Alvarenga described experiencing hallucinations during the drift — visual and sensory experiences that he knew were not real but that felt real in the moment. He described conversations with God, with the Virgin Mary, and with famous people in what might be understood as a deliberate mental strategy for creating social presence in an environment without any. Jonathan Franklin reported that Alvarenga described imagining complete meals — the specific foods he craved, prepared in detail, consumed in his imagination with the kind of attention that hunger focuses. These mental acts were not random wandering of an unfocused mind; they were strategies, deliberately constructed and maintained.
The daily walk around the perimeter of the boat is another example of this deliberate mental architecture. A 25-foot boat perimeter is approximately 50 feet — a tiny circuit to walk. But walking it daily, framing it as a walk rather than as the four steps from one end to the other of a very small prison, imposed a structure that connected to normal life. Normal life involves walking places. The walk around the boat’s perimeter was a way of maintaining the narrative that this was still a life with normal activities, not an ordeal of pure waiting.
The lunar calendar was part of the same architecture — not just a practical tool for tracking time but a way of having a relationship with the sky that connected to the world before the drift. His grandfather had taught him to read the moon. Using that skill daily was a connection backward in time and outward in space to a universe larger than the boat, the ocean, and the immediate situation.