Emma’s belief that she could fly is a manic delusion recounted to Michiel from inside the conviction itself: the world seemed finally right, and the certainty felt more real than doubt. The episode brought her to the edge of a balcony and led her to test the belief by increasing the height of her attempted flights. She never jumped from the balcony, but neither did failed tests immediately undo what she believed. The eventual interruption came when depression returned, leaving the delusion’s logic intact even as its exhilarating force receded.

The conviction as a newly normal world

Emma explains that she did not merely think she might be able to fly. She believed it. In her account, the change was not a person abruptly acquiring an absurd idea, but the arrival of a reality that felt self-evident: she suddenly knew she could fly and felt that knowledge down to her bones. She understood the belief as something that seemed to have been true all along, not as a suspicious thought approaching from outside. Its force came partly from that familiarity. Once the idea appeared, it seemed true; once it felt true, belief followed.

The account distinguishes the experience of delusion from ordinary speculation. Emma describes her mind as making reality rather than simply interpreting it. A single belief became a comprehensive explanation, and she then fitted the rest of the world into it. This is why she says the conviction did not feel like a thought that could readily be questioned: it felt terribly true. Her retrospective explanation makes the delusion intelligible without presenting it as reasonable from the outside. Its internal coherence was part of its danger.

The balcony and the imagined flight

When Michiel asks whether she jumped, Emma struggles to explain the memory. Closing her eyes brings her back to the balcony: the railing presses against her middle, with what had once seemed like endless emptiness beyond it. In the recollection, that emptiness has become space she believes she can enter and shape. She imagines the wind beneath her arms lifting her, carrying her through a dive and then pushing her upward into the sky. The imagined flight feels wonderful and irresistible, and for a moment it displaces the depression.

Opening her eyes returns her to the dreary room. The contrast leaves her close to tears: the depressive state has returned, but she has just felt the absolute conviction again. The memory therefore holds both the attraction of the delusion and its physical stakes. Emma says that she wanted to jump, yet she did not. The imagined freedom does not become a leap from the balcony; instead, the episode’s danger develops through an escalating series of tests.

Testing the belief in steps

Emma describes choosing small beginnings because she feared a failed first attempt: the wind might be wrong, or there might not be enough room for a forward dive. She wanted the attempt to work at once, so her reasoning was to build up gradually. Her first test was a stool. When it did not work, she did not conclude that flight was impossible. She reasoned that the stool was too low to provide the height and speed required.

That explanation allowed the belief to absorb disconfirmation rather than yield to it. Emma moved from the stool to a chair, then to a kitchen step ladder and, the following day, a ladder. Each increase in height treated the previous failure as a problem of scale, not as evidence against the premise. The sequence gives the delusion a methodical surface: Emma calls the gradual approach logical, while the logic itself keeps the conviction beyond challenge. She does not describe reaching the roof or making the jump from the balcony. Her account instead ends the sequence with a change in mood.

Depression interrupts, but does not disprove

Emma says she was fortunate when depression returned. The change stopped the progression toward greater height, but it did not persuade her that flying was impossible. As Michiel observes, the delusion had never really been broken. Emma agrees that she had not genuinely escaped its logic: everything had seemed to fit, and events that might have contradicted her belief could be reinterpreted as confirmation. A failed jump from a low stool, for example, only showed that the stool was too low.

She connects this episode to another belief: that she could see through closed eyelids. She tested it by trying to determine whether a curtain was open or closed, or whether a door stood ajar, while her eyes were shut. She was wrong each time, yet closing her eyes again restored the belief. For Emma, this illustrates how an idea may be rejected in one moment without the underlying conviction disappearing. Whether a delusion is positive or negative, she says in effect, it can briefly make the world seem logical. Her hard-won caution about trusting her own thoughts arises from this repeated gap between what a test shows and what belief continues to feel true.

Retrospective meaning

The scene is a recollection within Emma’s conversation with Michiel, and its force depends on her ability to describe both the delusion’s certainty and the danger that certainty carried. She does not frame recovery as a single decisive refutation: the flight belief faded when depression returned, while the episode remained vivid enough to be re-entered through memory. Elsewhere, Emma describes mania as a present that overwhelms past and future, whereas depression can swallow time in despair. That contrast helps clarify the episode’s abrupt shift from the expansive immediacy of flying to the return of depressive feeling, without making the change a cure.

Emma’s explanation also complicates the idea that insight simply defeats a delusion. Looking back, she can name the belief as a delusion and recognize how its explanations protected it from contrary evidence. Yet she remembers how utterly real it felt at the time. In telling Michiel that she survived without ever making the balcony leap, she turns a frightening episode into an account of both risk and interruption: the danger was real, but the belief’s momentum stopped before the imagined flight became a jump.