I'm mad because I'm different and I'm different because I'm mad. How's that for a nice bourgeois statement you can quote back at people? Because, you see, I am not really insane in the strictest sense of the word. Granted, I don't exist in the same world as you do, but that's more your problem than it is mine. You watch men climb into a lion's cage and think you have a grasp on the rudimentaries of schizophrenia, but you're just a square trying to understand a cube. There's a whole other dimension you can't conceive of simply because you don't exist in it.

As I often say, if everybody was mad, you wouldn't even notice people like me. I'm not going to claim we mad people are superior because if I get patronising you'll switch off before I've finished saying what I've got to say. I also don't feel the need to construct a hierarchical system for the world around me. That's something unique to your dimension. It doesn't exist in mine.

If I can contradict myself quickly, I'll add that in my perception of it, you live in the same schizophrenic world I do, it's just you're too sane to make proper sense of it. Ironically enough, it wasn't one of us who invented god. Despite the visions and the voices, it was one of you. We mad people don't need that level of explanation for everything, you see. We just accept the universe as it appears in front of us because it really is a mad, mad world we live in.

I won't start at the beginning because there's not enough time. I'll start with the day I decided I was mad. I used to be an air steward, flying around the world for weeks on end without a proper break, until one day I decided to walk out on my job and do something else. This wasn't madness, though, this was just impulsiveness.

I soon found I had trouble getting to sleep at nights. I'd been flying across different time-zones for so long my body had begun to adapt and form its own, in which a day was either so short or so long my mind decided that I didn't need to sleep anymore. On doctors' advice I went back to all the destinations I had been flying to until recently, to see if my body could get used to their time-zones again. It couldn't. One time I got no sleep for over sixty hours, and then only a couple of hours during the afternoon of the third day.

The thing is, it's no urban myth that you need to dream, so after a couple of days without sleep I began to dream whilst awake instead. This was pretty frightening at first, but as it began to happen more and more often, I stopped trying to fight it. After a while I only used to sleep on every third night, but I dreamt intermittently in between. It got to the stage where I wouldn't even feel tired until the third day, but I used to sleep so well that night I didn't want to upset the new sleeping pattern my brain had settled upon.

A waking dream differs from a normal one as fundamentally as sleep differs from the conscious state. They're more vivid, altogether clearer, and completely sensical - they're not the indulgences of the unconscious brain. You are not paralysed, you can still speak and you will always remember them afterwards. They're barely even dreams at all.

I decided I was mad when I stopped being able to tell the difference between the real world and my waking dreams. This was not my fault. There's very little that will tell them apart. If I see someone who's not there, for example, then it won't be someone who can't be there - a celebrity, a dead person, etc - if that makes any sense.

The good thing about deciding you're mad is that you have to be slightly crazy to do it in the first place. So even if you don't hear voices telling you to maim and murder, if you think you're nuts they'll assume there's got to be something wrong with you anyway.

This, then, is how I came to be where I am - which is how I came to meet Jonas Raufkind - which is how I learnt of this thing he calls Holocaust - which is the most peculiar construct of a mad, mad brain I've ever entertained.

NOTES:
For five years I've been trying to write a novel about the Holocaust, because it's something of an inexplicable obsession, but I've never found the most appropriate format before. Now, however, I think I've found a way to say what I want to say. Somewhat Kafka-esque, it originally started off with a Holocaust survivor waking up one morning in a world where the Holocaust never happened - though he retains his memories of it. Now it's taken another twist to this, where the protagonist may or may not be mad, and may or may not be a time traveller who went back and prevented the Holocaust ever happening - but again, retains his own memories of it.

It's more about memory and our relationship to history than the Holocaust, to be honest, and these latest developments have been very much influenced by reading "The Tin Drum" and "Slaughterhouse Five" recently. The name of Jonas Raufkind has been the name of my main character in this story since I first started writing it in 1998. The name Raufkind I've cannibalised elsewhere, whilst the name Jonas was pinched from someone I went to school with. The character was originally a perpetrator rather than a victim.

This is a rough first draft, written in a few minutes on either side of dinner in the middle of a notepad I'd originally set aside for revision notes. There are a few rough areas I'm not happy with, but I've learnt the lesson of rewriting before I know where I'm headed. This was really just me writing down some ideas before I forgot them. I don't know why I have a habit of writing sub-1000 word first chapters, though.