Dread is this dye-like sensation in that it suffuses all of the experience that it is in or around;  it is like a drop of red or pink dye that plips into a glass of  water and spreads, that is what dread is like; and that is also what the word  “dread” is like in this paragraph, it is getting mixed in with all the other words around it, it is being in and with all the other words of this paragraph.  

                    I was running around the wooded area out behind the one-room schoolhouse where I went for third and fourth grades, and I suddenly was  experiencing this sweep all through my body, and then way up powerfully swashing through my head, of dizziness, mild nausea, mild panic, with these big blurry black blotches taking up my field of vision, going melting  down in front of me and blocking out my seeing of the ground—the moss,  the pine needles, the random indentations in the earth—melting down that way and then immediately rising. When these blotches were melting  downwards they were so heavy I thought they’d drag me with them and that I’d collapse into a helpless heap; and then when they whooshed back upwards, totally contradicting their apparently heavy character from the  moment before, acting buoyant, being mercurial, the shift was so startling  that in addition to feeling sick, which I felt, I had this sense of being lied to, being thrown abruptly between hot and cold for no reason except to amuse some prankster.  

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                    I was eight or nine; I didn’t think that there was actually any prankster, any person or being outside me doing this to me, invading my body and head either as a swarm of weird dread or by casting a dread-spell—I didn’t  believe I’d had a dread-spell cast on me—but I reacted like that was what was happening—I clenched, I constricted—I started hyperventilating then—  

                    It had been tag or hide-and-seek—  

                    So as well as this unfamiliar realm of scary sensation, this flood of heaviness and prickliness in my head and my hands, I was suddenly grabbed by my distance from my classmates, the concept of the distance from me to them grabbed me, I was grabbed I mean to say by the concept,  and it was shaking me— 

                    To escape, I clambered inside a hollow, toppled tree trunk all covered over with moss—crawled into it on my elbows, pushing my way up inside there,  with the mulchy,  decomposting leaves and pine needles, the smell of the  moss, the weird ticking mouth-sounds of a rodent family or something, still further ahead of me in that space—  

                    It was very foggy out that morning; the climate had induced in me some out-of-character asthmatic bout, I got told later. I think it was the cold that hit me that way in those wooded hills, because inside the tree trunk where it  was warmer, my breath returned. Finally, I pushed my backwards way out to the forest ground again. I stood up and ran back to the game.