So instead of a bit of fiction this month, I'm going to
attempt to describe the indescribable. Just over a week ago, while trying to
fall asleep one night, a strange feeling began to steal over me. It happens
fairly often - although only when I'm falling asleep on my side, and when I'm
not thinking of other things - and it occurred to me that it would be a good writing
exercise if I attempted to explain what was going on. Also, I'm curious to see
if anyone else ever has moments like this. I assume it's just a glitch in my
brain as my conscious mind switches off and the subconscious takes over, but it
has a curious way of manifesting.
The whole experience is split up into three stages. First of
all, I begin to feel sort of light-headed - not in a 'over indulged on the
falling down water' sort of way, but more like the feeling you get when you're
on a rollercoaster, travelling really fast. In fact, I can cross my eyes
slightly at this point if I feel like it, and it feels like I'm doing a
loop-the-loop. It's slightly trippy, but not unpleasant. The only side effect
is that, for some reason, my head begins to get longer, until it feels about
half the length of my body. Despite the extra space this must create, I'm aware
that my brain is still crammed up where it always is at the top of my head. Obviously,
this must be due to the g-forces of the rollercoaster.
Eventually this feeling wears off a bit, and the second
stage begins. This is the stage that I can sort of understand, and will
probably be the easiest to describe, especially if you have a look at the picture.
This is sort of what I begin to feel like. I get very big, and everything
around me falls away. It always
starts with my tongue, and spreads to my lips and hands. There's another aspect
of this stage which I think is self-inflicted, and that is the feeling of being
in a large hall (tall ceiling, dark wood, tiled floor - I have classy tastes
when it comes to halls) which has an archway at one end. There's a person in
the archway that I'm having a conversation with, but I have to keep moving
further away from them because I keep getting bigger. There's also something to
do with hugging, but I didn't experience that last time, so I didn't write it
down.
Finally, the last stage. This is where I'm going to run into
problems, because a lot of this is pretty abstract. Mostly it involves
feeling/knowing about changes to my body, like before, but there are things I
want to describe but I don't think the right words have been invented. Probably
some psychologist somewhere has an obscure term for it. But anyway, I'll
describe what I can for now, and give the other bit a shot at the end.
The best way to describe what I feel is to say that I begin
to turn blocky. I still get the
swelling feeling that I had before, but instead of just getting bigger, I begin
to get square as well. Again, it starts with my tongue, which turns to a
rectangular block in my mouth. If you close your mouth and try making your
tongue as big as possible, but without it touching the inside of your mouth,
that might give you an idea of how this bit feels. Oh, and as well as feeling
blocky, everything becomes fuzzy too. I begin to feel like parts of me are made
of lumps of felt. The hall I was in before goes away, and I'm on an indistinct
and unremarkable platform floating through nothingness.
There's always a focus on my tongue, which might explain the
next, indescribable bit, to myself if not to you. There's something that's like
a cross between a taste/smell and a feeling. I don't actually taste or smell
anything, so I don't know why it comes across as that. It's pretty difficult to
conjure the feeling up while I'm awake and typing, but I'm going to throw a few
words out there and see how they work. Familiarity; fuzziness; weightlessness; beige;
distance; sweet; hollowness. Now mush all those impressions together, and make
it really, really faint. The beige is
textured, a bit like the texture of that rubbery-tarmac they use in
playgrounds, but it's purely visual.
So there's me, floating along in my own brain, feeling like
a block of felt, completely aware of what's going on and trying to find the
words to describe it. It was at this point that I decided it was time to get up
and write down what I was thinking, or else I'd fall asleep and lose it all.
And finally, after much mulling around in my brain, it has come to this. The
question I'm interested in is, 'Does anyone else's brain play funny tricks on
them as they're falling asleep?' Does
anyone else actually stay awake long enough after going to bed to find out? I
take an age to fall asleep, so maybe my brain is just looking for things to
entertain itself while I make up my mind whether I'm awake or not. Or maybe I'm
just weird (I'm perfectly able to accept that theory - after all, it wouldn't
be the only thing about me that is). Anyway, answers on a postcard, people.
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