By: Mark Honigsbaum | Brainstorm: Detective Stories from the World of Neurology; Unthinkable: The World’s Strangest Brains – review | Neuroscience | The Guardian
When I was a boy I had a recurring dream that Lilliputian figures were scurrying under my bed. I can’t recall if they bound my hands and feet like Gulliver, but I certainly found their activities fascinating and made no effort to resist, even when, on occasion, they succeeded in moving my bed slightly to the left or right.
Every now and then, however, they would push the bed a little too close to the window. That I did not like, because it put me in range of the clown waiting on the balcony (I have always been terrified by clowns). Now, frozen by fear, I really was immobilised and it was only by screaming that I could snap myself awake and escape their night-time peregrinations.
It’s as if when he zapped himself in the bath he also zapped his sense of self