It was a dark and stormy night.
From The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle:
It was a September evening, and not yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense, drizzly, fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.
Vignettes, such as this, are my reason for reading Gothic novels. It is an illustration in words. It is the writer's brush were he a painter.
Out of veneration for the writer and his writings I would leave it here, but a thought entered my mind, one I had not thought about for a long time. The ideas are associated, I believe, in my subconscious mind. The drab earth tones of Arthur Conan Doyle's vignette remind me of a personal experience. I had walked away from a car wreck. I promise to tell how that happened at another time. The point is, it was my first experience of the surge of adrenaline following a life-threatening event. It is trite to say, I know, but I felt like Superman. The surge of confidence was soon diminished by the rapid breakdown of adrenaline by my body. The body, in general, seems to adjust promptly to safer conditions, and to rapidly deregulate the powerful hormone for return to normal functioning. In my case, I experienced the crash by my vision becoming all browns, drab, and neutral grays, that is, by the loss of all color hues. Frightening. The condition lasted just long enough to make me humble. I realized I could have died. Years later, I chanced to read a classic study in a long out-of-date college psychology textbook about "Pink Adrenaline." Hormonal adrenaline oxidizes very rapidly and, as it does, it becomes increasingly red-tinged in color. One of the effects on subjects, noted by the study, was hallucinations of the Delirium tremens category, not the recreational sort reported by casual drug users. All I will add at this time is "don't try this at home."