I was first introduced to Schreber recently on the blog of a friend of mine--gospel(s)--and ever since his figure has sort of been stuck in my mind.  

Here is the excerpt from Judge Schreber's autobiography that he shared, entitled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.

While man is alive he is body and soul together; the nerves (the soul of man) are nourished and kept in living motion by the body whose function is essentially similar to that of the higher animals.  Should the body lose its vitality then the state of unconsciousness which we call death and which is presaged in sleep, supervenes for the nerves.  This, however, does not imply that the soul is really extinguished; rather the impressions received remain attached to the nerves.  The soul, as it were, only goes into hibernation as some lower animals do and can be re-awakened to a new life in a manner to be described below.

God to start with is only nerve, not body, and akin therefore to the human soul. But unlike the human body, where nerves are present only in limited numbers, the nerves of God are infinite and eternal.  They possess the same qualities as human nerves but in a degree surpassing all human understanding.  They have in particular the faculty of transforming themselves into all things of the created world; in this capacity they are called rays; and herein lies the essence of diving creation.  An intimate relation exists between God and the starry sky.  I dare not decide whether one can simply say that God and the heavenly bodies are one and the same, or whether one has to think of the totality of God's nerves as being above and behind the the stars, so that the stars themselves and particularly our sun would only represent stations, through which God's miraculous creative power travels to our earth (and perhaps to other inhabited planets).

Equally I dare not say whether the celestial bodies themselves (fixed stars, planets etc.) were created by God, or whether divine creation is limited to the organic world; in which case there would be room for the Nebular Hypothesis of Kant-Laplace side by side with the existence of a living God whose existence has become an absolute certainty for me.  Perhaps the full truth lies (by way of a fourth dimension) in a combination or resultant of both trends of thought impossible for man to grasp. In any case the light and warmth giving power of the sun, which makes her the origin of all organic life on earth, is only to be regarded as an indirect manifestation of the living God; hence the veneration of the sun as divine by so many people since antiquity contains a highly important core of truth even if it does not embrace the whole truth.

This excerpt pretty much gives you the flavor of the whole memoir.  It is easy to sympathize with the people around him for whom he had lost his mind.  It is harder to understand or identify with theorists like Gilles Deleuze who used Schreber as an example of the Schizophrenics productive voltage, arguing that the schizophrenic was not insane as such, that there should not be such an exclusive 'normative' definition of sanity and so forth.  Freud was also fascinated with Schreber.  Despite the fact that Freud never met Schreber,  he did think he could diagnose him from afar.  Freud's conclusion?  That Schreber's insanity resulted from repressed homosexual desires, desire that--during his infancy--had been directed at his father and brother.    According to Freud these repressed inner drives were projected onto the external world through the distorting lens of his neurosis and experience as visceral, violating hallucinations.  Deleuze dissects Freud's diagnosis to build up his argument that psychoanalysis must move away from the family model, legitimizing Schreber's experience as an unusually candid and forthright expression of the human subject's experience of late-capitalism.   

I myself withhold judgement.  I find it intensely interesting that Schreber's ideas have become the stuff of cliche in the late-20th and early 21st century.  This somewhat flaccid and pantheistic idea that humanity is the universe's consciousness of itself.  Schreber really was a pioneer in this strain of mystical thinking.