Emma's progressively higher attempts to fly

Emma's progressively higher attempts to fly show how a delusion can feel less like an implausible thought than like a newly revealed fact about the world. Convinced that she can fly, she tries to test the belief in stages, moving from a stool to a chair, kitchen steps, and a ladder. Depression interrupts the progression before she reaches the balcony, but it does not resolve the belief by proving it false. In retrospect, the episode is as much about the logic that sustains certainty as about the physical danger of acting on it.

The belief as lived reality

Emma explains the episode to Michiel while discussing her impending return to her parents’ home. Sergei is abroad, and she is due to begin new medication on Sunday evening. When Michiel recalls that she had said she could fly, Emma distinguishes that conviction from a passing thought or an intention to deceive herself. She remembers believing it with complete certainty, as though the world had finally become what it was always meant to be. The belief felt familiar and fundamental, not like an idea that had appeared suddenly and might be questioned.

Her account makes the delusion’s force depend on its felt normality. Emma describes knowing the ability in her bones and says that, in such a state, the mind does not merely interpret reality: it makes a reality in which the belief explains everything. Once that explanation takes hold, events can be fitted into it as confirmation. A failure to fly from a low height would not necessarily count against the belief; it could instead be explained as evidence that the height was insufficient. The conviction therefore supplies its own defense against disproof.

Testing the conviction by degrees

Emma says she wanted to fly from the balcony and recalls its railing pressing against her middle. In that memory, the space beyond the railing no longer appears as empty nothingness. It seems to her like open space she can enter and shape, with wind beneath her arms lifting and carrying her. She remembers the imagined flight as exhilarating and compelling. The intensity of the experience is important: the danger does not present itself to her as a reason to stop, because the belief makes the fall seem like the beginning of flight.

Yet Emma does not jump from the balcony. Even while certain she can fly, she worries that the wind might be wrong or that she might not have enough room to dive forward. She decides that the ability can be approached in small steps, reasoning that it would be more sensible to begin at a lower height. The first test is a stool. When she does not fly, she does not abandon the belief; she concludes that the stool is too low to provide the speed she needs. She then tries a chair, a kitchen step ladder, and, the following day, a ladder. Each increase in height follows the same internal logic: the failed test is reinterpreted as a problem with the test, not with the conviction.

Depression interrupts the sequence

Emma describes the return of depression as luck. The change halts her attempts before they advance further, but it is not an insight that the belief was false. When Michiel observes that the delusion was never really broken, Emma agrees: everything had seemed logical, and everything had confirmed what she already believed. She had not started on a roof, but her restraint came from a step-by-step approach, not from recognizing that flight was impossible.

The episode belongs to a wider contrast Emma draws between mania and depression. Mania makes the present feel absolute, a forceful now that seems to release itself from the past and future. Depression, by contrast, can make the past engulf the future until time itself seems to disappear. In another account of depressive collapse, Emma describes being drained of energy and reduced to fragments of herself, with the image of a depth beyond a balcony. These descriptions do not make the flight attempts a simple opposite of suicidal despair: they show how the same dangerous edge can be experienced through radically different states of mind.

A delusion that survives correction

Emma’s conversation with Michiel also places the flying conviction alongside another delusion. For a time, she believed she could see through closed eyelids. She tested this by trying to determine whether a curtain was open or closed, or whether a door stood ajar. She was wrong each time, yet closing her eyes brought the belief back. The comparison clarifies why the failed flying tests did not settle the matter: an observation can contradict a delusion without making its felt truth disappear.

When Michiel asks whether Emma produces the thought or the thought takes hold of her, she cannot give a definite answer. Her uncertainty captures the loss of distance at the center of the episode. She can later describe the belief as a delusion and trace its logic, but while inside it, the conviction feels more like reality than like a thought open to examination. The rising sequence of tests gives that experience a concrete form: each new height is an attempted experiment, yet the rules of the experiment have already been shaped to preserve the belief.