Journey from Childhood Terror,
to a Theory of the Cosmos

A fear without a face is the hardest kind to fight. It's not a fear you can point to. There's no monster. No shadow lurking. No sense of falling through endless space. Those are human fears — things we know, things we can name.

What gripped me was the fear of is-ness itself: of being undone, dissolved, scattered to the quantum wind. A dread not only of impersonal energy, but of my very self unraveling into incoherence, of becoming lost... a fading echo in the vast machinery of the cosmos.

And it didn't come only at night.

The worst, and most vivid, episode caught me wide awake in broad daylight. I was twelve, home sick from school. Lying on the couch, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, the heavy, shallow sleep of a feverish day. The rhythmic hum of my mother's vacuum in the next room was a comfort, a pulse of normalcy.

Then the normal dissolved.

I woke, but only halfway. Trapped somewhere between this world and another, feeling like a skin stretched over a boundless void, as if the very coherence that held me together was thinning: not just the terror of quantum energy, but the horror of slipping into cosmic forgetfulness.

My eyes saw sunlight catching dust motes, my ears heard my mom cleaning. But deep inside, I was dissolving — a voice soon to vanish in the static.

That non-living state took hold, a feeling of being fragmented into pure, raw energy at the quantum level, right there in the living room. Cold sweat coated my skin, my heart pounded like a bird trapped in a cage. I was utterly aware of where I was. Yet, terror gripped me as if I was somewhere else entirely.

"Mom!" I screamed. "It's happening again! I'm having the nightmare, right now...."

She rushed in, turning off the vacuum as fear spread across her face. She saw me, eyes wide, trembling, holding onto coherence, desperate not to disappear.

How do you help a child terrified of a feeling no one else can see?

"It won't stop," I said, voice shaking. I was a ghost inside my own body, caught in a waking panic over a vast, impersonal cosmic force. I had a deathly fear that my existence could dissolve, that my thread could fade away, leaving only static in a universe that forgets.

Desperation took over. Clumsily, instinctively, I threw myself onto the kitchen floor and began... doing pushups — furious, trembling pushups.

One. This floor is real. Two. My mom is here. Three. My arms are burning.

Each pushup felt like a battle to re-anchor myself, fighting not only metaphysical infinity but the crushing threat of becoming nothing, a fading echo, lost to cosmic incoherence. Slowly, the stretch across the cosmos loosened its grip. The terror ebbed, leaving me collapsed, gasping on the carpet.

My mom just stared, baffled and scared. "What was that?" she finally whispered.

I looked up at her, and for the first time, was able to speak the only phrase I'd ever known to describe it.

"It blew up," I gasped. "It just... it blew up."

I was, unknowingly, describing the Big Bang and, perhaps, somewhere deeper, the terrifying possibility of my own echo unraveling.

I wouldn't understand what it meant for another four decades.