I'm listening to the PBS program American Experience, this one on John Forbes Nash, Jr. (A Beautiful Mind.) Louis Sass, a clinical psychologist, started talking about paranoid schizophrenia, and mentioned as an example that paranoid schizophrenics might believe something like, say, Looking at something and believing that they are not the ones viewing that object through their own eyes; that someone ELSE is viewing that object.

Sometimes, not recently but within the last couple of years, I'd notice something while looking into a mirror; my movements, my eyes, the way I grin; and not notice anything else. Very quickly I'd be overwhelmed by the impression that it's not ME. It felt like I was someone else in the wrong body. But not that it was a stranger in my body; like a previous incarnation, or something. A past me looking at the present me going, "What the fuck?"

I couldn't shake it. I'd have to go do something else until my mind got off of it. It probably still could happen, but since it scares the shit out of me I don't try to do it anymore.

So if I start claiming that boys on my campus are shooting invisible webs at me as they walk by (actual case), somebody get me committed.

Dr. Sass also mentioned Nash hearing voices in his head, and gave examples. Man, if I have any MORE of a running dialogue, I DO need to be committed.



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