Threshold Crossing
All books · Research-facing model
What room remains to question, delay or choose?
By Justin McDermott · Complete manuscript · Unpublished
Vividness, conviction and obedience are different things. Threshold Crossing proposes a model of how unusual experience may acquire perceived authority, and how a person’s available choices can narrow or reopen.
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Throughout the book, Daniel and Jessica reappear as fictional composites. They are not diagnostic templates and are not intended to represent any one person. Their purpose is simpler: to keep the model answerable to what an experience is like from the inside.
Daniel — when a warning becomes an authority. After several nights of poor sleep and a painful relationship rupture, Daniel hears a voice behind him say, “You are not safe.” He is frightened by the sound, but the more important change comes later: he begins to organise his choices around what the voice might know and what could happen if he ignores it.
Jessica — when vividness does not become rule. Jessica sometimes hears her deceased mother’s voice in the kitchen. The voice is clear enough that she turns toward it. She does not know whether to understand it as grief, memory, spirituality or something else, and she does not have to decide. She can choose whether to answer, continue making dinner and go to bed.
Both experiences may be unusual. Vividness alone does not tell us which one threatens freedom.
Important distinction. An experience can be real as an experience without every explanation attached to it being literally accurate. Respecting the experience and testing claims about external reality are not opposites.
Why Stay With the Crossing?
The concise model can state its spine quickly: conditions shape the likelihood and character of a threshold crossing; a crossing changes the form, source or apparent independence of an experience; perceived authority describes how strongly that experience can overrule alternatives or demand a response; agency describes how many meaningful choices remain. Relationship, treatment, context and reflection can alter several points in that sequence. A book has to do something different. It has to stay long enough inside those transitions for the reader to feel why they matter.
That matters because unusual experience is rarely lived as a diagram. A person does not usually say, “My source monitoring became less reliable while salience increased.” They say the room changed. A thought felt inserted. A memory became present tense. A voice arrived with the force of another person. A coincidence would not let go. The scientific task is to explain without flattening that lived form; the lived-experience task is to describe without turning felt reality into proof of one cause.
Extract from Threshold Crossing. © Justin McDermott.
How to read the model
Threshold Crossing presents a proposed conceptual model for investigation. It brings questions from lived experience into conversation with research on unusual experience, perceived authority and agency. Its distinctions are offered for criticism and testing; this introduction should not be read as evidence that the model has been clinically validated.
The extract uses fictional composites to illustrate differences between experiences. These examples illustrate the questions the model asks; they are not research participants or findings.
Related published writing
When the dream enters the day: clouded consciousness, psychosis, and the search for shared reality · Justin McDermott · Psychosis, 2026. This is a separate published article, offered here as further reading.
Inside the book
The central question concerns the room a person has to respond. A compelling experience raises questions about what it seems to mean, how much authority it carries and whether acting on it still feels like a choice. The book offers distinctions for investigation, criticism and testing, with attention to the possibility of questioning, delaying or choosing another response.
The distinction between a vivid experience, conviction and obedience.
How unusual experience may come to carry perceived authority.
How the space available for questioning and choice can narrow or reopen.
Who it is for
Begin here if you want to examine the proposed model and the questions it raises. It is written for readers interested in research, unusual experience and agency, including those who want to challenge its distinctions or consider how they might be tested.
Its place in the Compass
Threshold Crossing develops questions explored philosophically in When Meaning Becomes Sovereign. The Needs We Carry turns toward the ethical responsibilities of support when someone’s options are constrained.
Explore The Needs We Carry · About the Compass project
A shorter way into the writing
The Weight of Maybe. A short reflection on how anticipated harm and possible good shape the choices we make.
Read more or get in touch
This is a complete, unpublished manuscript. Publishing enquiries welcome. To request a reading sample or discuss editorial interest, contact Justin about Threshold Crossing.
Browse all five books · Read the Field Notes · Meet the author