The Birth of a Delusion — Don Quixote

A gentleman bordering on fifty lives quietly in an unnamed village of La Mancha until chivalry books take over his life. He neglects field sports and property management, sells tillage land to buy more volumes, and stays up nights wrestling with the ornate prose of Feliciano de Silva. The narrator states plainly that with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.

Fantasy soon outranks fact. He decides that no history in the world had more reality in it than the romances he devours, and he ranks fictional knights above real ones, preferring the Knight of the Burning Sword to the Cid because one back-stroke can split two giants. His wits being quite gone, he resolves not to play at knighthood but to become a knight-errant, roaming the world to right wrongs and win eternal fame. Already he sees himself crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of Trebizond at least.

Then the preparation begins in earnest. He cleans his great-grandfather's rusted armour, builds a pasteboard half-helmet that fails its first slash test and reinforces with iron bars, spends four days naming his hack Rocinante and eight more naming himself Don Quixote of La Mancha. A knight-errant must have a lady, so he rehearses the speech a vanquished giant will deliver on his knees: I am the giant Caraculiambro, sent by Don Quixote to present myself before your Grace. Delighted with that fantasy, he elevates Aldonza Lorenzo, a farm girl who never knew his love, to Dulcinea del Toboso.