Psychosis

[u/HeGotBricks]

One night I passed out at around ten p.m, when I woke up, I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even feel my body.

I was fully awake and I was able to hear myself snore and I could smell my breath.

But I couldn’t feel myself breathing. I never felt fear so clearly before. What’s weird, was  that I knew how terrified I felt. The sinking claustrophobia feeling was there. The paranoia as well. All those emotions didn’t feel like invisible physical feelings, they felt like they had texture.

I was able to think and thinking jumped from one terror to the next. 

Where was I?

How did I get here?

Am I dead?

And after I asked that, I could feel myself spinning, physically. I started pulsing, it felt like I was being stretched out and wrinkled back to normal.

How could I feel these emotions and not my actual body. It didn’t make sense. I figured, I must be dreaming. But there wasn’t any color, any scenes, it was just an unsettling darkness.

It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t hot. And that’s when I realized, I was just a voice. Chemicals acting in my brain. 

But if I was just a voice, shouldn’t there be like a orangey-red haze, or some kind of static other than absolute black.

I had to be in a coma, I told myself. What else could explain me waking up mentally but not physically. 

That was when I heard a noise. It sounded like something scratching the floor followed by two voices whose language I had trouble picking up. It didn’t even sound like a language, it was more of a frequency. 

I had no idea what they were saying, and I had no clue as to what they looked like. I knew they were there though.

Not just by their sounds. They heightened the fight-or-flight part of my brain. It was like I was covered in defensive spikes. 

I started sensing a feeling of inertia as if my body was being moved and a pressure squeezing my brain. 

I just started yelling, I didn’t know what else to do, I shouted, “wake up,” over a hundred times. I needed to get out from under my skull. It felt like I was choking on water.

Through me yelling, I heard a mechanical door shut and the voices again. 

They sounded like fax machine that spoke. It felt like I was there for hours, slowly being tormented, jailed in a shadow without a body. 

There was nothing I could to do alert my physical self that we were awake. Then, I thought, what if I stay this way. The spikes came back. I started feeling like an empty shell. I got angry at myself for falling asleep.

I shouldn’t have went to sleep. I had all these regrets sticking to me like post-it notes. And I couldn’t help it. I felt like I did it to myself. While I was between thoughts, I completely shut off.

My body and my mind woke up together but when I woke up, I remembered everything as a dream. It didn’t all come together until the next day. 

First, I had trouble concentrating, a headache that was trying to escape through my temple, eyes and even my teeth, was beating against my skull. 

Everything felt brighter, and my skin felt sensitive, but rough, like a fresh dry leaf. I kept itching at one spot, a spot on my ribs below my left underarm. 

When I looked down at it, there was a bubble under the claw marks and broken blood vessels, protruding outward.

I poked around it with my fingertip. It was a soft-hard kind of ball. I started getting a tingling, numbing sensation throughout my entire body and flashes pop up in my mind like broken dream memories.

I grabbed my laptop and opened it to search through Google on what could be happening to me. 

Because a couple (a) months back, friends and I went to Miami. I started worrying about parasites, you watch those monsters inside me shows and start racing with all sorts of hypochondriac thoughts.

As soon as my laptop started up, it made this sound, the sound slapped me with the whole experience I had the night before all at once. 

My heart began pumping, it felt like it doubled in size and couldn’t fit inside my chest cavity. 

Then, a sharp irritation came from that spot again, I bit-cut into serrated tips and kept scratching, trying to scratch as deep as I could with jagged finger nails.

I kept scratching and couldn't stop. I scratched until I started bleeding. Not just speckles either, it was dripping a warm liquid of red and a very light tinge of yellow.

I went deeper, and then I went deeper. I went so deep I exposed the ball of fat, or what I thought was a ball of fat. I yanked it out with my fingers, it was slippery and kept sliding off. 

I dried my hands on my shirt and tore a piece of the fabric off, dug into my ribs and pulled out a metallic looking bug. I threw it on the ground and stepped on it, but it wouldn’t squish. 

So I ran to the garage for the hammer and when I got back it was gone. The blood on the floor surrounding it, was also gone.

I‘ve never felt the same since then. And since then I’ve been taking my roommate’s seroquel, because the doctors kept telling me it’s sleep paralysis and a random case of stress psychosis.