Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

This is one of the craziest feeling things to happen to me, hands down, ever. Don't try this (and don't be as stupid as me — if you're going to do it, do it with someone else around, and don't do it somewhere you could drown). Personally, I have no intention of trying it again.

Anyway, I'm lying in the tub trying to relax. My pulse is very visible (at all times) — you can see it in the veins on my wrist because they move around with every heartbeat. Same goes for most of my torso, and especially the blood vessels that run from the groin down the thigh, which move as much as half an inch with every contraction. So I'm lying in the tub watching my heartbeat in my legs, and speeding it up and then slowing it way down to relax, a simple exercise I do for stress control. I wondered if I could actually stop my heart, so I concentrated on not slowing it down, but just focussed on it really intensely, made it everything I thought about and put myself consciously into each beat, feeling it happen. When I was ready, I tried to freeze that moment in time, just lock myself in that moment. I just stopped all thought and tried to just make it end.

And then my heart stopped beating. I watched it and felt it for a moment, realizing that it had actually happened and not knowing what to do. I don't think I panicked but I remember feeling very, very strange. I don't really know how to describe the sensation, and what followed was I assume hallucination. My entire field of vision was reduced to nothing but blues and purples — no other colors — and I felt myself “shrinking”. My limbs deepened quickly in tone, and I started to slump into the tub. I couldn't stop it at this point — this is the only time in my life I've ever passed out that I can recall — and just sort of “watched” myself from what felt like about two inches higher than I should be. The hair on my legs (and this is why I say “hallucination”), starting at the most prominent set of veins became something half way between thick vines and a deeply tinted web of capillaries; death symbolically creeping over me.

Then everything went black and I dropped below the water.

I guess I must have come to a few seconds later — I can't imagine this whole experience was more than fifteen seconds. Anyway, I don't really care if anyone believes me (I don't think I'd believe anyone who told me this), or thinks I just forced myself into a hallucination. To be perfectly honest, *I* don't even know if this should be put in the “you're crazy” bin, or the “you've seen something special” bin. There's a real fine line between the two. In any case, it was extremely unpleasant, and I spent the rest of the day just trying not to pay any attention to my heartbeat lest it happen again! An all around terrifying event (more so afterwards though — at the time it was more a “what the fuck? I think I might die now! I didn't expect that at all!” moment).

That said, the idea that we can kill ourselves just by thinking about it is quite interesting to me!

Other than that, in the physical realm, I hope my fractured rib mends soon because working out with a cracked rib sucks, ha… That said, it sucks less than not working out, and now that I went and saw 300 (incredible movie visually), I'm even more motivated to keep on dining in hell.