I need the word for…

While lying abed this morning, a question popped into my mind: “You know how sometimes things go sour abruptly and you have this detached sense of watching your life collapse in slow motion? What’s the family-friendly word for that?”

There are over 500,000 words in the English language, and most of us have never heard 80% of them. Take didapper, for example. It’s a real word (a small grebe as it turns out), but you’ve likely never even heard it. You are no doubt an articulate speaker with a wide-ranging vocabulary, and yet you couldn’t pick a didapper out of a lineup if it mugged you. Grebe is just five letters and yet if I played it in Scrabble you’d make me whip out a dictionary to prove it was real.

There are hundreds of thousands of words just like that. There must be one for this! Everyone I’ve asked knows exactly the feeling I’m describing, and yet they can’t think of a polite name for it.

In case you’re still confused about that feeling, here are some other descriptions:

• the sickly feeling that drowns your mind when you remember that you left your presentation/homework/wallet at home
• the sensation of your bowels plummeting to your knees as you realize you’re not alone when you thought you were
• the instant your mind achieves total calm and with perfect clarity gazes upon your mistake in all its splendor
• the sudden jolt that runs through your body at the sound of a shotgun round being chambered unexpectedly

That feeling. It’s not fear, although fear often follows on its heels. It’s not surprise–surprise is having something unexpected happen whether good or bad. This is the sensation that follows surprise as you begin to process the event and realize that it is very, very bad.

Most emotions are destinations (the state of happiness or sorrow, for instance), this one is more of a journey.

What’s the word?