Jeepers and Creepers are the names of my bipolar friend's two animals. He has a monkey living up his left sleeve and a caterpillar living up his right sleeve.
My friend displays all the sanity and reasoning that the majority of humans do and is pleasant and polite. In fact he is somewhat of an intellectual in thinking out of the box solutions.
You could be chatting away with him over a coffee and as you dont expect the conversation slowly drifts like a bullet train on to the next subject suddenly interjected by my friend. The subject of him meeting the queen of the universe who challenged him to a lighting duel. He apparently won and stole some of her magic.
After not receiving much discourse in way of comments or questions (rather like this post :-)) the conversation drifts back to the redesign through reduction in size of a partical collider by rearranging the magnetic field layout.
Now I have a personal theory of how my little friend got in to the mental state to experience an 'expanded' reality.
If i take the view that our individual personal belief systems are a collection of input data being filtered by consciousness through a series of transistor like logic gates the same as any cpu. Creating a version of interpreted reality held and accepted by our concious state of mind.
Our sensory perception is limited to 5 physical senses plus thought (common sense or being afraid of spiders for example)
It is well understood that input data from our physical senses is recieved and processed as electronic signals stimulating our neural networks.
Conscious thoughts overtly manifest through the observance of electro / chemical brain activity. As our 5 senses pass information to the brain ultimately in electronic signal form so does conscious thought.
Thought has an equal seat at the reality definition table. Thought patterns or bonded belief thoughts created by the fusion of neurons.
If we accept the above variables as theory proven true then then we could offer the supposition that for the majority of people the belief that sits at their reality table is one rooted in entwined parental guidance. Knowledge deemed to be corporate quality data by parents and worthy of being passed along to their off spring.
I said "rooted" remember?
My friend's parents are successful businesspersons who follow wealth as the meaning to life.
Using their wealth from the get go of my friend's existence he was placed in front of an assortment of different parenting devices to teach and nature the root of his naive innocent core belief system.
Baby got in the way of making money so much so that after learning about the existence of Santa and the hypnotronic manga world of Dragon Ball Z, due to time constraints no one ever told him either one was make believe.
That's what i think anyway. Hope you view it as a possibility otherwise I'll worry that I'm mentally deranged. :-)