Last night Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debated for the first time. It was apparently the most widely watched debate in the history of American presidential politics. It was also one of the most psychologically uncomfortable television experiences of my life.

Which is not to say that I experienced 90 uninterrupted minutes of rage or horror, or that my preferred candidate (none of the above) performed poorly. (I think s/he did remarkably well, considering.) The problem wasn’t that I was overwhelmed by one all-consuming negative emotion. Quite the opposite. I had no idea what I was feeling. I was plagued by a vague sense of discomfort, an ambivalent unease that refused to take the shape of any recognizable feeling. I could not open the big coloring book of human misery and turn to the crayon-blackened page that perfectly depicted my agony. There was no chance that someday Pixar would transform this nagging mental other into a supporting character for a sequel to Inside Out. It had no name, and no clear character.

It was ambiguous. Ask your neighborhood psychologist; they’ll tell you: when it comes to the human psyche, ambiguity is hell.

So, as an act of therapy, a rare moment of self care, I’ve set out to taxonomize the demons that plagued me, to give names to this Legion of psychopolitical anxieties.

Here are my best efforts:

1. Waking Dream Amnesia. A wonderful thing happens to most of your nightmares: you forget them. (Of course, it happens to many of your most blissful dreams as well, but, hey, that’s life buddy.) They disappear when you wake. They’re sucked back into the vast fertilizer lagoon of your subconscious, often leaving only scraps behind: a poorly organized slideshow of traumatic images, a lingering sense of disquiet. Sometimes they leave nothing at all.

This is a common experience. There’s nothing particularly unsettling about it, at least nothing that lasts longer than the length of your morning shower. It’s an accepted fact of sleeping life. But last night it happened to me while I was awake.

As soon as I had turned the television off―and I acted fast, since I have an overpowering fear of talking heads, even when they are not disembodied ones―I realized I had no memory of what I had just seen. Or, rather, I had traces of memories, the pond scum of recollections, but I could not reconstitute them into a narrative that made sense. I couldn’t even form a timeline. I was a drunk who could not walk a straight line from my car (made in a factory in Detroit that was now closed … thanks to Chinese trade deals?) to the police officer (who somehow was emanating an aura of both unexamined racial prejudice and unequivocal saintly self-sacrifice). I could not separate my deleted emails from my undisclosed tax returns. I was adrift. Maybe this is what alien abductees mean when they talk about lost time.

But, of course, there’s a reason we cannot remember our nightmares: they are incoherent. Even as they are happening, they make no sense. They are not linear and they are not logical. They just happen, senselessly, horribly, even as we wish they would stop. They are not forgotten because they are traumatic. (The human mind actually loves to dwell on trauma, to savor it.) They are forgotten because they’re nonsense. How could you hope to remember something that doesn’t move sequentially through time, that doesn’t progress naturally from beginning to end, that seems to stop and rewind to rewrite names and faces and facts as it goes, that has no respect for material reality and even less respect for plot continuity? What you are left with is debris, the plaster dust, broken glass, and bits of bone left behind after the accidental demolition of reality: rubble that can be buried, but never fully understood. You’re left with words, words, words, and no sentences (except, maybe, four to eight years).

2. Curdled Nostalgia. It’s almost a cliché to say that we are living in a nostalgia culture. Yes, our current fixation with remaking and remarketing everything (literally everything) that ever brought any American a of pang of adolescent joy is probably deeply pathological, but it’s the extension of a natural desire. Nostalgic fetish objects are so desirably exactly because they serve as touchstones that evoke an uncontaminated feeling of past joy. They are a conduit to old sensations that have otherwise been burned out of serotonin-exhausted adult minds. And, even better, they are incorruptible. They can dim over time, even blink off forever like an incandescent bulb (itself now a nostalgic fetish object), but they can’t go bad. They can’t rot.

Or, well, that’s what I thought. But then I heard the fatal acronym: NAFTA. A string of letters that had previously been totally benign became a portal through which the noxious present started to seep into the past, trickling outward into a web of associations to settle and congeal over an entire decade’s worth of once-pleasant memories. Somehow the totem’s magic had been reversed. The incantation―just five letters, just two syllables!―which had only the faintest meaning to me before but which recalled a trinket that had been nestled snugly in a mental toy chest next to Ninja Turtle action figures and copies of Nintendo Power had transmuted gold (or that golden Legend of Zelda cartridge) into dung.

And then nothing could be unseen. The entire affair became a perverse reflection of my departed childhood. Here were two 90s icons, diminished, perverted, ghastly. Not Fuller White House, but a display of memorial portraiture: the two corpses, propped next to each other, in unnatural poses in a mundane setting made grotesque by their presence. And the mortician forgot to tie their mouths shut. A memento mori that no comfortable misremembered past could survive.

3. Dissociative Identity Disorder by Proxy. This one is self-explanatory. There were only two people on stage, but I got the disconcerting impression that there were many more. Many, many more. An unfathomable number of distinct Clintons and Trumps that could never be reconciled with each other, could never find peace in just two bodies, in just two minds. So many more.

4. Converging Parallel Universes Dysphoria. Have you ever watched two people have a conversation, only to realize at some point, maybe five minutes in, maybe ten, that they cannot possibly be talking to each other? Sure, they give every appearance of talking to each other, and they seem to be occupying adjacent chunks of (mostly) breathable air, but yet it becomes increasingly obvious that no conversation is taking place, that they may not even be aware that the other person, the one they are apparently addressing, even exists. Something is out of sync. Maybe the rhythm is wrong: the pauses come at the wrong time, the speak over each other, one speaks and the other seems to hear nothing.

Maybe it’s the content instead, the incompatible subtext, or the vast differences in style and tone. One seems furious while the other seems giddy; one is scowling while the other is laughing. When this occurs in mental patients it is called inappropriate affect, but you cannot judge what affect would be appropriate under the circumstances. Both seem valid. Neither seems apt. Regardless, they cannot coexist.

Or maybe the disharmony is more profound than that and you cannot fathom a reality in which these two individuals could occupy the same space at the same time. No plausible single universe or timeline could contain both of the remarkable, tragic, or inexplicable series of events that would have had to have transpired in order to bring the parties together, here, in this place, now. It’s absurd. It requires two totally distinct, irreconcilable sets of natural laws. Two opposites must be true. It’s fucking impossible. But yet, here they are, together in a room and separated by infinite space.

I shudder to think of what might happen if they tried to shake hands.