Tsunamisurfer: My understanding is that this experience isn't uncommon. It must be very distressing not to trust your perceptions.

When Will Hall interviews Pat Deegan, for example, she mentions that her psychosis started with perceptual changes - specifically visual. She says she was out on the basketball court, and she suddenly lost her depth perception (which would be frightening with basketballs flying all around you! ).

My son has mentioned odd visual perceptual problems, but they seem to have to do with the reduction of his medication dosage. He didn't have these problems before he took medication.

I read somewhere (Origins of Mental Illness by Claridge?) that part of psychosis is this perceptual change, but there's a secondary part which is the brain's way of trying to make sense of the odd perceptions. One of my son's things, for example, is that letters and numbers will suddenly appear very sharp and will "leap out" at him. When this happens he says he feels like there is some hidden message he's supposed to figure out. So, maybe the visual distortion is some kind of purely physiological thing, but the idea that there's significance or meaning in that distortion is just the brain's way of figuring out why the numbers and letters have suddenly jumped out.

It's odd the kinds of things the brain will do in order to make sense of the world. I mentioned yesterday that I'm reading a book by a neuroscientist. He tells a story of a woman who had a stroke. When she was asked to close her eyes, she could only close one because she no longer had control of the other eyelid. If you asked her, she would say that she had closed both eyes. Finally one doctor held up three fingers and asked how many fingers he was holding up. When she told him three, he asked how she could know this if her eyes were closed. She simply didn't answer. Her brain just locked up, because it couldn't sort out the contradiction: my eyes are closed and yet I can see.