Struggling with Reality

Continuing with this trend of self-bashing, let's talk about reality.  Every year around show week, two things happen: 1. I become so stressed out that my schedule, as well as my grip on the world around me, dissolves and 2. I lose my grip on reality as I become sucked into the show I'm working on.  It's bizarre.  So last night, as I was walking home, I came across the idea, again, that maybe I have some severe mental handicap and don't know, and that everything I experience is skewed by how people feed my perception of myself.

Now, you can respond and say, "Ryan, you're being foolish, that's totally not the case at all."  But here's the fun part: I'm reading it.  How can I be sure I can trust my perception?  Having spent some time with Ayn Rand's writings, I often try to take the Objectivist stance and claim that my faculties are all I have, and I must thus trust them as best I can.

Now should I rely on consensus reality, I am still tied to the faults of my sensory faculties.  But here is where I agree with Rand: subjective reality is utterly disgusting.  It says that everyone has faults in their faculties without acknowledging that the view that everyone has faults in their faculties is probably a fault of one's faculties in itself.

So how may I decide what's real?  Should I really blindly trust my own senses?  How do I know something is actually 'there' is I can't be totally sure I'm of sound mind? 

These questions aren't rhetorical: I've been struggling with this for a few years now, and I think it would make an awesome post-a-day discussion.  But seriously, maybe it dissolves back into itself as a question, just as "What is the meaning of life?" does.

I thought this video was appropriate for this discussion of consensus reality.  Or the reality of reality.  Enjoy.  I'm going to go stick my brain in a jar.