The Fortress of Solitude

Seated on the chill concrete, I felt a recurrence of my childhood micropsia, a night terror I thought I'd left behind at age eleven or twelve, in my bedroom on Dean Street: the sensation that my body was reduced to a speck size in a universe pounding with gravitational force, a void crushing against me on all sides. The ailanthus branches brushing the back windows had seemed to me then like the spiraled arms of distant galaxies. Later, in the years after I retired the ring, I'd blamed my inability to fly from a rooftop, my preference to look away from the sky, on the micropsia hallucinations. Now, they'd returned to undermine my heroism in the prison. My heroism was used up.

Jonathan Lethem, "The Fortress of Solitude"