I have watched people faint in movies and thought, dramatic. I have heard stories and thought, how does that even happen. And then today, in the middle of a dance class I had no business attending on an empty stomach, I found out exactly how it happens. In excruciating, fascinating, first-person detail.
Let me set the scene.
I had snacked on some dates. The fruit. Not a romantic outing, just three or four small wrinkled pieces of fruit that I apparently decided was sufficient fuel for the most cardio I had done since before my period, which had ended over a week ago. My body, it turns out, had opinions about this.
I was also very thirsty before I left. I remember coming back inside, rushing a glass of water, and heading straight back down the elevator. A cursory acknowledgment of what my body was asking for before I ignored it anyway.
I then walked thirty minutes to class, arriving just as stretches were beginning.
The class started fine. I was dancing. My heart was working harder than usual, noticeably harder, but I chalked that up to being out of practice and pushed through. At some point, without making a conscious decision about it, I stopped dancing and drifted to the back of the room. I found the ballet barre and hooked my arms over it, the way you might hang off a ledge. Not stretching, just… existing, holding on. Looking back, I think some part of my body already knew what was coming and was quietly making arrangements.
Then my vision started to go.
Here is where it gets interesting.
I want you to understand that “vision starting to go” does not mean what I thought it meant. I assumed fainting looked like a graceful Victorian swoon; one moment you see everything clearly, and then black, cut to commercial. Instead, what happened was far stranger and, honestly, more interesting.
My hearing went first.
Not gone. Scrambled. I could hear that there was sound in the room. Music, voices, movement. But I couldn’t decode any of it. It was like being underwater, or like listening to a radio station just slightly off-frequency. I knew the instructor was still calling out the beat rhythmically, the way she always does. I even knew it was her voice specifically. But what she was saying, the actual words, the meaning, was completely gone. Sound existed. Comprehension did not.
Then the vision followed, but again, not black. Never black. What I got instead was color without content. I could see that there was pink. There was purple. Light was reaching my eyes just fine. But the part of my brain that turns light into information had quietly clocked out. I could not tell you what was in front of me. I could not recognize shapes or faces or walls. I was seeing without perceiving. Receiving the signal with no one left to read it.
This, I would later learn, is exactly what you’d expect. Vision and hearing are high-maintenance senses. They require significant processing power, active interpretation, a lot of cognitive infrastructure. As blood flow to my brain dropped, my brain started shedding functions in order of luxury. Complex interpretation went first. Raw sensation held on a little longer.
I walked to my purse. I don’t fully know how. My purse, a Prada duet bucket bag with drawstrings, was resting on one of those wall AC units that stick out of older NYC buildings. I picked it up, sat down, and placed it in my lap. I tried to open it and couldn’t. I remember, in my semi-conscious state, cursing the drawstrings while my fingers refused to cooperate and my vision was gone entirely. My hands and my brain were no longer on speaking terms, and the purse was not helping. So I just held it and waited.
For about five minutes, I sat there refusing to faint. That is the only way I can describe it. I was not surrendering. I was fighting, quietly, from the inside.
And here is the part that surprised me most: I was aware the entire time.
Not aware in the way you are aware right now, reading this. But there was still an I in there, observing. Noticing. I knew I was fainting. I knew my hearing was gone. And then, from somewhere, a memory surfaced.
Months ago I had read an article about a man who survived for three days in an air pocket inside a capsized boat. Trapped in pitch black water, no way out, he understood one thing clearly: if he panicked, his body would burn through the remaining oxygen faster. So he forced himself to stay calm. He kept his head in the trapped air pocket while his body floated in the water. And he waited for three days, calm, in pitch blackness.
I recalled this, fully and specifically, while my brain was in the process of shutting down. And I applied it. I instructed myself not to panic. I told myself to stay calm, conserve whatever I had left, and give myself time to come back to the surface.
I was not passively watching myself faint. I was managing it. Somewhere beneath the scrambled hearing and the colorless vision, there was still enough of me left to reason, to remember, and to choose how to respond. I was genuinely curious, not scared, just focused. I remember thinking something close to: how come I can smell things but not hear? A legitimate neuroscience question, posed internally, while my brain was running on almost nothing.
The same is true for the meta-awareness. We tend to assume self-reflection is sophisticated, a luxury of the well-functioning brain, the first thing to go when things get hard. But there’s a theory that basic consciousness, the bare sense of I am here and this is happening, might actually be rooted deep in the brainstem rather than in the cerebral cortex we’re so proud of. It might be one of the last things to leave, not the first. What I lost was the ability to process and interpret. What stayed was the thin, quiet fact of experience itself.
I was down to almost nothing. But something was still home.
At some point, after sitting in that strange suspended state for what felt like a long time, no sight, no hearing, just the thin thread of awareness and my instruction to stay calm, I considered using the last of my energy to yell out to the class. But I worried I would use up whatever I had left. So I waited.
After another minute or so, I noticed my instructor was closer to me. I could not see her or understand what she was saying. But the signature of the sound was unmistakably her voice. She came closer, almost touching me. I collapsed in her direction and whispered, “I can’t hear you.”
Which means I was speaking while barely conscious, which raises another question I didn’t expect to have today: why could I still talk?
The answer is that speech, at its most basic and most automatic, is ancient. It sits low in the brain. A single urgent whisper doesn’t require much. I wasn’t having a conversation. I wasn’t choosing words carefully. I was issuing a one-line alert, which is about as primitive a communication as there is. My higher functions were gone. My alarm system was still running.
After class ended, she told me that at first she wasn’t sure I needed help – I was sitting so still. But once she was close enough, I leaned fully into her, like my body recognized that help had arrived and simply released the effort of holding itself upright. Even at the level of barely-conscious, the nervous system knows the difference between alone and not alone. Something in me registered her presence as safe and let go.
They put gum in my mouth. I tasted it and wanted more, my body communicating its needs in the most direct way available. And then one of the other dancers, who happened to be a nurse, produced an alcohol strip and held it near my nose.
And that smell.
I want to talk about the smell.
Smell is the oldest sense. It is the most primitive, the most direct. It bypasses almost all of the processing infrastructure that vision and hearing require and goes straight to the brainstem, straight to the limbic system, the ancient emotional core of the brain. It does not need much. It does not ask permission from your higher functions. It just arrives.
So while I couldn’t see properly, couldn’t hear properly, couldn’t speak in complete sentences – I could smell. Perfectly. Sharply. The alcohol hit me like a slap and I knew exactly what it was.
And here is the thing: I started trying to sniff it. Actively. Deliberately. Some part of me, operating well below conscious reasoning, understood that this smell was a rope back to the surface and grabbed it. I was grasping for a sense that still worked, using it to pull myself back, because apparently even at rock bottom my brain was trying to problem-solve.
My hearing came back first. Then my vision. And then I was back, blinking, present, mildly embarrassed, and full of questions.
I walked home thirty minutes later, armed with a chocolate bar, a Gatorade, and an order of Chick-fil-A fries. I stopped at the bodega downstairs for a drink because my phone had died on the way and I was navigating on pure instinct. I came in, sat down, and started trying to make sense of what had happened to me.
Here is what I know: I fainted because I hadn’t eaten, because I pushed my body harder than it was ready for, because there was not enough fuel or blood pressure to keep my brain properly supplied when my heart started working overtime. The mechanism is mundane. Bodies do this. It is a known thing.
But what happened inside that mechanism, the precise sequence of what left and what stayed, the colors without shapes, the sound without meaning, the one sense that held on, the awareness that somehow persisted through all of it, that is something I did not expect to find so remarkable. Or to remember so clearly.
Most people faint and remember nothing. They go, and then they’re back, with a gap in between.
I watched the whole thing.
I don’t know what that says about consciousness, or the self, or what exactly it means to be present in a body. Neuroscientists and philosophers have been arguing about it for centuries and will keep arguing long after I’ve finished my burger and gone to sleep.
But I can tell you what it felt like from the inside: like a dimmer, not a switch. Like the most essential, irreducible part of experience is quieter and deeper and harder to extinguish than any of us realize.
Very faint. Very demure. Fully, stubbornly, curiously present.
Eat before dance class.