A thought rattles around in your head, permeating your mind. It doesn’t go away.
People around you are talking but you have trouble understanding their words or empathizing with their emotions. The thought overshadows all other thoughts and things. Your immediate surroundings grow distant as the thought builds a newer and more visceral reality around you. This new reality is not the same as the reality you know. It’s new.
You stop trying to resist and let yourself focus on the thought. It permeates even more. It pulses and throbs and becomes more intense.
It is exciting, visceral, uncomfortable and painful. It’s extreme. It is euphoric or excruciating. Maybe it’s both. You can’t tell. You can’t escape it. You’re not sure if you want to.
It intensifies. You feel like there is no escape. You focus on the feeling even more. Nothing else exists.
At that moment it becomes instantly light. It feels as if the thought was air that you could cup in your hands. It still exists. So do you. You’re there next to it, sitting still, noticing and observing from a distance. You feel your self split from the thought. You look at it. You have no opinion of it. It exists on its own just like you do. It is an object.
You slowly start to notice your surroundings. You slowly start to hear people talking around you. You understand what they are saying. You feel like you’ve been here before.
You’re not sure how much time has gone by. You know the thought will come back. You know it’s not gone forever. But you also know that it was only a thought. It was something separate from you entirely. You can look at it and touch it from a distance. You understand it objectively.