One night, I woke up from a dream that I couldn’t quite remember. Something felt off; not painful, just a kind of warm electric buzzing through my entire body.
Eventually, a realization came to me; I had no idea how long I’d been experiencing this feeling, this moment. I was intensely uncomfortable, everything felt wrong. Every time I would make up my mind to get up, walk it off, take a drink of water, or even call 911, it was like there was something keeping me stuck in my bed. I wasn’t paralyzed, I could move my hands, and rubbed my arms to try to make that buzzing feeling go away. Somehow, knowing that I could move made me feel so much worse, every moment that I couldn’t bring myself to just get up from my bed.
The feeling wouldn’t end. I didn’t have a clock nearby, and every time I thought that I should pick up my phone to check the time, that same feeling would take over and just… stop me from doing it. I just lay there, praying for the feeling to end. At some point, I decided to start counting; it felt like the only thing I could actually do.
At some point, maybe around when I started to count past a thousand, a new horror dawned on me; what if this moment didn’t end? What if I just lay there, with that anxious, electric feeling, unable to leave my bed. What if I counted to a million? A billion? I tried to stop counting, but it was no longer under my control, the number kept ticking by in my head, louder and louder. I realized that every number was a heartbeat, and eventually, if I kept up this counting, I would reach a specific number and my heart would stop. A very real number, finite, and not even very large. Was it going to be the next number? Or the next? Any number would be just as likely as any of the others, and there was a hundred percent chance that SOME number out there represented the amount of heartbeats I had left. I was screaming inside my own head, begging to be able to yell out loud, or cry, or do literally anything except lying in my bed staring at my ceiling, holding my shivering arms, my nerves on fire, and wondering “WHEN AM I GOING TO DIE?”.
I don’t know how long the moment lasted. I just know that eventually, suddenly, it was over. The sun was breaking through the curtains over my bedroom window, a bird was singing outside, and I felt fine, albeit a bit exhausted. I knew that I hadn’t slept, I know my eyes had been open for what felt like forever, but I couldn’t seem to remember when the moment had ended. I couldn’t remember what the last number I’d counted was. I got out of bed and went about my day, but something inside of me felt like it was broken, or missing.
I know deep down that at some point during that moment that stretched on forever, I counted into eternity. I know that I counted until I reached my number, and that it was revealed to me; not just my own number, but everyone’s. I know that I had an idea so dark, and deep, and ancient that it transcended anything that could ever be put into words. An inescapable truth of reality that goes even beyond the horror of death, and I know that this thought was so powerful and horrifying, my mind locked it away and ended that moment, so that I would never have to experience the idea again, and could never spread it to anyone else.
I also know that this idea, somehow, is so deeply ingrained in our existence that I could utter it with a single sound, and I know that this sound would immediately pass on that horrifying feeling to anyone who heard me utter it. This sound, if realized, could bring crowds to their knees, and make the strongest man weep and beg for the release of death. I can feel my mind searching at the edges of where the idea has been locked and buried, against my will, like when you’re in the ocean desperately trying to see the bottom, even though you know that it is terribly deep and anything could be lurking there waiting to kill you, you just have to see it, you need to know. And I live every moment of my life in fear of the day where I will inevitably stumble across that idea again.