My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them.
When I was a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.
The circumstance was this: I had been cutting up some caper or other–I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,–my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere.
I felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.
Moby Dick, CHAPTER 4, The Counterpane by Herman Melville
UPDATE 2024: Beliefs: 1. Women have a choice 2. No doubt there is a Highest power 3. Science seeks the Truth 4. Sex, like art, is what you make it 5. All good people are welcome to be a great country, yet scoundrels slide. But it’s best to have a bias toward goodness unless proven otherwise. #goodness
UPDATE 2023: While the snail & snake proved to be problematic, and the mollusk impossible, at least I think I’m over Covid-19. Got one new YOGA pose out of all the suffering. It’s called Sleeping Bear; good body position for taking the next breath.
Yes, the door has been past through earlier. – It’s a different world with M’s mother gone on to the next. This date from last year seems so frivolous in comparison.
Every day at 1:15 pm, write down three tasks even if you don’t plan to do them right away. Notice the pattern.
Journal Entry (3/3/23): One whole week with Covid-19, which up until now, had been avoided. (Grateful for Paxlovid, and many thanks to modern medicine in general, but the blame falls on humanity.)
There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us. We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Seneca
Feedback mechanisms as anticipatory anxiety trigger symptoms which in turn, reinforce the phobia. Paradoxical intention consists of a reversal of attitude. Fear is replaced by a paradoxical wish to experience the anxiety fully, and the wind is taken out of the sails. ~Logotherapy by Victor Frankl