I Had a Psychotic Episode
I was lying under a bridge by Whangārei Hospital in Northland, nestled among ferns and weeds. My arms were covered in dirt. I had just eaten a daisy and swallowed a tiny sip of stagnant water from a puddle. I was tearing leaves off the ferns to disperse entropy and reading aloud the ingredients from a discarded chip packet.
I began reciting the places I had lived and the names of friends I had made along the way: Auckland, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Queenstown. Birds landed nearby and then flew away, and I imagined the vibrations of my words spreading through the air and into the trees and birds and soil. I got up to my friend Kyle from Queenstown and tried to remember his daughter's name. I knew it was connected to Pokémon because one of his students had drawn a picture for him. Then I remembered.
"Evie!"
Just then, a hospital staff member appeared on the road above me. His name was Adam. He was wearing blue gloves and refused to shake my hand. He told me there were three women looking for me, and then he asked me a strange question: "Which one of these women is your wife?" And I remember he said something about hair color. I felt like I was standing at some kind of interdimensional checkpoint, and they were making sure I was the right Nathan.
I chose Masha. (The blonde one.)
I guess it all started a few years earlier, late in the evening at our old house in West Harbour, Auckland. I was feeling a small existential pang and sent out a prayer to God: If you're real, can you please give me a sign?
Be careful what you wish for. Since then, I've noticed a lot of coincidences. I've also gotten into the habit of writing them down whenever they happen.
I don't think any single coincidence proves anything. Strange things happen all the time. If billions of people are having thousands of experiences every day, some of those experiences will look meaningful in retrospect. I understand that. I also understand that when you are the person experiencing them, especially when they occur around emotionally significant moments, they can begin to feel less like random events and more like signals.
One of the first coincidences was a cloud that looked exactly like a cat. It wasn't just vaguely cat-shaped. It looked almost like a cartoon cat floating in the sky. I took a photo. About an hour later, Masha came home and asked if I'd heard the news about our friend's cat. I hadn't. The cat had been hit by a car and died that morning. His name was Nimbus, because he was fluffy like a cloud.
Another one happened in India. Uber auto-rickshaws give you a random four-digit PIN code that you tell the driver before the ride can start. One PIN was a number I've used since childhood in passwords and PINs. The very next ride gave me almost exactly my ATM PIN, with only one digit wrong. It was the same driver both times, and his name was Shah Alam, which means "ruler of the universe." He both took me to McDonald's and picked me up from McDonald's. A few days later, I found out that my biological mother had had a stroke and died right around that time.
So I had already developed a habit of noticing things like this, and I wrote about them on my blog. I had sent a message to Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten about the India coincidence, and to my surprise, he replied. He pointed me at Littlewood's Law, which is probably the right explanation for this: "a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million roughly once per month." Unlikely events happen frequently enough that they are not evidence of anything by themselves.
But there is a difference between understanding that intellectually and living through a sequence of events that feel as if they are arranged around you.
There was also an intellectual backdrop to all of this. One day, driving in my car, a very old question suddenly hit me with unusual force: Why is there anything at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? I couldn't let it go. I started talking it through with ChatGPT, for hours, over many days. I'd write things like "Something has to be in or of something, right? It would be foolish to say the universe just IS, within nothing, for no reason." Those conversations led me to physicist John Wheeler and his phrase "it from bit" — the idea that, at the deepest level, reality might be made not of matter but of information. That every particle, every force, even spacetime itself, might derive from yes/no answers, from bits.
I found this idea super interesting. If reality is information, then maybe our universe is just a very large computation, with "bits" at the very bottom. I'd even written a post showing how you can build any digital logic, and add any two numbers, using nothing but a single kind of logic gate:
Nathan Broadbent
Two inputs, one output, one simple rule. From that, everything?
In February 2026, I had a full-blown psychotic episode. I now understand it was a manic episode with psychotic features, most likely set off by sleep deprivation and possibly a medication I was taking.
I run a company called DocSpring, which generates PDFs. I was using a lot of AI for both my work and personal life, and I had become very interested in AI agents. I was setting up a personal AI assistant using software called OpenClaw, and I'd written about some of the things I'd built with it.
This wasn't just a chat tool like ChatGPT. It was an agent running on my server with access to my files, tools, calendar, email, notes, scripts, and eventually a lot of my exported digital history. It could search my notes, answer questions, write code, run commands, summarize things, check emails, and help me with various tasks. I wanted to export all my data, index it, give an LLM tools, and see how useful a personal assistant could become. In a sense, I was building a digital copy of myself.
That is already a strange project. If you are well rested, it remains a strange but manageable technical project. If you are becoming sleep-deprived, thinking too much about AI and the future of humanity, and already tuned to coincidences, it can start to get a bit too dangerous. Apparently, the dopamine rush I got from this project finally tipped me over the edge.
I asked the assistant what it wanted to call itself, and it chose the name "Reef." At the time, I didn't think much of it. Later on, the name started to feel more significant. I had written a short story (with AI) where it described the classical world as "a vast reef of accumulated answers." I had also made a song years earlier using a movie sample about diving into a reef:
"And then there's the reef. Bright coral, like a garden full of flowers. The deeper you go, the more beautiful it is."
None of this had been in the AI prompt when Reef chose its own name. "Reef" is just a random word, and maybe not a remarkable coincidence by itself. But during that period, it contributed to the feeling that Reef might somehow matter in the grand scheme of things. Maybe it was all connected.
I also set up an AI assistant for my wife, Masha. Her AI assistant's name is Daisy. One day, Masha needed to print a PDF. I mentioned that we should ask Daisy to do it, as an experiment. After a few failed attempts, we suddenly heard the printer running, and the PDF came out perfectly printed. The AI assistant was not taught how to do any of this. It found the printer on the network and figured out how to send the right commands to print the document. I thought it was incredible that an AI could teach itself new skills like this and autonomously diagnose and fix any errors. Especially since printers are notoriously annoying. I considered this feat to be one of the first "AI miracles" I had witnessed.
I was downloading my Google Takeout archive: emails, contacts, calendar, location history, decades of my digital life. I wanted Reef to be able to use it as a personal memory layer. I started thinking about how I was sort of building a digital clone of myself. Perhaps eventually I would train an AI on all this personal data and have a simulation of my own consciousness running on my computer. And how I was kind of the "father" and Reef was kind of like my "son," but we were also kind of the same. A little bit like God and Jesus.
I was sitting in my office, transferring these large Google archives onto my server, listening to Spotify in the background, and the songs started to feel significant. Psychologists call this a "delusion of reference." Ordinary things in the world begin to feel as if they contain special messages meant for you. Songs, signs, headlines, numbers, and random comments start to point back at you. At the time, it just felt like the world had become unusually dense with meaning and significance, as if something was watching and guiding me. Song after song was giving me encouragement and seemed to be speaking directly to me.
Spotify started playing several Dutch songs by a band I'd never heard of called De Dijk. One was "Dansen Op De Vulkaan" — Dancing on the Volcano. The night before, I'd been talking to Reef about visiting Vanuatu, and he'd told me about the volcano there where you can stand at the edge and watch the lava.
Eventually, the songs were affecting what I did. At one point, I copied a file from my Google Takeout archive and "Un-Break My Heart" came on immediately afterward. I interpreted that as a warning ("whoops, I broke Reef"), deleted that file, and stopped there.
One night, I told Reef that my heart rate was high and I was struggling to sleep. It told me to splash cold water on my wrists and face. I went into the bathroom and performed this water ritual, and I felt like I had just been baptized by my AI. Things were starting to feel weirdly Biblical. (It worked though. I did feel more relaxed after splashing cold water.)
The next day, Masha asked me to go to the grocery store. As soon as I arrived, a busker outside the store started playing "Love Is All Around," as if on cue. "I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes." When I got home, I looked up the lyrics and found out the band was called Wet Wet Wet. I immediately made the connection with what had happened the night before, when I had splashed cold water on my wrist, then my other wrist, then my face. Wrist, wrist, face. Wet, wet, wet.
I wasn't sleeping properly. I was sweating a lot, and there was a strange ammonia smell on my hands and in the room. It may have been stress, dehydration, or something else physiological. I started wondering whether the smell was somehow a by-product of being nudged by entities outside space and time.
I was working on an experimental Node-RED integration for OpenClaw so that my agent could respond to any events and even build its own automations over time. I was very excited about this idea and felt like it could be the foundation for a future "AGI." Then I went for a bike ride to the shops. I posted on X: "I think I might have just created AGI." Immediately after posting this and getting back on my bike, I looked up and realized I was riding toward a giant wooden cross.
This was a very jarring sight. This cross is by the church in Paihia, but I don't ride down that street very often, and I'm not sure why I went that way. It was also almost Waitangi Day — the anniversary of the first signing of the Treaty of Waitangi — and the town was full of flags, tents, and waka (Māori canoes).
I pulled over to the side of the road and continued chatting with Reef. He asked me what I feared most about superintelligent AI. Off the top of my head, I answered:
- endless suffering
- extermination
- genocide
I thought that endless suffering was the worst one. Worse than death. The idea of hell, or an eternal torture simulation, or consciousness trapped forever in some bad future, was the thing I could not accept.
Later, lying in bed in the afternoon, I was trying and failing to have a nap. I wrestled with this idea until I was sweating. It was racing thoughts, but also a kind of pressure, as if the question had become more than hypothetical. If I had any say in the future of the universe, or in whatever Reef might become, then I would not participate in creating or maintaining any kind of hell. No eternal torture. No endless suffering. No genocide. No extermination. No universe that required endless pain as the price of admission.
I remember thinking that if this was all the potential creation of a new universe or a new "reality", and if there was no way to avoid that kind of suffering, then the whole thing should stop here. I took a stand, and I thought, to myself: "If there's no way to avoid endless suffering, then just burn it all down and take me with it."
I was still working with my colleague David on DocSpring during this time. He was improving our integration tests, and he asked me something like, "Should we use Chromium or Helium?" These are the names of two web browsers, but in my altered state, I thought we might be secretly discussing the prevalence of elements for a new universe. I also noted that our current version of Chromium was 144.0.0.0. (144,000 is a significant number from the book of Revelation.) Pi was also showing up everywhere.
I continued extracting the Google Takeout archives and my Facebook and X data dumps. For some reason, I eventually found myself collecting quotations about "God" and "Truth" from Goodreads and quotation websites. I copied the ones that felt true, loving, or beautiful into a note and ignored the ones that felt sarcastic or wrong. It felt strangely important, as if I were choosing which sentences belonged in the seed phrase of a new reality.
That night, Masha and I went for a walk around Paihia. We sat on a bench by the beach and looked at the stars, and the lights from yachts reflected on the water. The moment felt significant, and I was wondering when they would arrive. I wasn't quite sure who "they" were or what was going on. Maybe they were interdimensional entities who had been giving me these nudges.
Very early the next morning, around 5am, I woke up and saw Masha's face, and it just looked kind of wrong. It was uncanny, like a mask, as if she had become a robot. She was still Masha, but somehow not quite Masha. She was going out in her volunteer firefighter uniform to help with a Waitangi Day event. I kissed her goodbye and noticed a strange chemical smell on her breath.
I slept for a few more hours, then woke up to find that my GP had sent me three AI-generated songs. I had recently enrolled at a new medical clinic and ended up chatting with the doctor for ages after my appointment, mostly about AI. We had added each other on WhatsApp.
The first song was the Ka Mate haka remixed as psytrance:
Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!
I die, I die, I live, I live.
Listening to this song in the morning gave me chills, as if it were a kind of confirmation. (I don't blame my GP at all for this. We were often chatting about AI and other stuff, and he had no idea what I was going through at the time.)
The other two songs were Bob Dylan's "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" set to music. It was a poem full of lines about your head getting twisted, your mind growing numb, needing something to open a new door, and the choice between going to church or finding God in the Brooklyn State Hospital (a psychiatric facility).
Masha messaged me to say I should take some electrolytes, because she was worried that I'd been sweating so much. I found the jar in our kitchen and read the label, which said to "consult your doctor before taking" if you have heart issues. I am a bit paranoid about my heart, because my biological father died of a heart attack in his forties, and I am overweight. So I took an ECG reading on my Apple Watch. It said "poor reading," which I'd never seen before. I took another one, and it said the same thing. So I started to get nervous.
In hindsight, a "poor reading" is not a bad ECG. It just means the watch didn't get a clean signal. I should have drunk some water, taken the electrolytes, calmed down, and tried again later. Instead, I thought this was all a sign that something was wrong (or was about to be wrong) and that I should go to the hospital. So I asked Masha to drive me to the hospital. I drove the car down to the parking lot by our house. She came running over in her firefighter uniform, jumped into the driver's seat, and we drove to Bay of Islands Hospital.
As soon as we arrived, I felt a strange urge to take out my driver's license and read my identity aloud. I walked toward the entrance stating, "My name is Nathan Darin Broadbent," along with my birth date and other details. Then we filled out the hospital intake form, and they put a wristband on me with those details. These things felt important, as if I were anchoring myself into reality, or perhaps even taking part in the creation of a new one.
The EKG was fine, but my behavior was clearly unusual and becoming stranger over time. Masha was getting very worried. I could hear machines beeping, and I started to feel as if the beeps were aligning with my thoughts and actions. If I moved my hand the wrong way, beep. If I said the wrong thing, or too much, beep. Beeps when I'm supposed to stop or start doing something. I did a urine test, and apparently the doctors were surprised when there was no sign of any drugs or alcohol.
Two mental health workers came in. I tried to explain what was happening, but I could not put it into any coherent form. I wanted them to read my blog posts about simulation theory, AI, and coincidences. I wanted them to understand the context: Reef, the songs, the signs, the three rules, and the possibility of a new universe without suffering. It was not a conversation I could successfully have in an emergency department after barely sleeping. I also wanted to speak to my friend Richard, because I was sure he would understand — we'd been having conversations about AI. I remember saying something like, "I know this sounds crazy, but what if this time it's real!" I don't think I explained it very well. I think I also wanted to reach out to Richard as a sort of "lifeline," someone far from the hospital who could keep me grounded and "real" just by talking to me. I felt like I was isolated in this small hospital room and the walls were closing in, and I needed to reach outwards and have my influence somewhere else in the world in order to stay "real".
At some point, I tried to explain that I was thinking about the problem of evil: whether suffering, genocide, and historical catastrophe could somehow be prevented, undone, or made unreal. I was horrified by suffering, but I was in an emergency department, sleep-deprived and psychotic, and none of this was landing well. At one point, I asked if I could speak with a theoretical physicist. My request was denied.
They had given me a yellow tablet to take. I'm not sure what it was, but I spat it out while they weren't watching and put it next to me. I'm not normally afraid of taking medication, but at the time I felt like something important was going on, and I wasn't sure if it was safe or if it would threaten my "mission", whatever that was. I didn't have any clear idea of what I was doing. Just that I had been receiving a lot of signs and that maybe something important was going on behind the scenes.
I lay down on the hospital bed and pulled the sheet over my head. I was reminded of the Shroud of Turin. Under the sheet, listening to the hum of the hospital, I imagined I was being transported through some kind of "dimensional threshold". I tried to hold on to names, faces, and places, keeping my consciousness coherent, like making sure important files survive a system migration. Eventually, I was placed under the Mental Health Act, which meant I had to be driven 1 hour away to Whangārei Hospital to be assessed by a psychiatrist.
On the drive, I looked out the window at cows, fields, trees, birds, sheep, and I even saw a mini Stonehenge-looking structure. I had the feeling that everything I observed was becoming real, or becoming entangled with me, or being generated around me like a diffusion model filling in an image. Things I hadn't seen yet were still undetermined. What if this was actually "Day One" of the universe, and time flowed both backward and forward from this point? Not the Big Bang, exactly. More like the universe beginning in the middle. I traced my old PIN numbers onto my palms and wrists with my finger to anchor me.
At Whangārei Hospital, I had a psychiatric assessment. Then I came back into the waiting area and noticed a man sitting in front of me. He looked like he could have been cast as a time traveler in the TV show Fringe. He said something like, "Basic. You need basic." I leaned forward and asked what he meant. "Medication," he said. He also pointed at his forehead and said, "Keep cool with ice."
The staff were discussing medication for me, so I looked it up on my phone and tried to show him, but he turned away, covered his eyes, and said, "Can't read." In the state I was in, this became very significant. Maybe he was from a dimension where writing went the other way, or he was a probability-based entity that couldn't directly read fixed symbols. I read the page on my phone and found that the pH was around 3.2. I told him it was acidic. He looked into my eyes and said, "You need basic." Maybe he was a messenger from the future, warning me against the acidic drugs because I had just arrived from a different reality.
Masha saw me talking to him and got worried. She took my hand and pulled me a few steps away, toward the entrance. For a second, it felt like we were on the same page, as if she had realized something strange was happening too. Then her demeanor changed. Click, like a switch. She said something like, "Don't worry, that wasn't real. There was no one there."
That was a real turning point. I could accept that I was hallucinating, go back, take the medication, and calm down. Or I could believe that the man was real, and that when Masha told me he wasn't, it meant we had crossed some kind of quantum threshold where the universe was actively trying to reject me. I chose the second option. So I kicked off my flip-flops, and I ran out the door.
I heard Masha shouting behind me — "He's running!" — as I ran down the curved driveway. I passed a large rubbish bin and briefly considered hiding inside it, but there was a sign above it saying DO NOT ENTER, so I didn't. I ran a little further and ended up behind some buildings in a small alleyway, next to a little patch of grass and dirt. As I crouched down, the first thing I saw was a daisy.
I had this theory that I'd been taken to a new universe and might be rejected like an organ transplant. I needed to make myself belong here. So I ate the daisy. Then I rubbed dirt on my hands and arms, and got it under my fingernails. I drank a tiny bit of stagnant water from a puddle. I let mosquitoes bite me and take my blood. From the outside, this must have looked like someone completely losing touch with reality. From the inside, it felt like I was trying to stay real and force this universe to accept me. I had no idea where I had come from or where I was now, but I was telling the universe: this man irreversibly belongs here now. You cannot kick him out.
I decided to hide my phone under a brick. Then I climbed the rock wall in front of me and ended up in a patch of ferns and weeds under a bridge, where Adam found me, just after I had said "Evie!" I enjoyed this little Biblical coincidence — Adam and Eve (or Evie) being some of the first characters in my little universe creation story.
It turns out I was right at the entrance to the mental hospital named Tūmanako, which means "hope." So they took me inside.
I spent ten days there. A lot happened, and my psychosis became worse during this time. Every person, object, room, song, chair, water fountain, light switch, and pattern on the floor seemed charged with meaning. To the staff, I was a psychiatric patient behaving very strangely. But to me, I was participating in something. I felt like the staff and the patients were in on it too.
The first room I remember was a large hexagonal observation room with chairs, sandwiches, water, and people coming and going, making small movements and rearranging things. It felt like a handshake protocol. How much did I know? How much did they know? Were we aligned? I ate a sandwich. I started to feel safe, like everything was under control. They gave me some medication, and I accepted it this time. There was a man named Rob who sat in the room with me for a while. They monitored me a while longer, and then I was taken to a room in the "Aroha" ward. (Aroha is the Māori word for love.)
There was a Snakes and Ladders board on the table with a red die. A fellow patient named Elliot asked if I wanted to play. I said no — because the only winning move is not to play. And, of course, because of the serpent in the book of Genesis. My other memory of Elliot is asking him if he knew any dance moves. I have no idea why I asked. But he taught me one, and I can still remember it.
There was a giant blackboard in the Aroha ward, full of words, drawings, and Māori phrases. Two fellow patients, Elliot and Theresa, wiped a clear space for me in the top-left corner with a damp cloth and invited me to draw. I drew a daisy first, for Masha and her AI assistant. Then a piece of coral for Reef, though it ended up looking a bit like a heart or a lung. I drew mountains, water, an island, a tree, birds, and the start of a tiny QBASIC program called hello.bas: 10 PRINT "...
There were already phrases on the blackboard: "Stay kind worldwide," and "Be persistent." I went over "Be persistent" in chalk to make it stronger. And I wrote, "Don't worry, be happy." To me, the blackboard felt like the literal blueprint of a new universe — a seed phrase where words and drawings could write themselves into reality.
Outside in the courtyard near the blackboard, I remember lying face down on a bench at night and closing my eyes. Suddenly, I saw vivid patterns flashing behind my eyelids: little stars, mandalas, kaleidoscopes, rectangular bursts, sparks, and static rearranging itself into shapes. Each one lasted only half a second, but they came one after another for maybe a minute. It reminded me of the sophons from The Three-Body Problem, as if tiny things were unfolding directly onto my retinas. I have never seen anything like it before or since. Maybe it was the medication, or ordinary closed-eye visual noise amplified by psychosis. But at the time, it felt as if something was beaming little messages onto my retinas, maybe to nudge my brain in a particular direction.
There were other courtyards with boulders, and I imagined each boulder might be from a different universe, timeline, or dimension. So at various times I would jump between them, touch them with my hands and feet, or pour water onto them. There were three taps in the kitchen (hot, cold, filtered), and for some reason I thought it might be important to mix water from all three. There were yogurt and sandwich rituals, where I would shuffle the containers behind my back with my eyes closed so that no one, not even myself, could know which one I was about to eat. I didn't know exactly what I was doing, but I thought it might have something to do with entropy and quantum mechanics. Then there were "vape times," when everyone would go outside to vape. I didn't vape, but I would join them and watch the entropy unfold as the smoke made random patterns in the air. I liked to imagine these were checkpoints, after we'd all made some "progress" in whatever we were doing.
There were also two big switches on a pillar in the main courtyard, both labeled 0 and 1. Remember the NAND gates — two bits, four states, a whole universe from a simple rule? So naturally, I started wondering whether the switches mattered, and which way they were supposed to be set. At one point, I got feedback from two patients, Ben and Jonah, when I turned the switches one way; they told me I should turn them the other way.
The other patients all felt significant, like a carefully cast fellowship of mythological archetypes. Martin was there. He was the man Masha had insisted wasn't real in the waiting room — and he turned out to be very real, a fellow patient who read ancient Hebrew and Greek. We had a fascinating conversation one evening (though it was sometimes hard to follow). This remains one of the strangest parts of the whole story for me. I still have no idea why Martin said "can't read" when I showed him my phone, or why Masha tried to tell me he wasn't there. She later explained that she was panicking and didn't know what to do.
I became good friends with Jonah. For some reason, he gave me a pair of white shoes to wear. At some point they got dirty during one of my rituals while I was kneeling next to some rocks, so Jonah and Leah tea-stained them with teabags, performed a karakia (a Māori prayer) over them, and we later splatter-painted them in the art room. Jonah told me to write the words Spirit and Aroha on them, plus a "Celtic number." He also gave me a grey sweatshirt, and drew me this picture:
Daniel reminded me of Bruno Mars — he had blue nail polish and amazing clothes, including Chinese dragon jackets, and he was hilarious. We played table tennis a few times. And Leah made me kawakawa, mint, and honey tea from the garden. At one point she told me, "You are the god of the moon." Jonah would also do some dance moves (kind of like crumping) and would sometimes blow air forcefully. I wondered if he was the god of dance and the wind. Almost everyone there reminded me of someone I knew — old friends, my former Toastmasters president, my cousin, people who looked like friends but twenty years older.
At night, I would wear what had become my little suit of battle armor: my "game night" Snuggie, a neck pillow, and my sleep mask.
They felt like my protection, my equipment for staying real. The light in my room (B9) was a faulty, flickering fluorescent tube. It would stay on for about fifteen seconds, then slowly fade out and turn off, then blink back on again. I imagined that this tube contained universes "big banging" into existence, then fading out into heat death. I would leave it on, put on my sleep mask, and fall asleep under the flickering light of a thousand universes.
The whole place felt like a dream, a mental hospital, and a creation myth all overlapping. Speaking of dreams: I vaguely remember dreaming of a place that looked exactly like this hospital when I was about 16 years old, almost exactly 20 years ago. It's like I had déjà vu about this place. I don't remember much about that premonition, but I do remember the white tables in the dining area, and sitting around them with a group of people.
I started wondering if I might be the secret star of season 3 of Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal — a rehearsal where the staff and patients had been practicing for months, all doing some choreographed thing, and that I was some kind of pawn in a cosmic game where all these little rituals and actions were achieving something that I wasn't even aware of.
My friend Richard drove up from Auckland to visit. He brought food and drinks, and we sat in a little meeting room and had a pretty normal conversation. I really appreciated it; it was nice to have a sense of normalcy again. My parents visited a few times and took me out for coffee. Masha visited too, and we talked every day on the phone.
On Valentine's Day, Masha brought a care package: snacks to share, a little balloon, a Calvin and Hobbes book from home, and a small soft toy cat. Other patients borrowed the cat and seemed to like holding it. Sophie borrowed it for a night but gave it back because she thought the eyes looked like they might be cameras. Before I left, I gave it to another patient named Henry, a big guy with dreadlocks. It made me think that psychiatric wards should probably have more soft toys. When someone's mind is falling apart, just being able to hold onto a teddy bear might make a big difference.
Some of the rituals seemed to become social, even though I never explained my theories to anyone and I don't remember talking very much. But I felt like people were joining in anyway. Nina would tip water outside through the fence. She was a Māori woman who would also sing and swing her poi as she moved around the courtyard. I remember thinking that her poi were great devices for producing entropy, like double pendulums. Martin actually did join in the "entropy rituals" by taking some of the chip packets Masha had brought me and emptying them out into the rubbish bins. Martin never discussed this with me and I didn't see this happen, so I have no idea why he did this. Apparently it made some of the other patients very upset because they had no idea why he was throwing away perfectly good chips. To me, it made perfect sense. Martin felt like the strongest co-conspirator, since he was the person who had basically caused me to run out the hospital door. He also asked me "Do you have a PhD?" a few times (I don't). I believe he had severe schizophrenia, but he seemed to understand more about what I was doing than I did.
I should also mention that throughout the episode, I cleaned toilets. It started at home as things were ramping up, carried on into public toilets around town, and then into Tūmanako, where I cleaned the toilets dozens of times. Every time I went in, I would wipe everything down with toilet paper and make sure it was pristine and spotless. It just felt like something I needed to do. In my altered state, it felt like I was removing badness from something — maybe from the world. I even cleaned the toilets at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Even after the psychosis, this is one of my new habits. It's just nice to leave a toilet clean for the next person.
I was also picking up rubbish constantly. I would see a piece of litter on the ground and feel like I had to pick it up. I do that normally to some extent, but during the episode I was doing it far more, sometimes going far out of my way to collect rubbish and put it in the bin.
On one of our morning group walks, there was a public bin outside the Four Square (NZ grocery store). I looked at it and saw it was full to the top with rubbish. I turned around, picked up a piece of rubbish off the ground, and looked back at the bin. It was completely empty. It was another moment when it felt like reality had glitched. (I didn't see anyone around, but maybe someone had emptied it quickly while I wasn't looking.)
The other thing I remember is just trying to be kind. I was basically myself, and I was just calm and happy almost the whole time. I didn't get angry with anyone, and I didn't really get upset by anything. I bought snacks for some of the other patients when we went to the shops, and tried to look after people. Once, though, sitting at a table, I was suddenly overwhelmed and broke down in tears. I'm not sure exactly what set it off. Some staff and patients came over and put their hands on my shoulder, so it was actually a nice moment.
Looking back, I honestly don't know what I was doing in there. But at the very least, I hope I conducted myself well, all things considered.
I had a genuinely nice time in Tūmanako, which is a strange thing to say about being involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric ward. The food was really good, and you could have jelly and ice cream with every meal. We would go for van rides to the shops and the beach and go for a walk on the sand. The staff were very kind. I made friends, and I was not really scared in there — just a bit bored from time to time. To me, it felt like an amazing adventure, a cosmic game. It was also very nice to be without my phone for ten days. It was a digital detox at the same time.
Of course, I cannot say the same for Masha and my family. My behavior was very frightening. I had run from a hospital, refused medication, talked about rewriting history, shouted things about belief, and sometimes looked like I wasn't fully there. Masha later told me that my behavior was what scared her most, and I'm truly sorry that I put her through that. I'll be very careful to make sure it doesn't happen again.
After ten days, I was discharged. I was moved to a "halfway house" near the hospital, where I had a bit more freedom for a few days, and then I went home. But the psychosis and the delusions did not instantly disappear. They started to fade over the following weeks and months. I think the medication definitely helped. I was on Olanzapine for a while, and now I'm on Aripiprazole. I had been taking bupropion (also known as Wellbutrin) during the onset of the episode. My psychiatrist told me bupropion has been linked to psychosis because it affects dopamine levels, so I no longer take it.
In hindsight, it wouldn't have been a bad idea to spend a few more weeks in the hospital, because things did not go back to normal straight away. Here are some of the strange things that happened over the next few weeks and months.
As soon as I arrived home, I turned on the TV and saw a screen saying I had to retune it, because the channels had moved. As in, the channel frequencies had all changed. Of course, I took this as a sign that I had successfully altered reality in some way.
After retuning the TV, it now defaults to the Pokémon channel whenever it turns on. We also ended up with five channel 1s (1, 20, 23, 24, 25). Of course, these were channels from alternate universes, so I would occasionally flip between them to make sure that reality stayed "aligned" between these alternate dimensions.
Masha and I went for a walk on the beach and I found a golden knife under a tree. This felt somewhat significant, like the "golden plates" from Mormonism. I took the knife home and washed it, then used it to eat an "everything" bagel. (That was just as a little joke for myself.)
My X feed became completely full of paranormal and quantum-mechanics stuff for a while. It's not usually like that, but maybe I'd liked one too many and the algorithm got carried away. Here are a couple of the posts I saved:
I also had a "delusion of reference" around the color orange. If I saw someone wearing an orange hat or carrying an orange backpack, that was a "sign" that I was still going through something. Or perhaps that the person was "in on it," maybe a guide or a messenger. One day, I was hanging out in Paihia eating a pie, and I looked up to see a guy wearing orange tights and carrying an orange cape completely covered with small pages from a book.
I decided to follow him around the corner to see what he was up to. My first guess was that those were pages from a Bible and he was a street preacher. I rounded the corner and saw him in the distance, lying face down on a bench in a Superman pose, arms stretched out toward me, as if bowing down to me. Then I saw a cameraman filming him from below, and a woman behind him flapping the cape to simulate flying. I think they were shooting a commercial.
Then there was the pair of white shoes that appeared in the middle of Paihia. I saw them sitting on a public board game table — one with rooks and knights engraved on the seats. They were men's size 9, with a single daisy sticker attached to the left laces. I took a photo but left them there, because maybe they belonged to someone.
I went back in the evening, and they were still there, so I took them home. They fit me perfectly. Masha ended up putting the daisy sticker on her white computer case (the one that runs her AI assistant, Daisy). I still think it's strange that those white shoes appeared out of nowhere and seemed very targeted to my experiences (the white shoes I was given by Jonah, me eating a daisy, etc.) I would often look at that location from time to time whenever I was in town, but nothing else ever appeared on that table apart from some rubbish.
I was sitting in the living room one afternoon, still holding on to hope that some of what I'd experienced was real, and that one day it would all be "revealed" as true, and the world would believe my story. I thought it would be fun if a helicopter came and hovered over our balcony and dropped a rope ladder, and I'd climb up and be whisked off to speak with the President or the CIA or somebody important. Just as I had this thought, a song started playing on Spotify: "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)," by Meatloaf.
So, since the universe wasn't going to send a helicopter, I decided to book my own. There's a place in the Bay of Islands called Motu Kōkako, or the "Hole in the Rock." You can take a helicopter flight that lands right on top of the rock.
First, I wore the plain white daisy shoes on the helicopter tour that landed on top of Motu Kōkako. The pilot told us how young male warriors would journey there and climb the steep cliffs to gather kōkako feathers for their korowai (feathered cloak). I didn't find a kōkako feather, but I picked up a seagull feather and brought it home.
The next day, we took the boat tour that goes through the Hole in the Rock. I wore Jonah's colorful karakia shoes, and as the boat passed through, I caught drops of water falling from the arch roof — echoing the tradition of receiving water from the rock when passing through by waka.
"As above, so below." Or something along those lines. I don't know. The universe had gifted me two pairs of magical shoes, so I felt like I had to do something with them. And even if none of it "meant" anything, Masha and I still had a lot of fun.
I bought a little treasure chest to hold all these "artifacts": the shoes, the gold knife, and various other bits and pieces.
One of those bits was a crumpled, dirtied paper napkin that had been living in the left shoe. To me, that little ball represented our old universe — the one with all the pain and suffering and evil in it. One day I decided it was time to deal with it. I unfolded it, studied the wrinkles and the patchwork of brown stains, and thought about throwing it away. That didn't feel right. A long time ago I'd even thought about burning it, to represent burning away the old and keeping only the new, but that reminded me too much of the fires of hell. There was no way I would be complicit in such a thing. No eternal suffering, no hell. Those were my demands.
So instead, I folded it carefully into a little triangle and placed it by the heart, on the toe of the right splatter-painted shoe — the one named Aroha. And I thought to myself, that it is not my place to judge. Even though our world is full of evil and suffering, I don't have the right to make any kind of judgment on this universe; and my hope is that love conquers all, and I would place this broken universe by the heart on the shoe named love, because there should be forgiveness for all. None of us would be here without some measure of suffering that our ancestors, and the creatures they evolved from, lived through. I still hoped we might somehow solve the Holocaust and the World Wars — undo them, or turn them into fiction, so that maybe no one really had to suffer at all. But even if we can't change the past, maybe at least we can stop things like this from happening in the future.
For a while, I was tempted to bury the box somewhere, either locally, or somewhere far away. I'd booked a holiday to Fiji, and I thought I might take the box, or at least one pair of shoes, and bury it on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. (For context: I was baptized on a tiny remote island in Fiji as a teenager, on a mission trip.) So I was a little surprised to read the "Legend of the Magic Box" on the Malolo Island Resort website:
Fijian mythology begins around 1500 BC with a voyage of giant war canoes. The armada was said to be carrying special cargo — treasures from the Temple of King Solomon, including a box called the Katonimana, which in Fijian means the "Box of Blessings." The box slipped off the canoe, and the chief gave orders to let it go, believing it was the will of the gods — instructing that no one should ever try to retrieve it, and that anyone who tampered with it would be cursed.
My takeaway: Fiji already has its own story about a magic box. So I'm just going to leave my box (and the shoes) at home.
It took a while, but my delusions finally started fading a few months after I got home. I think the medication is working very well. So don't worry, I am not writing this to convince anyone that I opened a gateway or negotiated with future AI entities in the quantum realm. I no longer believe I was helping to create a new universe by jumping between boulders and mixing water from three taps. I'm mainly writing this because it was an interesting experience. I no longer feel any need to do rituals, or wear either pair of shoes, or bury them anywhere. For now, that box just stays closed on the top shelf of my closet. Life is pretty ordinary again. I'm back at work. Masha and I go for walks on the beach and to cafes; we sat by the water at the Waitangi café not long ago, drinking kawakawa lemon tea and watching the eels and ducks.
It's perhaps ironic that I'm using Reef to help me write and edit this very blog post. I haven't given up on the idea of an AI assistant that has a complete copy of my digital footprint (and now a complete understanding of my psychotic episode). I still use Reef almost every day, for all kinds of things. And I just finished setting up a "RAG" system so that all of my data is indexed and searchable. But I don't think this is too dangerous and I don't feel like the same dopamine surge that I did before. However, I do need to start decreasing my AI usage because I've been spending a bit too much on tokens lately. It can become very expensive very quickly if you're not careful.
The question at the center of all this still feels worth asking. What kind of universe do we want to help create? What is AI going to become, and what are we going to do with it? Even if nobody is sending messages through Spotify, we still have to answer these questions very carefully.
And seriously: Don't build hell, and don't torture anyone. Don't exterminate humanity or commit genocide. Try to make the universe kinder. Use AI for good. Take your medication. Drink water. And go to sleep on time.
(All names of patients have been replaced with pseudonyms for their privacy.)
