Omoni,
Usually when I'm about to fall asleep it starts at the top of my arm and slowly moves down my side to my legs.
It's not so much a form of paralysis but more that my body seems to give up, it carries out all the movements I would like to do, but with an apparent delay and without any active desire. When the feeling has flattened my legs, this feeling spreads to my nose, eyes and throat, choking the sob that is then trapped between my epiglottis and trachea. My nose becomes blocked and the pressure behind my eyes also increases. But instead of breaking out into a heartbreaking cry with big tears and lots of snot, it lingers and is replaced by a silent cold loneliness. This loneliness is sterile, without feeling. All color, sound and movement do not exist, just a paper-thin screen in which I exist.
The space in front of me closes in a round vacuum ball and weightlessly I am slowly drawn towards it. I feel the pressure and suction of the ball that seems to get bigger and bigger, like a black hole moving inexorably towards me.
The moment I can almost touch it and it threatens to be sucked in, the ball turns away from me again and becomes smaller and smaller. The pressure then decreases again and the silent loneliness also leaves me.
The first time this happened to me was when I was about 6 years old and had a high fever during some childhood illness. The orange, green and brown balls on the wallpaper, which was very hip in the 70s, sucked me in and out.
When I flew to Korea for the first time years later, just like on my first flight from Korea to the Netherlands, I had a stopover at De Gaulle in Paris and with a shock I felt my body react in exactly the same way on descent and again a few hours later on take-off. The 'Broccoli trees' around Paris were the balls that sucked me in.
It still happens to me, more often in the fall when the days are getting shorter and the watery cold first turns the leaves of the trees into dazzling colors before finally falling and decaying into a brown sludge. The loneliness then flares up dark brown for a moment.
Have you ever felt so lonely?