After a few blocks of trying to pound this thing out of me in furious marching, I felt myself sweating in the day's heat and was thrilled at the normality of that sensation. The noise started to diminish. Sounds began to leap back into their rightful places, populating the street outside me once again. That jackhammer over there thudding into the pavement, the car braking suddenly, people chatting as I passed. Each sound resumed its accustomed meaning and location. I could feel my chest working hard and listened happily to the simple intake, outrush of breath.

So this thing disappeared after a few horrible minutes, but it left me changed. Here was something new that I had never experienced, could never tolerate, something that had crept past all my defenses – and in the middle of the day! Could it happen again? It was the kind of thing I might read about in a case history – safely distant, someone else's particular torture. But it wasn't remote; it had directly invaded my brain. That overpowering noise could distort every mental pattern, setting all perception loose from its mooring. The torrent of sounds and sights disorients each moment, leaving nothing firm to hold to, no shape I can recognize , only a din of color, motion, threateningly near, whips of sensation, each small pain magnified in intensity because each is experienced for the first time as part of a shriek-like collision. There is a flailing to organize, find pattern and order, the habit of the intentional mind, but nothing sticks, no memory holds, no meaning persists to render the assault of bulleting crashes ordinary, expectable, endurable. It is the constant stress of assault, defense, striking back, retreat. No escape, just a desperate running, and there is nowhere to run.

I understood in a way I hadn't before that there are mental forces capable of rushing people to destruction for the only relief they can find. So – here's a new problem. How do I fight this if it should return? At least I know now that it can happen to me. When I hear that coming on, I can tell myself, this is no stranger, I've heard it before. I know it's a symptom. I know it will pass.