Sebastian Faulks suffered from a form of psychosis at university that left him questioning reality for two years.
The author has said binge drinking homemade beer and consuming marijuana, nicotine and cough medicine could have contributed to becoming trapped in a hallucinatory loop, debilitating panic attacks and agoraphobia.
In an extract from his new book Fires Which Burned Brightly: A Life in Progress, Mr Faulks said that by the summer term of his second year at the University of Cambridge he had given up work altogether to focus on drinking.
In the memoir, serialised in The Sunday Times, he wrote: "I awoke one morning after a day-long binge and got up unsteadily from the bed. I was halfway through dressing when I woke up again.
"It seemed I had only dreamed my first awakening. I had finished dressing and was leaving the shared sitting room when I woke up again, still in bed."
He said he climbed out of bed again to brush his teeth before waking once more, getting as far as the stairs before he woke up another time and then opening his eyes again after reaching the dining hall.
"It took everything I had to get myself at last, physically, into the sitting room and cling to the table, praying that I was finally and truly awake," he added.
He described barely being able to hold a pen during his exams.
Mr Faulks said the following two years were challenging and involved meeting doctors, prescriptions and a visit from a peripatetic consultant.
He visited a faith healer in North Kensington and Park Prewett Hospital, an old county asylum in Hampshire.
He said he was forced to return from a holiday in Greece after waking up on a beach "to find the sea dragging shingle through my veins".
The writer suffered from panic attacks, insomnia and the anxiety disorder agoraphobia, recalling the moment he told his mother he did not think he could go on.
In his third year of university, Mr Faulks said he had "steadied up a little" by using prescribed tranquillisers but was "still drinking to oblivion in the evening".
Instead of taking final exams, he wrote two essays and secured his degree but still felt as though the whole world appeared "unreal".
After fearing he had taken too many pills following a panic attack in Bristol, Mr Faulks phoned a friend who took him to hospital, where he was thereafter treated three times a week with psychotherapy.
"My problem was that the world and everything in it appeared unreal. The table, the cup, the book, the window were like unconvincing replicas of the actual things," he said.
"I felt that I had severed my link with the life I'd known and was now lost in a shadowland," he added.
Mr Faulks said he embarked on a project to prove the material world existed again and spent many years fearing a relapse.