1923

1923 is significant in the book as the year in which Karl Jaspers described the primary delusionary experience, a state defined less by an immediately formed belief than by a prior alteration in the subject’s felt world. The surroundings remain perceptually intact, yet everything seems subtly changed, making the year a reference point for the book’s comparison between disturbed waking consciousness and the dreamlike experience of false awakening.

Jaspers’s Primary Delusionary Experience

Karl Jaspers’s 1923 account describes patients who feel that something uncanny is occurring before they can identify any specific cause or formulate a definite delusion. They sense that something suspicious is afoot, while ordinary things acquire new meanings. The environment is not grossly transformed and perception itself remains unaltered; instead, a subtle and pervasive change envelops the entire scene in an uncertain light.

The experience is therefore atmospheric before it is intellectual. An unexplained presence seems to be in the air, producing distrust, discomfort, and uncanny tension. Its defining feature is not simply a false conclusion about reality but a prior disturbance in the conditions under which reality is interpreted. The world looks much as it did before, yet no longer feels stable or self-evident.

Relation to False Awakening

The 1923 description is introduced alongside the account of Type 2 false awakening, in which a dreamer appears to wake in realistic surroundings but gradually becomes aware of suspense, unusual sounds or movements, and an atmosphere of apprehension. The comparison rests on the similarity between an apparently normal setting that becomes ominous and the primary delusionary experience in which the world’s significance changes without any obvious alteration in its visible objects.

Charles McCreery argues that the resemblance is not coincidental. He proposes that both Type 2 false awakening and the primary delusionary experience are phenomena of sleep, with the latter representing an intrusion into waking consciousness of processes associated with stage 1 sleep. On this account, the 1923 formulation supplies a psychological and phenomenological vocabulary for describing the moment when waking reality begins to behave like a dream without fully losing its ordinary appearance.

Hyper-arousal and the Border of Waking

McCreery’s explanation connects the experience to hyper-arousal. A psychotic subject may be so highly aroused that waking life is interrupted by micro-sleeps, while sleep-related phenomena such as hallucinations and secondary or specific delusions intrude into consciousness. Sleep paralysis is also presented as a possible part of this borderland condition.

The significance of 1923 within this discussion is thus conceptual rather than merely chronological. The year marks a formulation of consciousness caught between recognizable perception and an altered field of meaning. It helps frame the book’s later image of death as a more radical false awakening: an apparently ordinary condition gives way to the discovery that reality has changed at the level of the body itself.