They say if you're crazy then you won't know you're crazy. You'll just assume that what you're thinking is perfectly normal. I doubt that's always the case, but it's probably strangely comforting to most people out there who have bizarre thoughts and hope they haven't crossed over into lunacy. Still it's probably hard to know exactly at what point a person goes sailing off the edge of sanity. Like many things in our lives, it's a subtle change over time. Just look at how you think about things now. You probably didn't always have the same exact thoughts meaning your current point of view could be a relatively recent development in the way your mind works. Sometime in the past you believed something that you don't anymore. You may not even know at what point you changed your mind. I'm not talking about something like the existence of Santa. It's usually something more fundamental in the way you perceive the world that shifts throughout your life. Next thing we know it seems like it's always been that way and we accept our new reality as fact and move on with our lives, hardly remembering how it was before.
The thing is we tend to take a lot of what constitutes reality for granted. Never mind the fact that reality itself is hard to define. So in a way reality becomes this mutually shared experience that everyone sort of agrees upon after the fact. While it's happening though it's different for everyone. The same event is viewed in diverse ways and after it's been processed by everyone we come to a general consensus about what happened. That is assuming everyone's perception isn't skewed in some drastic way. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and everyone except you believed that the sky was green. Not only that, but in their minds it's always been that way. The idea of a blue sky is unheard of. Now for you you have memories of a blue sky and your personal reality is suddenly counter to the shared reality. In that situation who is right? How do you know you haven't taken the first step towards going crazy?
In movies there are those times when a character finds themselves in a situation that defies logic. They're talking to someone who isn't there. They feel insects crawling over their body, even though no one else can see them. While we're watching these scenes we can't help but ask the question "How would you not realize what you're thinking is crazy?" On the outside it seems obvious that what's happening isn't real. Why would aliens from the planet Zersus-7 be trying to read your thoughts through your toaster? When you say it out loud it sounds crazy. To the person it's happening to though it seems real. It may seem crazy to them at first, but it doesn't take long for something to become the new truth. Like I said at the beginning, we've all had beliefs change over the course of our lives. We believe that our thoughts are the truth. To someone else it may seem irrational, but for us it's our reality. Each of us knows a person who has done something that made no sense. Most of us know there have been times that we ourselves have done something that made no sense. At the time it seemed right. Later we come to our senses and realize that our thought process was off in the weeds. What if we don't ever come to our senses though? What happens if despite all indicators to the opposite, we continue down that chain of thought? The people around us my start to question our ability to navigate reality.
Of course there are times though when our brains try to put the brakes on something that seems to be bordering on false. Again in the movies they like to do this when some unbelievable situation comes smashing into a person's reality. The waitress is suddenly being chased by an evil cyborg from the future. Aliens have invaded and destroyed every major city in America. The dead have risen and have a taste for human flesh. These are all situations where initially the mind is going to reject the premise and try to find a more reasonable explanation. How do you know what you're experiencing is real? Sure you just saw robotic overlords set the ocean on fire, but the same brain that sees that could believe that you're actually Napoleon returned to life in order to finally win at Waterloo. How can we ever truly distinguish what's really happening compared to what's happening within our mind? We hope that someone else can confirm what we believe to be true and that more people accept it as fact. It's when someone's perception is in the minority that it gets labeled as crazy. We like to believe that the majority opinion is the right one when it comes to the acceptance of reality. If each of us is experiencing our own version of the world at any given moment then how can there ever really be one unified reality? Does that make us all a little bit crazy to someone else?
