I Took a Cosmic Journey During Mania and Part of Me Never Came Back

A woman surrounded by swirling galaxies, stars, and glowing constellations in space

For The Manic Mind, The Line Between Psychosis and Revelation Is Thinner Than You Think

By Jayne Millerton

I took a cosmic journey one night during my manic episode. I did not take drugs. I did not meditate. I was alone in a hotel room and the boundaries of my self simply dissolved.

I merged with everything. I became one with what I called Uni, my shorthand for the universe itself. There was no place where I ended and it began. There was no past, no future. Only a single luminous present in which all sentient beings had gathered into the same point of awareness. It collapsed inward, infinitely small, and then it was whole. Complete. Perfect.

I wrote about it obsessively afterward. The same phrases over and over, as if repetition could preserve the feeling. I was terrified I would forget it, that the ordinary world would swallow the most profound experience of my life.

And here is where it gets complicated: I still do not entirely believe it was not real. Maybe there was some revelation?

Religiosity is a well-documented feature of manic episodes. The clinical literature describes grandiose delusions with spiritual content, a sense of unity with the divine, a collapse of the boundary between self and cosmos. It is one of the most common presentations of bipolar psychosis. Textbook stuff.

But knowing that does not make it feel less real. During my manic episode, every building was a temple. Cemeteries were celebrations of the people who built the world we inherited. The sun was not just a star. It was the source of all life, and I worshipped it. I watched every sunrise and every sunset. I thought in terms of the grand context of all things, and in that context, everything made sense.

I believed prime numbers were sacred. I structured my text messages around them. I saw patterns in nature and architecture that seemed to reveal a hidden order. I thought I was the opposite of a vampire, a creature of light who served the day and feared the darkness. I compared myself to the Oracle at Delphi.

None of this is comfortable to write. It reads like the ramblings of a man who has lost his grip. And that is exactly what it was. But it was also something else. It was a lived experience of total interconnection, of imagined ego death, of cosmic belonging that felt more real than anything before or since.

People who have taken psychedelics describe similar states. Monks who meditate for decades describe similar states. The overlap between mystical experience and psychotic experience is one of the most unsettling questions in psychiatry, and I do not pretend to have the answer.

What I know is this: I came back from that journey different. A lot of it was damage – a destroyed life, having lost everything. The paranoia, the inability to sleep, the loss of contact with reality. But some of it was insight. At least I think? It felt like a deeper compassion for other people. A sense that the barriers between us are thinner than we pretend. A feeling that all religions carry a sliver of the same truth.

I am on medication now. My brain is quieter. The cosmic unity is dimmed. Most days that is a relief.

I kept a note from that night. It says “Never forget.” I have not. I am just not sure what to do with it.

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