“When one becomes at first accustomed to the fact that one is and shall likely remain utterly stranded, there may, from time to time in certain minds arrive, in waves, hysterias, reveries, and madnesses without bound or number. Like fevers, these come, and take one’s mind as their body of action, enforcing upon it a likeness with each storm whose arrival and passage rock the human person to their core.

Within these tempests, patterns otherwise inaccessible to notice or reflection leap into demonstrative significance upon the inner stage of such a person’s heart and mind. It is as without intention or choice as is seeing color or feeling temperature is ordinarily understood to be.

The effects can be provocatively bizarre. One receives messages from the specific codes on the license plates nearest the four corners of the nearby intersection, or reads in the pattern of fallen fruit near one’s hut a narrative written by the highest hand regarding one’s fate, one’s circumstances, one’s sins… and one’s future. The sound of the wind is actually a language; and how rarely it bodes well. Only a mind tempered to its core can withstand the incredible force, velocity and chaos that are characteristic of even the more gentle examples.

The world and all its features become the interwoven books of a mind gone rampant with symbolic hyperbole and pseudoreligious identification. This mind’s perspectives render obvious to it patterns endless and sublime in the otherwise ordinary processions of phenomenon; the lay of dust on the desk becomes a secretly divine epic of paranoid futurisms and phantasmal intrigues intended only for oneself. Needless to say, the implied roles for contexts and participants generated by these seizures of awareness are most often as absurd as they are exaggerated.

Yet this is neither the beginning, nor the end of this topic. For a truly adaptable person can, like an extremely experienced ship captain, not only survive such encounters, but make fine developmental and perspectival use of them. For these rare few, such experiences can be provocatively beneficial.”

— an anonymous informant