It's any night of the week, and you're just as stressed or not stressed as any other day. You've taken your medications, you've eaten well for the past month and your excercise routine is excellent. You set your head down to rest, and you begin to drift to sleep.
I feel my palms get sweaty, and my limbs and digits start to twitch.
So all of a sudden you're laying down, in the rain, feeling cold. Feeling cold and alone, you can feel your body tremble. You can look over your right shoulder and see a house in the not-so-far distance, you can hear the people, you can feel the party. Immediately the party, the noises, and the ecstacy all run through your body. You feel it from the top of your scalp down to the very ends of each toe.
I can hear that goddamned airplane in the air again, and I remember that goddamned song, but it instantly fades from memory. . .
And you can't control it. That bothers you, and you try to understand what's happening to your body; you can feel your sweat, you can feel the shaking. Your friend has come from the house and is shaking you, hard, shaking your right shoulder and asking if you're okay. He's screaming your name, and that scares you, too.
I'm afraid I've made a complete fool of myself.
They're all screaming your name. They're all yelling for you, begging for you to hang on and to live another day. Each and every single person you've ever met is screaming your name, and your nicknames, and even insults that you've heard in your days. They're all screaming, and it hurts your ears.
I'm worried, and you hope there's nothing wrong.
You're confused and you're lost. You have no idea what's happening to your mind, or your body. You think you're insane. A voice tells you that you're not, but you can't even put a name or a face to the voice. It's your mother or your lover or your best friend. Or all three, in one being. This confuses you again, even more, until you realize that it's God you're speaking to.
God? How the hell am I talking to God, unless I'm dead? Oh, my God, I'm dead. . .
You have a chat with God. You talk about free will. You talk about your destiny, and the lives and times of all the people you've ever known.
I can only feel pain. Mind-consuming, thought-pervading pain in my chest. Ive been shot, or I'm having a heart attack, or a seizure, or an anuerysm. . . I'm really not sure which, but it's one of them. .. .
This is when it hurts. You can feel it in your brain, as if you've had an aneurysm; you can feel each pulse of blood burn through the very threads that weave your neurons. You can feel the net break down, and you know you're losing your sanity.
My sanity is the only thing I've treasured; the only thing I've sworn you'll never let go.
You're scared, because you're going insane. You know there's no way out, and you can feel the pain. The gunshot wounds from when you fought in World War One, World War Two, Vietnam, Iraq. The spears that have punctured your torso during Medieval times.
I keep hearing the goddamned door slamming, and the goddamned gunshot in the background; the gunshot who's high-velocity lead has found it's way through my body.Oh, my God, I'm bleeding. . ..
Your being is timeless and cross-dimensional. You have no bounds and no limits. You are reliving every single death you could ever possibly experience, and it's a punishment. You're cold again, and you notice that you've fallen on a stick in the woods and you're bleeding all over the ground. Your friend is still
shaking your shoulder and you want so badly to get up and let everyone know you're okay, because they're worried.
Oh, my god, how am I suddenly back in the woods?! How did I go through space and time and ended up back where I started?!. . . and I start to shake with fear.
Sadly, they're not really there, and you're terrified. You're alone, and that's it - there is no life. There is no point. There is no universe, and no existence; but at the very same point in time that your conciousness becomes aware of this very disturbing thought, you're also bombarded by every traumatic event you've ever experienced. You feel so lost and alone and scared because of these moments: running through the woods when you were twelve from a home you could no longer subject yourself to living in. When you smoked salvia, and unconsciously walked forty meters and fell over and unto an electric fence. The third time you dropped acid, when you were arround a dozen or so people you don't know well enough or trust well enough, and you have a bad trip.
Bad trips! Of course, it's a bad trip! Just like my bad trip on cid. . .
Here's the kicker: you realize that everything you're feeling so far is exactly what you felt that third time you put the cursed LSD into your body. Down to the point where you can see the blood on your hands from when you killed everyone in the apartment, and you can hear the sirens
and you can see the police. So you run.
I can see and hear and feel myself, safe and secure in my bed at home, but my legs are twitching so, so bad, they hurt because I'm running so fast even though I'm laying down, crying. . .
You're running and you're running and you can't remember why you started running, all you can feel is the intense fear of being caught. You hear yourself asking yourself "What was it that I did," over, and over again. You get so incredibly angry that you can't figure out what you're running from.
I try to stop these thoughts in my mind, I try my hardest to stop it all and continue with my normal life, but nothing seems to work. . I look at a mirror on my wall, and I'm terrified of it; I look at the flag on my ceiling, and I'm even more afraid of that. . .
Instantly you know why you're so scared, why you're running. Why you're so alone, and afraid. This is your punishment, and you're sure of it. This eternity of loneliness and insanity is your lot in life, and nothing more can be done to save you. You must relive every single possible death there possibly is, and it's all a punishment. "By who?" you can hear yourself scream, and you know the only answer is God hisself, because this is hell. You're doomed to spend eternity cycling the same thoughts.
I want to live my life. I want to work this year I took off from school, and then go to school. I want to be a lawyer, be successful, have a family. . . but I can't, I'm doomed with this curse.
Sooner rather than later you realize how outrageous that thought is. You remember that God cannot exist, because man had to have conceptualized Him into existence. You realize that the only explaination for the way you're feeling, the way every sound you can hear is a threat to you and every memory that zooms through your mind is absolutely tragic is because you're being punished for smoking crack in a previous life.
"Previous life?" . . . I remind myself that there is no reincarnation, and my mind searches for another explaination. . .
You keep wondering why you would be so tortured. You can see and hear things that definitely do not make sense, like You feel as though you're doomed to relive the life of everyone around you, that you must kill everyone you've ever met, that you must kill yourself, in order to end the pain in your chest and in your head.
How many pills do I have? Where are the knives. . . .NO! I scream at myself, in my mind. NO! That is not an option. . .
You realize the only explaination is that you've come from sometime in the future to warn yourself of your death, or every death you could experience; you're experiencing the warning through this excruciating mechanism of mind alteration. Almost immediately you know that that can't be true, as time travel is physically impossible.
Or is it? I wonder. I wonder because it's the only explaination I've got. . .
You realize that you /are/ God. You are everything, through every dimension imaginable. You feel that the things you're afraid of most are the absolute truths: that you're gay, that you're a killer the likes of which the world has never known. You realize that you're a failure and you'll never amount to anything.
I'm so cold, I'm so lonely out in the woods, and it's raining. Oh God, someone help me. . . .
You can hear voices, in the background. Some are louder than others, and they're all saying different things. You hear your lover tell you how much she loves you, while she's crying, lost forever to you, because you're spiralling into this abyss that your mind has created. You hear your mother, lecturing you. You hear your friends and your family, worried, concerned.
Who do I trust? Who do I listen to? Why is my jaw clenching so bad. . .
You hear a voice that tells you to lay down, to calm down and to fall asleep. A part of your consciousness warns you that with sleep comes death, or that sleep won't help, or that sleep is just giving up in the war against your own thoughts and your alternative realities.
So I close my eyes and try to fall asleep. . .
You feel as though you're doomed to live out a sequence of events, but you can't figure out what they are. You feel as though you're lost and alone, and you've been doomed to experience it all, over, and over, and over again. You're telling yourself that you've made the most horrible decisions in life, and that you have HIV, that you have cancer, and that you've already lived the next forty years of your life and you've already died.
This is so horrible! This is the most pain and suffering anyone could ever experience . . .Why me? Why? Oh God, why?
You feel as though every day, normal life is just your 'life flashing before your eyes,' because the attack is the only thing that is real. You feel like you have to spend eternity figuring it out, and you'll never get up and live the next day of your life. You feel as though you have to argue with another version of yourself for the entirety of eternity about what it is you're feeling.
Each attack makes me believe less and less in real life. .. and rely more and more on the medications.
You feel as though nothing is real. You go day by day, after waking up. Everything you experience, you try to fit into your 'prophecy,' because you are developing an obsessive compulsion to figure it out, and get it behind you. You can feel the symptoms come on, and you can identify them.
I need to vomit, it's coming again, it's going to happen again. . .
The one thing you know is that you never want to experience the pain and the fear of an attack again. You seek medical help, and sign yourself into the hospital. They perscribe you drugs, but a month down the road you're convinced they're not working right.
I can feel each and every attack as they come on. Right now, as I type, I can feel it and I'm experiencing it; Every night I try to fall asleep, it happens again. . .
You try so, so hard to calm yourself down. You try breathing deeply because you read online that that helps. You're afraid to try meditation, because you're afraid that that level of relaxation will let your body go to the entire depths of hell that you've experienced, and never want to relive.
I know you've lost the battle, and so I give in. I let the panic take over, and I lose control. I lose your life. Just for one more night, hoping that the condition will go away.
This is nonfiction, and it accurately describes my panic disorder. Two of every hundred people you meet suffer from this disorder at at least one point in their life. It is not by any means fun. Mine was likely brought on by the use of narcotics, as mentioned above. If nothing else, I'd like for this document to serve as a warning for teens with underlying mental conditions, or genetic predepositions for said conditions: Don't eat acid.
It's cursed me for life, and if I could go back in time and change it, I would.
-Jarett Dunn