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Well written. I understand. It is indeed difficult to explain, but the word "detachment" is a good word to include. Been there, done that, more than once, and two times that immediately come to mind there was an element of complete surprise on my part. Once I was shot by a sniper, and another I surprised a large bear in a place (but not moment) where I expected one to be. In the bear incident, upon seeing the bear, I reacted perfectly with my actions up to and through my first shot (which was a good one).............and then I "detached" as I watched him roll backward, spin, thrash,...............and then lope away. Much later, back at work, a friend called it "buck fever". I disagreed, pointing out that my actions through the first shot (despite my initial surprise) were immediate and perfect, and he pointed out that "buck fever", which I never truly understood despite being a lifelong hunter, has no required timeframe. To this day, as you correctly write, I can't say he was correct or not, I can't adequately explain it, but it's very real. Moreover, since 2012, when I drove my pickup truck through the ice and to the bottom of a large lake at 44' deep, I've also been dealing with PTSD in a very alert, expectant, and educated way. Unlike 1975 when I was shot and PTSD was still a psychological phenomenon newly recognized in Vietnam veterans and undergoing new, intense, and continuing research, I fully expected to feel its effects after my brush with death trapped in my truck at the bottom of the lake. I even knew what those effects would be since I had gone through them more than once before. I'm learning that I knew nothing, but also that 7 years later I'm still learning that I don't understand so completely that my new experiences really won't be of much help to me or others. I'm quite confident that people who experience sasquatch encounters deal with very unique PTSD effects for the rest of their lives afterwards, and there's really not much they can do about it, even if they're wise enough to understand that they're going to go through it. Suffice it to say that I now strongly believe that PTSD has a definite cumulative effect. Each time one adds another psychological trauma (and that includes emotional trauma like fear, loss, surprise, etc as well as physical trauma), your mental health dies that much more, and recovery might not be forthcoming. My PTSD, starting in my childhood and being built upon every few years since with fresh traumas, emotional wounds, fears, and even major disappointments have destroyed me, and hurt everyone around me. I'm crazy to want to see a sasquatch. Maybe that desire says a lot about why my life is not much more than a collection of regularly scheduled traumas?

I'm either in a Marmot Limelight, rarely in a Henessy hammock, as the human burrito, out on a cot if no bugs or the back of the Rover, which is preferred to the hammock if only for the insect free view. It's a deathtrap as far as accidents on a roadway but all the glass sure makes it nice to see out of. That said, I still like the tent for getting to those sweet spots, not to mention the sounds are much easier to hear. I'm never going to have the experience of something waking me up by sticking its muzzle into my back through 4 mils of nylon in the truck. I'll never know what that was... Later, with the carpeted sleeping platform installed:

^^^^^^ Just as a footnote, I've sequestered myself in my bedroom for the past several days with the blinds drawn due to another breakdown of some sort. I've been doing a lot of reading during this time. It's remarkable what one can find when one looks for it. "Knock, and it will be opened unto you. Seek, and ye shall find"......... At any rate, cumulative PTSD is extremely common among front line police officers, even those who haven't experienced lots of deadly gunfights themselves simply by dealing daily with murder, suicide, and accident victims, the anguish of victims families, or even just the regular exposure to evil (which is most definitely something I have felt and have a definite ability to detect). But this caught me by surprise! Apparently, the longer one accumulates trauma, the more it affects one's sense of smell! https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(17)30567-X/fulltext It was brought to my attention nearly 20 years ago that I had lost my sense of smell, just before or just after I had been shot in the head, and most definitely my worse gunshot injury, and the one that took the longest time to recover from (lost my eyesight in my right {dominant} eye that took years to fully regain). What is amazing is that the damage to the eye healed fully, but my sense of smell appears to be gone forever. Today is the first that I'm learning that it may be associated with PSTD. The PTSD associated with sasquatch exposure, in my estimation, could be particularly damaging with the added factors of others rejecting your claims, including officialdom, in addition to the wonderment one would engage in for the rest of his/her life afterwards over what they had seen.