5 ideas
A witch poisons the only well in the city of Wirani so that everyone who drinks from it goes mad. Only the king and his lord chamberlain avoid the water, and the maddened citizens decide the king has lost his reason and plan to depose him. The king drinks from the well, goes mad like everyone else, and the city celebrates that he has regained his sanity.
The narrator's masks are stolen. Barefaced for the first time, he feels the sun on his face and chooses to stay 'mad.' He finds two things in madness: the freedom of loneliness and the safety of not being understood, because 'those who understand us enslave something in us.' Once others can predict and categorise you, they hold you to that version of yourself, so being opaque protects your capacity to change.
In 'The Seven Selves,' the narrator's selves argue at midnight. Each has its own job: joy, pain, love, rage and the rest. That idle self turns out to be the most burdened, because having no function is harder than any particular labour. The person is not a unified will but a set of roles that each experience the whole life from their own partial position.
A fox sees his long shadow at sunrise and decides he will have a camel for lunch. At noon he sees his shrunken shadow and settles for a mouse. The lens: self-assessment often tracks passing external conditions, like the angle of light or current circumstances, rather than actual capacity, so appetite and confidence swing while the creature itself has not changed.
The Eye reports that it sees a beautiful mountain veiled in blue mist. The Ear hears no mountain, the Hand touches none, and the Nose smells none, so they conclude together that the Eye is deluded. Here truth is outvoted: faculties that lack access to a kind of perception judge its reports by their own limits and call them madness.