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The act of remembering, we know from neuroscientists, has a way of rewriting a memory, and this day, in particular, the day I met Jane for the first time, is one I have often revisited in my mind, perhaps altering it slightly with each remembering.

One thing can always mean another, and a doctor learns early the law of what is known as Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is the likeliest to be true. On that day in the hospital, it seemed to me that the two events—Jane's short visit to my office and this unusual amnesiac episode—were linked, somehow, perhaps two consequences of the same source of internal distress.

The word for hallucination was for three centuries in the English language interchangeable with the word for "ghost": apparition.

The more I learned about the case, the less certain I was about its nature. It was as if each conversation led me further from a diagnosis instead of closer to one.

A new picture of Jane was emerging—some form of psychosis might explain all of her symptoms: hallucination, her memory loss on the day she was found in the park, and also this new contradictory conviction.

Whatever the case, research has established what would otherwise be intuitive: Memory and trauma are powerfully linked.

I'd rather face a darkness outside than a darkness within.

My memory sometimes gives me a false sense of familiarity with people—or a sense of familiarity that would feel false to someone else. With Dr. Byrd, I have the feeling, which is true in one sense but not true in another, that I have known him for twenty years.

It occurred to me that night, as I read [...] Alice in Wonderland, [...] that it is so often the girls who vanish into realms beyond reach, whether into Oz or the underworld, a hundred years of sleep, or the simplest, most familiar dark woods: madness.

Once the mind begins to question itself, there is no bottom to its questioning.

If I could pore through the missing records in my brain, maybe I could solve this thing.

I am having trouble putting down on paper what my real thoughts are in this case, but I'll say this: I am at a loss to explain certain features of Jane's case, certain threads of her delusion, certain very specific and personal details, without violating rules of reality as we currently understand them.

If there really do exist the kinds of parallel universes that some branches of physics posit, and if we lived in a world—and I am not necessarily saying that we do—where certain human beings could sense the events unfolding in those places, what might that sensory experience take?

I no longer believe that these episodes of Jane's are a kind of psychosis, or that anything is clinically wrong with her. I think it may not be appropriate to think of Jane's experiences as psychiatric symptoms at all. Instead, I believe that they are what the ancients might have called a way of seeing. Not the future, though, but the parallel.