The drowing dream

I had this feeling today. A lunch in the gut and the feeling that makes you mute and the way you cannot see things and everything becomes blurry. They way you can feel every drop of your blood turing into ice and the breathlessness. The feeling of drowing and of all the hopes drowning out of you and the the way that you can feel that this is your last minute and this is your last breadth.

Panic arraives slowly at first creeping though the cracks if my mind. Then it flooded e everything. My heart pounded so loudly that it became the only sound I could hear. The would shrank until there was only me and the desperate need for air.

I remember thinking This is it. Not dramatically and not poetically. Just a simple certainity. This is my last minute.

The thought did not scream. It whispered. And somehow that made it worse. A strange calm followed. That kind that comes when resistance feels pointless. I felt myself sinking deeper into the darkness gathering around me. My body felt heavier. My thoughts slowed. Every hope and every plan and every unfinished conversation seemsmed tk drift away from me like peices of a ship disappearing beneath black water.

I was drowning not in a ocean and not in a river but in something far deeper. In the feeling itself. The darkness swallowed everything. Memories floated last like distant lights. Faces appeared and vanished. Dreams I have not achieved yet drifted away before I could reach them. The future dissolved into nothingness.

As I sank I heard a voice. It was clear and calm. Closer than my own thoughts. "This is reality". The world's echoed through the darkness. "This is reality" again and again.

The voice sounded familiar yet I could not place it. It was not threatening and it was not comforting either. It simply stated a fact thought it knew something I did not.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to ask questions. But I was sinking tok fast and then suddenly a violent vibration...a sharp noise and a flash of light and my eyes flew open.

I sat upright and gasping for air. My phone was vibrating beside me like it was gone bad. The screen glowed in the darkness and filled with calls and notifications. My heart hammered against my ribs. Sweat covered my skin.

I was drowning not in a ocean and not in a river but in something far deeper in the feeling itself. The room slowly came back to focus. The walls and the ceiling and familiar shadows. Reality. Or atleast what I beleiveed was reality. I stared at the phone trying to steady my breathing. And then again. The voice that looked into the darkness and whispered This is reality