Time: 45 minutes.

Situation: A quiet room with my eyes closed, sitting Burmese-style with my hands on my knees.

Experience: I closed my eyes and immediately perceived my visual field "vibrating" at about four times per second. My concentration was diffuse and my legs and head hurt a lot. I shifted my awareness to my sense of touch (skin) and the "vibrations" sped-up to about eight times per second.  "Vibrations" were initially chunky and intense, but soon became much finer and the pain was gone. I slipped into a stories, snapped back, and slipped into stories again. Formations were almost evident, but not quite. Then I dropped back into pain/stories/chunky vibrations and repeated the process. This happened maybe a dozen times.

Observations: I've been feeling very irritable today and have been in persistent pain (headache). I don't know if its the "Dark Night", or the fact that I foolishly decided to stop drinking coffee yesterday, and so am in withdrawals from that (I was drinking a lot of coffee before), but today has been profoundly physically unpleasant. This trip through the "Dark Night" has me thinking and feeling a lot like I've "lost it" and am "not meditating right"; in short, I'm feeling a little lost; the weird counterpart to these feelings is that for the first time, I'm spotting the individual nanas that make up the "Dark Night" and recognizing them as they occur (e.g. Misery, Disgust, etc), which is kind of interesting.

The meditator keeps on meditating largely as before.