(Dec. 6, 2013) My first full-blown psychotic episode began as a series of imaginary conversations with God.
It began with me trying to imagine what it would be like to be God. This progressed to my imagining that God was with me in my mind’s eye telling me what being God was like. At some point I came to believe that He was there talking to me and from there it got progressively worse.
It would sometimes be hard to say if I thought I was talking to God or remembering being God. What He told me about being God was cataclysmic. He described immense amounts of time drawing up plans and designs. He told of entire universes slowly developing intelligent life and complex civilizations. His goal was to create joyful societies living eternally in peace and harmony. And He always failed.
He could not root out people’s quarrelsome nature and warlike tendencies. Time after time a vast, complex universe would develop only to have man destroy it. There would be nuclear war or some such. It would start on one planet and spread throughout the universe. He told of destructive weapons beyond my imagining.
When I started believing that I was God, I sometimes believed I had made myself human out of loneliness, not wanting to continue being one of a kind.
Neurologists to this day don’t understand how we distinguish between memory and imagination, as they seem to involve the same brain areas and impulses. Many times in my life, I would be unable to make an accurate distinction. It was getting that way now. I was imagining highly complex, structured fantasies and believing them to be memories.
It kept getting harder and harder to push away the fantasies dominating my consciousness to focus on conversation, what a teacher or coach was saying, or homework. I couldn’t shut them down to sleep at night. I became obsessed with them.
I quit sleeping altogether, as the fantasies kept racing through my consciousness more and more complex, faster and faster. At some point I came to believe that I was some combination of God and Jesus, then the creator of the universe himself.
I spent much of my time, both in bed and during the day attempting to live my life “remembering” my many adventures and accomplishments as creator. I didn’t talk about these thoughts to anyone partly because of how I thought they would react and because I was beginning to believe they were real and wanted them to be real.
Eventually it became useless to shut them down or to tell myself it was just fantasy.
Joseph Bowers
Author of Life Under a Cloud: The Story of a Schizophrenic
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