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Paul Schreber was a life whose memory survives as a book, Denkwürdigheiten eines Nervenkranken (Great Thoughts of a Nervous Patient), made world famous by Freud. Mistranslation of the book's title as Memoirs of my Nervous Illness was compounded by the unwarranted omission of its all-important subtitle: Under what premises may a person declared insane (psychotic) be kept in an asylum against his will? The subtitle sums up his plight during his second illness and the purpose of writing the book: to get out alive from the Sonnenstein Asylum where he was imprisoned against his will being declared an incurable and mentally incompetent paranoiac. The book is only one of the sources of his life story. It is a personal account, written in sober narrative prose, and a treatise on matters natural and supernatural in the poetic, magical realism of fantastic narrative of hallucinations and delusions. The fantastic part became the basis for falsely diagnosing him as paranoid based on a conflation of the two distinct definitions of paranoia: (1) as delusions of persecution without a real cause and (2) as fantastic imaginings. The fantastic narrative, like Freud's dreams (in his 1900 Interpretation of Dreams), is also a dream narrative about his life and second illness. Since Schreber named two major persecutors—God himself, who punished him the way he did Job, and Flechsig, who was first friend and then foe, and because of whom he landed in Sonnenstein—it is insufficient to diagnose his psychosis as “paranoia” in the first sense, nor as paranoid schizophrenia. He suffered from recurrent depressions and had three hospitalizations: moderate, 1884-1885; severe, 1893-1902; deadly, 1907-1911. Both in 1884 and 1893, he was admitted voluntarily and stayed only six months, as allotted to him by law, but in 1894, instead of treating him at the university hospital until recovery, Flechsig had him evacuated to Sonnestein, his wife Sabine had him declared mentally incompetent, and his status