Phew, I thought I was a goner this morning. I don’t know exactly what happened, but what I can say is that before I went to bed at around midnight it felt like my heart was beating irregularly, and then just after I laid in bed I could feel my face flushing. But since I was going to sleep anyway I thought, “Screw it,” and fell asleep very quickly.
Then during the night/morning I woke up, and then struggled to find a comfortable way to sleep. As I was going through this process of being uncomfortable I very quickly felt like my body was shutting down for good. It didn’t feel like passing out — I’ve done that quite a few times now — it felt worse than that, like my body was executing a shutdown now command. Maybe it was a reboot command, I don’t know, but it was the first time I’ve felt scared in a while. Usually when I’m about to pass out I tell myself to just focus on the breath and the present moment, but in this case there was no time for that. This came on me much faster and was clearly different from passing out.
(It’s hard to describe, but when passing out you have some notice. At first you don’t feel well, your body gets heavy, you might get warm and/or break out in a cold sweat, start shaking, and eventually you “white out,” where your field of vision becomes more narrow, you start losing vision and what you can see starts turning white. In this case it was like someone just pulled the plug on the power to my body. It was like if you were shot and knew you only had a couple of breaths left to live, except for some reason I came out of it.)
When the episode ended I sat up in bed and looked at the clock, and it was 3:01 a.m. I didn’t go back to sleep for a while. I wanted to try to understand what just happened, and whether it was over, but eventually I did go back to bed.