No no no no no. A witch wouldn’t be so careless as to admit that in public. Everybody knows witches keep cats as familiars. But witches are cunning and sly so they’ll disguise it as something else, therefore anybody you see with a cat can’t be a witch, especially if it’s a black cat.
Now, you see a guy with a white dog … it’s time to call the Inquisition.
clubs the red-robed Monty Python actor suddenly jumping through a nearby door
That is Solipsism.
Not exactly. Solipsisim is when you believe you’re the only thing that exists, or is real, period. The cases I’m talking about are where other things are real, but are not at all what they seem.
I know it isn’t the traditional interpretation of the song, but that’s the way I always see it now. As if saying: I almost got a glimpse of it (the Illusion of the World) as a child, but lost sight of it. Now I’m just comfortably numb to the world as a whole. Lost in the world, accepting it as reality, needing medication to ease the pain.
One strong intuition I had as a child (after the brain damage) was that I should be able to pass my hands through solid objects at will. This was in the mid 60’s or so and the only scifi I would have been exposed to would have been on tv at that point so it could have been an idea that was implanted, but it wasn’t something I just wished I could do but something that seemed unnatural by virtue of being unable to do it.
Of course much later I learned that atoms are virtually all empty space and even the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons in a nucleus only account for 1% of the mass. The rest comes from massless gluons morphing into sea quarks and being annihilated over and over again.
T.S. Eliot alluded to a similar phenomenon in “The Waste Land”:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
Eliot’s notes on the poem state that the passage was suggested by an Antarctic expedition whose members experienced a persistent delusion that there was an extra person in their party.
No, it’s by Roger Waters. Comfortably Numb is on The Wall, which was released in 1979. Barrett was out of the band in 1968.
Ok to be very boring here this is simply your peripheral vision evolving and your brain coming to terms with it. As a child our peripheral vision is weak, this is one of the reasons we see kids run out in front of fast moving things.
I’m pretty sure that the lyrics are using the metaphorical sense of sight. It’s not about seeing something, literally, out of the corner of your eye. More like ‘seeing’ in the same way you ‘see’ that if a=b and b=c, that a=c.
I remember when I had that idea for the first time. There’s nothing new under the sun is tired, tiered, tried and true. Maybe it doesn’t make sense until it seems like its your thought first!
It was in the Sixties when the term “psychedelic” was coming into play. Sometime, probably during experimenting with marijuana, it occurred to me that I was interpreting things differently. And I wondered if it weren’t a return to to a more pure childlike state.
Chortling a bit now. All that stuff was in the air, both literally and figuratively, so it’s not surprising that I’d be picking up on it.
But later, when I’d birthed two children I noticed their fascination with things that I didn’t notice, actually couldn’t see, until their little musings brought them to my attention. And upon tip-toeing into my daughters room, peeking over the top of the crib and seeing her mesmerized by her little mobile and the look of pure delight on her face I began to think in terms of “Children are born naturally psychedelic.” Deep, I know. 
It wasn’t too far a stretch from there to the regimen of schools (I was studying to be a teacher at that time) and the perceived necessity of erasing all that self-indulgent foolishness so that children could be taught.
And isn’t that one underlying theme of The Wall?
I love that album. Wasn’t introduced to it until the late 80s when my son gave me a copy.