Part of what happens when one goes crazy is that there’s a grammatical shift. Thoughts come into the mind as firmly established truth. There is no simile or metaphor. There’s no tense but the present. The fantastic presents itself as fact. It would possibly be tolerable to feel like or as if one was on fire or like the CIA might be after you or like you had to hold your breath so that you could be compacted and smuggled to a neutral site in Mongolia to wrestle India’s craziest crazy. But there’s no like or as if. It’s all really happening, and there’s no time to argue or have second thoughts.
