Originally Posted by Watered

Thanks.

Yesterday I watched a Roger Waters interview in the DVD "The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story". It's an extended edition where the extras are mainly the interviews they made to the members of the band in their full length. Roger Waters was talking about Syd's illness and recalls something that happened to him while he was recording "Wish You Were Here". It was a pretty tough time for him since the disagreements within the band were already quite strong (with Gilmour mainly) and he was going through the divorce of his first wife.

He remembers that one of those days when he was feeling really bad, in the canteen at Abbey Road, he saw reality zooming out of him. He lost perspective of everything ("you are receeding") and saw his hands as "two balloons" (much like when you've got fever as a child). He got really scared as he thought he was going crazy. He walked into studio 3, started playing piano and little by little reality and perspective came back to him. In that moment he realised how thin the line between sanity and insanity sometimes is and he also quotes this moment as one of the inspirations behind Comfortably Numb's lyrics.