"a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a
year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or
feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly
uncertain or even content for the first time in your
life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any
cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things
are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some
reason, you will no longer be the person you believed
you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts
going on all around you, more importantly shifts in
you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting,
like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark
like a room. But you won't understand why or how.
You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness
in the first place.

Old shelters--television, magazines,
movies--won't protect you anymore. You might try
scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in
the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover
you no longer trust the very walls you always took for
granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred
times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows,
any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much,
much, deeper.

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so
full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky
can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent
magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the
light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll
care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for
hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain
to believe you're some kind of indispensable,
universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you
could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad
you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to
sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded
restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the
comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself
dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll
stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing
apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived
denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then
for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist,
though try to resist you still will, fighting with
everything you've got not to face the thing you most
dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come
before, the creature you truly are, the creature we
all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin."