to moment, various “selves” arise and disappear entirely at random. There is no connection between my present ego and the one before.
542It’s all collapsed into the present so I guess I don’t see a future any more than I see a past. It just seems to be an omnipresent pure present presence, I guess.
543Time is somewhat changed. It isn’t supposed to be the way it is. I don’t know in what way.
544I thought I was controlling time. I thought I was here and in a different dimension at the same time.
545Time going back to same moment over and over.
546Not only time repeated itself again. A foreign time sprang up. Everything was confused, pell-mell, and I felt contracted in myself.
547Then everything seemed to stop, to wait, to hold its breath, in a state of extreme tension. Something seemed about to occur, some extraordinary catastrophe.
548And everything was new for me, it was all new for me.
549Every morning, “always everything again [seemed] completely different. On the one hand there’s this weird feeling that anything could be around the corner – monsters, the end of the world – and yet it’s all still like ‘so what.’ There’s no feelings of anxiety like one might expect. I notice this, and often wonder why these possibilities that would normally frighten people have no impact on me.
550Everything around me is motionless and congealed.
551I cannot see the future, just as if there were none. I think everything is going to stop now and tomorrow there will be nothing at all.
552I feel really disconnected from anything that might happen in the future. Even if I know what I’m doing, I can’t quite personalize it, like for me, will I be eating dinner? It has to be specific in my mind for me to feel like it’s real. And because I can’t predict those kind of things, I just don’t feel connected to it.
553Sometimes it seems that there’s not a future for me. I don’t know how to explain it. Kinda like, where it’s gonna go on, but I’m gonna stop.
554The subject reports feeling the future is full of “deadlines by which I would have to do things or everything would stop.”
555The future was blocked for the patient by the conviction of a destructive and terrifying event his execution. This conviction completely dominated his outlook.
556I was cut off from my own past, as if it had never been like that, so full of shadows as if life had started just now.
557The past feels like something that one has read in a book or a novel but never actually experienced oneself.
558Sometimes the past just doesn’t seem to exist, so a memory, like my therapist can tell me something has happened, I’ll think ok that exists because you’re telling me about it right now, not because it actually happened. Sometimes I think that I never was a child, never had a childhood, never had a past.
559Months and years fly by with excessive speed. One subject felt a past of twenty-nine years had lasted only four years at most and the smaller time-spans within this period were correspondingly shortened.
560My own memory gives me the impression that this time-span, 3–4 months by ordinary reckoning, was an immensely long time for me, as if every night had the length of centuries.
561There is no more present, only a backward reference to the past; the future goes on shrinking – the past is so intrusive, it envelops me, it pulls me back.
562Time seemed like I was back in the past, not today’s time.
563People move weirdly about…make gestures, movements without sense. I simply cannot grasp what the others do.
564I feel as if I’ve lost the continuity linking the events in my past.
565Instead of a series of events linked by continuity, my past just seems like disconnected fragments. Then the past turned round. Everything got intermingled but in no comprehensible way; everything shrank, fell together, packed up.
566When the visit is over, it could very well have happened yesterday. I can no longer arrange it, in order to know where it belongs.
567My cousin just had a baby, and I feel really happy, but I have to think about how I’m showing it. I don’t have that kind of automatic reaction to things like other people do.
568It’s sometimes difficult for me to move and do things naturally. So when I take a drink from my glass, and I’m having dinner with people, I always have to pay attention to who’s picking up their glass after other people.
569Other people’s gestures often seem odd to me because I’m really noticing the movements.
570I would really be overly attentive or critical or curious of body language. Like if I happened to be walking toward someone and they were moving away, I might take it to mean that they were intentionally moving away from me.
571I cut myself off from other people and became shut up in myself.
572There is a pane of glass between me and mankind.
573A wall of void isolated me from everybody.
574I am like an emperor in his pyramid. I am not involved in the world, merely observing it from outside to understand its secret workings.
575The others know the rules; I have to study them.
576When I was a child, I used to watch others to see what was the moment to be happy or to be sad.
577Should I make the algorithms to talk with him?
578The subject finds herself asking, “Why do I have to think so hard about what little things I’m doing?
579Am I doing the right thing, am I doing what other people would think is acceptable?
580I was convinced that everyone who saw me instantly knew I had some sort of social handicap, as if everybody who met me pretended to treat me normally and then laughed at me behind my back once I’d gone.
581I always feel like I walk into a room, people are staring, talking about me, they can know what I’m thinking. They know how stupid I’ve been in the past.
582Getting in touch with others scares me. They can harm me.
583Although I like company, conversations have recently become exhausting, stressful. Even the talking of others affects me.
584Being with people provokes an emotional crisis in me.
585When people get too close to me I feel nervous.
586Dealing with the three voices together, the sound would be just tremendous. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t do certain tasks because they’d be all talking.
587I suffer from acute empathy and identification.
588I think sometimes somebody is saying something because I think they’re thinking it, and I think they’ve actually said it out loud.
589The people that I look at, I make them have my own thoughts.
590My radar beam was a source of delight to me. I was able to summon it at will or to extinguish it, move it into my eyes, stare angrily at my enemy and he would become pale, frightened, and usually leave.
591Whenever I enter a room, I spread my energy all around and people become anxious and restless.
592My mind is too open. There is no filter. Everything goes in.
593It felt like my head was open and they could put thoughts in and so they could probably check what’s in it as well.
594Imposing thoughts coming into my head, and that’s always at the back of my head, near the brain stem actually, and I’m being taken over by some foreign sense to do things that I don’t want to do.
595Neighbours could read her mind, make her take the wrong turning in the street to prevent her seeing men and make her think violent thoughts because they sensed she liked men.
596Sometimes I think that there’s this other mind, and I am really part of this other mind, and they control me, they control the entire universe.
597Gradually I can no longer distinguish how much of myself is in me, and how much is already in others.
598I feel the mental states of others and I can no longer find myself.
599When I’m actually attempting to visually engage people there doesn’t seem to be any space between us, mentally. It’s really difficult to distinguish their thoughts and speech from my thoughts and my speech, and I feel like I’m not sure when I’m just thinking something, if they’re hearing it.
600I feel immersed in the human flood.
601I have observed already for a long time, how I change in the presence of other people. I start behaving as the other behaves, talking as the other talks etc. I wonder then what is my real identity, if I constantly change it. If I’m with my mom I act more like my mom, if I’m with my sister I feel more like my sister.
602I always try to avoid physical contacts since when people even touch me I feel they penetrate inside me.
603Other people’s bodies intermingle with her.
604One patient referred to other people in the ward as “All moving, rushing inside my head. They’re swinging round, pushing the head out."
605When I was standing on the platform, I saw this guy on the opposite platform, and I had the impression, he was doing exactly the same as I did, was somehow copying me. It was as if he were my mirror image.
606As she saw a group of passengers getting off the bus she had a feeling that they were performing some sort of a parody of her actual state.
607I feel gazes of other people as piercing, as if stabbing into me.
608When I look at the eyes of the other, I perceive them as very strong, almost impossible to bear.
609When someone looks at me, I feel exposed. I feel embarrassed that the other can literally ‘see’ my interiority.
610I have a constant feeling that I spread bad energy through my eyes.
611Sometimes I feel that everyone gets irritated and restless when I make eye contact.
612“I worry that when I look at people I may be injuring them somehow.
613When I make an eye contact with someone I feel uneasy. I cannot describe exactly why, but I feel like escaping or at least looking away.
614When I look someone straight in the eyes I feel strange vibrations inside.
615I have never been able to stand the gazes of others.
616People looked strange as if they were dead.
617Things were bad. As if I was on the Underground. It was like a dream. All I could see were people in a car. They looked like ghosts, statues, monuments, as if cremated.
618People appear to me as diminished in size and made out of paper or cotton, like small paper mâché chess pieces.
619She seems like a manikin moved by a mechanism, talking like an automaton. Movements were deprived of emotion and feeling.
620Whenever I’m around people, I look at the way they’ve positioned their feet: are they turned in or out or perfectly straight.
621The positioning of their feet tells me who they are and what they believe in.
622The colors of the clothing people wear tells me a tremendous amount about their values and what they believe in.
623One informant reported experiencing others as “gods, manifestations (faces) of a single god or superhumanly powerful”; she described “increases in metaphysical dynamism, universal animism, emotional resonance, human and/or divine purposiveness.”
624Patient reported that she couldn’t help noticing that she saw faces in the clinic which she has seen at home a few weeks before.”
625I knew her name and everything about her, yet she appeared strange, unreal, like a statue… I was in the presence of a stranger.
626He noticed odd behavior in an acquaintance which made him feel strange. A passer-by gave such a penetrating glance, he could be a detective.
627People appeared too fat or meager, somehow disfigured and not like they normally look.
628People’s faces rearrange sometimes, if I stare at them for too long and I lose track of what they’re saying. They become very kaleidoscopic. And faces start to rearrange.
629My husband’s eyes changed from bright blue to dark brown.
630Everyone was playing language games, as a way of persecuting me, with people using gestures, nods, and smiles to confirm to each other that I was the intended reference.
631She asked if I wanted them by Saturday. She meant I was a tart.
632I would hear people say that to me that I was early or I was late, people in crowds, and I would have a lot of delusions around that: I thought that I was supposed to stop time, and that was my goal.
633Other people somehow conveyed “that the world was coming to an end and that the result of this was that the world was constantly referring in a coded way to its own collapse."
634I couldn’t understand what anybody was actually saying to me, so when they would talk to me, on some level I got overwhelmed by all of these other sorts of secret messages they were trying to send me.
635I try to keep things at a distance, because the fate of others gets so much under my skin, I cannot cope with it. I avoid every conversation, because it excites me too much. If somebody comes for a visit, I retire.
636I reject my tendency towards identifying myself with what the others say.
637People buy a ticket to get on a train – that is the rule. But this rule is for them, not for me.
638But what is a train? It’s a word. The word has nothing to do with a solid thing like a train.
639I said ‘chair, jug, table, it is a chair.’ But the word echoed hollowly, deprived of all meaning; it had left the object, was divorced from it. A name, robbed of sense, an envelope emptied of content. Nor was I able to bring the two together. Everything that I read had a large number of associations with it, everything that sort of caught my attention seemed to start off, bang-bang-bang, like that with an enormous number of associations moving off onto things so that it became so difficult for me to deal with that I couldn’t read.
640Reading, I often wonder about common words and have to think about their meaning.
641More and more, I just read over lines without comprehending what they mean.
642When people are talking I have to think what the words mean.
643Sometimes when people speak to me my head is overloaded.
644It’s too much to hold at once. It’s just words in the air unless you can figure it out from their faces.
645I hear people talking but I did not grasp the meaning of the words. The voices were metallic, without warmth or color.
646MAMMA for me meant that from the beginning we are the two of us (M), then we are alone (A), then we are together for a long time (MM), but at the end we are alone again (A). Letter after letter I wanted to see if the string of letters corresponded the original meaning.
647Contentment? Well uh, contentment, well the word contentment, having a book perhaps. But when you come to the word “men” you wonder if you should be content with men in your life and then you get to the letter T and you wonder if you should be content having tea by yourself or be content with having it with a group and so forth.
648I don’t understand why this has to be called a table, and if the sun’s out we have to say it’s a nice day.
649Words breathe, they blink; they are capable of transforming the world and themselves.
650One word stood out of the sentence. That word became as something material, nearly a thing for me, or an image in front of me.
651Any word that could be taken as referring to me, even by oblique references, was interpreted that way "America" could be taken to mean “Am Erica,” i.e., a coded reference to someone who thinks he’s a woman. I would then take that to mean that the group accepted that this referred to me.
652One patient used the word “vessel” for nearly all objects and called a watch a “time vessel.
653If I could not immediately find an appropriate word to express the rapid flow of ideas, I would seek release in self-invented ones, as for example wuttas for doves.
654I built words that did not exist because my experiences needed something that went beyond ordinary language.
655One patient expressed trivialities in the most lofty, affected phrases, as if he were dealing with the highest interests of mankind.
656Thoughts were so numerous that I didn’t manage to talk.
657It’s like I can’t help but express things in a way that would leave a different impression and not even realize it.
658It leads to me trying to express something serious, but my expression is so messed up that certain details are distorted; with the changes in details, it no longer seems so serious.
659I thought my language was wrong. I believed that no one could understand what I said. I couldn’t understand what I said. Just high-pitched noises came.
660My thoughts get all jumbled up. I start thinking or talking about something but I never get there. People listening to me get more lost than I do.
661I often don’t know which details to include and I can also bring up a bunch of irrelevant stuff because I don’t know if it’s relevant.
662One patient would say of his speaking that ‘someone is controlling me,’ that ‘it goes out all by itself,’ or that ‘I am being forced to talk.’
663I have difficulties now to understand the symbolic meaning of sayings or fables that I had not before.
664I cannot recognize anymore that a certain object or event only stands as a symbol or metaphor for something more general, abstract or philosophical.
665Refers to a candle as a ‘night illumination object,’ a dustpan as a ‘domestic utensil.’
666One talks and it seems one says nothing and then one finds one has been talking about the whole of one’s existence and one can’t remember what one said.
667There are things I’ve experienced that are totally outside the scope of my prior experiences but that I cannot describe (or even begin to describe); there is no way of expressing them.
668Again it is extremely difficult to describe these changes in words because matters are dealt with which lack all analogies in human experience.
669"I am blocked by the limitations of inadequate words” said a patient, explaining her silence as due to her “inadequacy to use language to express what lies buried so deeply inside me."
670I find that I cannot accept the inadequacy of abstract or general language to fully capture and communicate whatever I want (or feel I need) to think or express.
671I go into such detail because I tend to find normal, simple language to be inadequate for describing the complexity of my experience.
672Everything is too nuanced. There are subtleties that one cannot express.
673One patient described a schoolyard as “limitless, unreal, mechanical and without meaning.
674Things are artificial, detached one from the other, unreal, without life.
675Everything appears as through a veil; as if I heard everything through a wall.
676Things do not feel real. There is something between me and the things and persons around me; something like a wall of glass between me and everything else.
677A Russian patient in the Burghölzli asylum in Switzerland claimed that “an identical duplicate ‘Russian Burghölzli’ had been erected.”
678As a child she experienced that ‘the whole world was built up just for her,’ like a scene. You can’t imagine what it is like to know everything is simulated. Having dinner – even at my grandma’s house! – seems faked!
679More and more, despite my efforts, I lost the feeling of practical things.
680Subject describes world feeling “thin as plastic,” “immaterial,” or like “floating images,” “shells with nothing inside” or “a pasteboard house,” or perhaps as “strange, two-dimensional” or “only silhouettes."
681I like immovable objects, boxes and bolts, things that are always there, which never change.
682People are perceived as “truncated,” like “perpendicular lines,” “stripped of their flesh” or having a “trapezoid head".
683One patient lived for ideas and saw people as impersonal objects.
684Patient experiences other people as robots and everything as a big pot of molecules, and then starts wondering if the world is real.
685All objects appear so new and startling I say their names over to myself and touch them several times to convince myself they are real. I stamp on the floor and still have a feeling of unreality.
686Objects are stage trappings, placed here and there, geometric cubes without meaning.
687When, for example, I looked at a chair or a jug, I thought not of their use or functions – a jug not as something to hold water and milk, a chair not as something to sit in – but as having lost their names, their functions and meanings.
688A gardener sweeping a path fifty yards away is ‘a long streak with something moving backwards and forwards towards the top of it’.
689Obstacles, chairs, buildings took on a life of their own. They seemed to make threatening gestures, to have an animistic outlook.
690Just as the perceptual world may be experienced as something strange or dead, so it can be experienced as something entirely fresh and of overpowering beauty.
691The behavior of the dog made a strong impression on me; it was so wild, uncontrolled, so full of pure nature, savage and instinct-driven. The whole landscape was so authentic, so primordially natural it was all so moving that I felt an immense happiness.
692The very same visitor in exactly the same clothes was here one year ago today and said the same things.
693When I heard the news I felt I had heard it before. I felt I had already done those things.
694I knew it was my room, but I felt as if I’d never set eyes on it before.
695It’s just as if I’ve visited a place for the first time.
696I suffer from a diminution of memory, or something like that: many concepts suddenly seem so strange to me. I have to get used to them again each time. They seem new to me, even though I have not exactly forgotten them. They are just so unusual then.
697I don’t know, when I talk to you whether I’m having a hallucination, or a fantasy about a memory, or a memory about a fantasy.
698I have a really difficult time distinguishing between dreams and reality...I’ll have dreamed about something, and then it happens, and it’s this really weird doubling of the experience because I feel like I’ve already had the experience. Sometimes when you first wake up from a dream [normally] you’re a little uncertain, but this just endures.
699Real day time scene seems to be part of a dream that I had.
700When people were talking to me, instead of hearing what they were actually saying, I would hear something else that involved my delusions.
701I sought some fixed point, but found none. The muchness and the motion were too much and too fast. Everyone withdrew from everyone. There was a running as of something liquefied, a constant going forth, as of evaporation. Everything was schematic, ghostlike, even myself.
702Reality is too complex. I cannot find key rules.
703The patient felt paralyzed. His hands could no longer grasp, for who was it that gave them the right to take things? His feet could no longer walk, for who could ensure ground for their steps?
704The more I focus on my breath, I feel like I’m either not breathing or I’m hyperventilating. I feel like I’m constantly working on just being. I have to think about doing everything.
705The patient observed that he was ‘compelled to give things a second meaning.’
706Suddenly things seem to mean something quite different. The patient sees people in uniform in the street; they are Spanish soldiers. There are other uniforms; they are Turkish soldiers. Soldiers of all kinds are being concentrated here.
707One patient “sees incorporated in the white bark of a birch tree a very definite quality, namely that of innocence” (as opposed to seeing it as a symbol of innocence).
708My trouble is that I’ve got too many thoughts. You might think about something, let’s say that ashtray and just think, oh! Yes, that’s for putting my cigarette in, but I would think of it and then I would think of a dozen different things connected with it at the same time.
709I have sometimes seen my thoughts floating around outside my window like leaves or snowflakes.
710Parents are the people that raise you. Anything that raises you can be a parent. Parents can be anything, material, vegetable, or mineral, that has taught you something. Rocks, a person can look at a rock and learn something from it, so that would be a parent.
711One patient classified “table” and “chair” not as furniture, but as “objects in the universe."
712I always know how many red cars I have seen today. It seems my attention is overtuned.
713The coming into existence of such life [patient is explaining the appearance of insects before his gaze] is due to the purposeful manifestations of divine power of will or divine power of creation.
714These ‘devilish incidents’ are most certainly not coincidences.
715Collisions in the street are obviously intentional. The fact that the soap is now on the table and was not there before is obviously an insult.
716These animals [referring to insects appearing in a garden] always appear on definite occasions and in definite order around me. They cannot possibly have existed before and only been driven into my company accidently.
717I kept thinking I was being watched by videocameras. I had a tremendous feeling of claustrophobia. I felt trapped. It was all like a story.
718It feels like the universe is zoned in on me.
719He had the impression as if he could control the weather, as it seemed to change with his mood.
720A patient had sometimes a fleeting feeling as if only objects in his visual field existed. Other people and places did not seem to exist. He immediately considered it as nonsense.
721I seem to have lived all the events I have read about or heard about or knew by heart.
722When I read a book or a newspaper, one thinks that the ideas in them are my own; when I play a song or an opera arrangement for the piano, one thinks that the text of the song or opera expresses my own feelings.
723My so-called delusions are concerned solely with God and the beyond, they can therefore never in any way influence my behavior in any worldly matter.
724Many of my aberrant pseudo-perceptions feel the way they do because I am actually perceiving them taking place in a parallel reality that only partially overlaps with this one.
725I can feel absolutely certain that space and time (and hence physical reality) no longer or never did exist, and yet understand that in order to get to a psychiatry appointment I have to walk down the street, get on the train, and so both ‘beliefs’ exist simultaneously and seem in no way to impinge on one another.
726You only see a still picture if you don’t move your head and eyes.
727The flowers at the window suddenly started to shake, the landscape to move heavily. The walls went back and forth.
728The house-signs are crooked, the streets look suspicious; everything happens so quickly. The dog scratches oddly at the door.
729‘I noticed particularly’ is the constant remark these patients make, though they cannot say why they take such particular note of things nor what it is they suspect.
730When he was having a cup of coffee, he thought that the clouds resembled a man having a cup of coffee.
731It was as if everything was being done to spite me; everything that happened in Mannheim happened in order to take it out of me.
732A young man noticed that other passengers in the train would occasionally cross their legs. Whenever this happened he knew that the whole scene around him was a play performed for his benefit.
733It isn’t just that things seem different or changed but that there seems to be some intention or motivation behind the changes.
734Things seem to have transformed themselves or been transformed for a reason. And somehow – although I can’t figure out why – this seems to pertain directly to me.
735Something is happening, please tell me what it is.
736Something is going on, as if some drama is unfolding.
737Everything was the same and yet it seemed strange.
738In my mental illness I had been, as a person, enlarged and stretched beyond all reasonable limits. I was a part of everything, and the whole world, sometimes the whole universe, was in a sense a part of me.
739When, for example, I looked at a chair or a jug they became ‘things’ and began to take on life, to exist. Their life consisted uniquely in the fact that they were there, in their existence itself.
740I hear the world blowing up.
741I sometimes feel absolutely strongly that the world is going to come to an end, that everything’s going to end. But not because I know how or why – there’s no specific vision there – just an impending sense of a final end to all things.
742I try to hold on to a certain emotion, grab it before it gets away.
743I think others are more spontaneous in this, it comes to them more freely and stronger.
744I am without emotions or joy. All the time, I am in the same mood, that is, in a no mood, without swings or changes. It is total boredom. I only vegetate.
745Immediate clear emotional significance seems to have disappeared and consequently I often feel confused and at a loss as to how to respond to people and events.
746I am starting to feel pretty numb about everything because I am becoming an object and objects don’t have feelings.
747Sometimes I feel completely blocked, as if paralyzed and I cannot express any emotion, negative or positive.
748Sometimes I feel angry or very upset and desperate, but cannot express it, cannot communicate it at all. I just stare at my psychiatrist and am completely unable to convey anything other than a kind of blankness.
749It’s like an internal block, a block of feelings.
750I constantly live in fear. I cannot relax and I don’t know why.
751Underneath all my fears is a fear of death, fear of not existing at all.
752Since I remember I felt a deep irritation: ubiquitous, powerful and irresistible.
753Restlessness deep down within me provoked a huge gap between me and other people. If only I could feel an emotion like love, hate or anything! Because emotions mean that you are part of a society, with this restlessness I was not.
754...kind of an internal restlessness or mental irritation...almost physically unbearable, but definitely in my mind, a mental thing.
755I’ve had some strange experiences like travelling in time and flying to the planet Mars in which the feeling was unlike anything I’d ever experienced...kind of the deep beauty of the universe, and also, in those moments, the sense that I understood things in a deeper way.
756My afflictions fill the place that was meant for sharing love. I am crying in despair.
757The world is a hostile and cold place in which we are sentenced to loneliness, estrangement, and finally death.
758There have been times when my emotions... are stuck, even though I’ve moved on and am in a new situation...Somehow the mood is still there, in a strange way...Just there just as an emotion without anything really attached to it.
759I see it as that I experience opposites simultaneously. Like if I read the word ‘white,’ I have to think black. But it’s also like that with feelings, so I might feel aroused and disgusted, interested and uninterested, that sort of thing...
760What I detest more than anything else is being persuaded by others.
761I’m changed. I’m getting to be more humane. Will it ruin my brain? All this humanity is upsetting my own special framework. It’s polluting me.
762I cannot reach them [other people], but also I don’t want to reach them.
763My aversion to common sense is stronger than my instinct to survive. That’s why I say that being against common sense is both a gift and a punishment at the same time.
764Madness is necessary to human intelligence to get to the higher levels.
765Doctor, I have a mission to accomplish. First of all, to build my country, Somalia, then together with my brother to build a more livable and fraternal world. I realized that there is a new culture in the world, to morrow’s world, that of brotherhood.
766I have the invention in my head. Mine is not an illness, it is an experiment. I was chosen for this.
767I am an existentialist, everything is the same to me, I don’t need any diploma. The existentialists are people for whom everything is equal.
768If I no longer believe in gravity, it’s not that I fail to anticipate something when I don’t expect an apple to drop from the tree, but that I simply think that the apple could just as easily float or fly and therefore have no reason to anticipate it falling.
769[A] patient had difficulty coming up with what is usually deemed the ‘correct response’ [to a picture arrangement test] because, as he said, ‘any order would make sense.’
770One patient would “collapse any difference of degrees of probability,” since it is possible for historical archives to be tampered with (even if highly unlikely on a large scale); he insisted that one could not trust any historical account at all.
771I wonder sometimes where does this globe end. I look around and I wonder whether I can reach the end.
772Sometimes I think about where did the first word come from?
773Who brought the first words, and where did it come from? I don’t understand how we have seeds, you know? Where did the seeds come from?
774I doubt everything and everybody. Sometimes I even doubt that my parents are my parents or that Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia.
775Well, that is how it is; I have no doubts about it, I know it is so.
776Everything is so dead certain that no amount of seeing to the contrary will make me doubtful.
777The truths I found, presented themselves immediately and directly with absolute certainty.
778I have come infinitely closer to the truth than human beings who have not received divine revelation.
779I knew that I was given some powers from God to penetrate the deep sense of reality.
780I have a mission to accomplish. Saving the world from self-destruction.
781One patient said he had “come to understand the mind more completely than, and please pardon what may seem to you my grandiosity, more completely than anyone in the history of mankind”; most other human beings seemed purely “mechanical” minds: “organic machines” or “mental vegetables.”
782The first psychiatrist that I went to, I told him that I felt responsible for the Gulf War, and I blamed myself for things that I had nothing to do with.
783One patient declared she “has been under the influence of an electrical machine...being manipulated by someone in a certain manner, and everything that occurs to it happens also to her.” I am monitored to react as expected, and that happens so rapidly that I, even if I had wanted to, am unable to stop myself.
784One patient adopts a pedagogical system, changing its principle once a week: he changes between strict military discipline to a principle of absolute indulgence or ‘a liberal principle of tenderness.’
785One woman categorically rejected any use of knives and scissors (even for chopping vegetables or cutting open a package) because she viewed them as associated with circumcision.
786New ideas and interests that gradually overtook my life and thinking absorbed me; they left a mark on my entire life.
787Extremely occupied by thoughts about how to be good enough.
788”I have the sense that everything turns around me,” the patient may say. “I am like a little god, time is controlled by me.
789At a party, everything seemed to originate from him or depend on him.
790I feel as if I were the ego-centre of society.
791I became in a way for God the only human being, or simply the human being around whom everything turns.
792Is this really happening? Is this actually the universe, or just some kind of an amoeba in a Petri dish in some kind of larger universe?
793Gustatory disturbance: distortions in the sense of taste.