I began to feel that I was trapped in reality, in some sense, and that there were beings outside the universe - previous escapees - who were sending me telepathic messages in an effort to help me escape as well.

This is a familiar mind state. Most often in the middle of the night, suggesting it's a particular brain state repressed by being conscious, especially after thinking hard about something intellectually eluding.

I associate it with being on the schizophrenic side of the autistic-schizophrenic spectrum, and I consider it within normal range, but not something we're very aware of yet as a society. Though the movie 'A Beautiful Mind' makes it easier to point to.

I think with myself it is connected to assimilating difficult concepts (along the lines of permitting the revolutionary to take over). The flexibility of thought required to learn weird things is also a flexibility in ideas about how the universe might work. In other words, I think that the sense that there are layers of reality and 'real' reality is leaking through is a byproduct of this flexibility.

On Less Wrong, the discussion about 'biases' is very interesting, but I think that irrationality due to biases is completely eclipsed by errors in rationality due to schizophrenic influences. (Whereas biases are incorrect judgements about external reality, at least they're about external reality. These biases are at least nodding to the supremacy of the 'territory', whereas schizophrenic influences are like getting lost in a maze of layers of maps.)

Further, I hypothesize that if lots of LWers tend to be on the autistic side of the spectrum, they may not be aware of these influences and wonder why people aren't more concerned with being accurately logical and don't commit to materialism. However, schizophrenic events seem to teach that "real-life" and logic are a small part of 'truth' (though I think this is just a hallucination or a misinterpretation) and that the material world is a small lower-dimensional component of a much vaster, richer reality.

I look forward to understanding such thought patterns, if research progress is made in these areas in my lifetime. I did pick up a book on schizophrenia-the-disorder, and the list of delusions didn't sound familiar (maybe 'paranoia' was closest). So perhaps the association with 'schizophrenia' is completely wrong.