It's been a very "Davey" day.

When I woke up, I toddled off to watch my cartoons. Digimon was upsetting for some reason, and I wished Dave were there to snuggle up to. Beast Machines was OK. Rattrap's robot mode is ugly as all get-out, though. Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot was, as always, fantastic. I wished Dave were there.

I made (or rather, tried to make) french toast. I failed miserably. As I ate my burnt-on-the-outside, soggy-in-the-middle toast bits, I missed Dave. I decided to go shopping and bought some really spiffy pjs. I've needed new pjs for a while because there are holes in the shoulders and armpits, and when I was up visiting Dave a button popped off.

I miss Dave. A lot. Perhaps even more than usual. You see...

Something very upsetting happened last night. Something that hasn't happened since I was 12 or 13. Something that I have never tried to describe, or explain, before. Please bear with me.

As I was closing my eyes to go to sleep, I heard a roar. I knew what was coming. I'd been there before, so many years before: Suddenly surrounded in a cacophony of color, as though someone had taken a million brilliant hues and spattered them on the white walls of a small room.

(In trying to explain this experience, I will use terms such as "surrounded," "inside," or "buried." But there was no sense of space in... wherever I was. There was no front, no beside, no here. Everything just was, existing in a single point.)

On all sides were the colors, jagged and rough. The colors had texture. In seeing them I could feel them, rubbing against me. And the noise was deafening. All the colors were making a sound, distinct in tone and pitch. Some were long and drawn out. Some were staccato notes. It was a deafening roar.

When I looked around (I say "look" but I had no choice - my eyes were shut already and the colors were everywhere), I would see a swath of colors. I could feel them with the body I didn't have, and I could hear them singing.

It was completely and utterly overwhelming.

My eyes were closed and the colors were. They were. I couldn't stop them, I couldn't block them out, I couldn't make them go away. But, from experiencing this so many years ago, I knew I needed to concentrate. And the gray would come.

Gray. White? Black? I don't know. But it was neutral. All shadow and no sun. Calm. Smooth - no rough colors here. It was tranquil and cold. Frightening in its featurelessness, but it was peaceful. And it was silent, except for the laugh.

When I last experienced this over a decade ago, I thought it was a horse laughing at me. I mean, laughing at me. Not a wild guffaw, but a snigger. This time, I only heard a laugh. No horse.

Never mind the laugh. The colors were gone.

Almost.

I could feel them, out there, trying to get inside where I was. They battered against the shell where I had buried myself. Sometimes they broke through, destroying the gray and the peace. In a blink the calm would be gone, replaced by the shifting and the scraping and the screaming.

I'm forgetting something.

Ah. Yes. Have I mentioned that through this entire ordeal, I was paralyzed?

It would have been a simple matter to open my eyes. The colors would vanish, the sounds would cease. Sometimes I could do that. It's how I eventually escaped last night. But for what seemed like an eternity, I was trapped trying to balance myself between the color and the gray.

When I was finally able to open my eyes, I was afraid to close them again. The colors might come back. I did eventually drift off to sleep, but sleep was a long time in coming.

Am I going insane? I don't know.

I have never taken acid or any other drug that would induce such hallucinations. And it is a hallucination. It is real to me when it's happening.

I'm sure there's some psychiatric explanation for all this. I know of a thing called "sleep paralysis," in which a person will lose motor control over their body just before falling to sleep. It's theorized that "alien abductees" actually experience sleep paralysis.

No aliens here. Just screeching colors and giggling horses.

Is it caused by stress? Something I ate? Something I heard? Something I was thinking? I have absolutely no idea. But whatever the cause, it is a terrifying experience.

I hope it won't happen again tonight.