When I was little I had an irrational fear of Hellhounds. I thought they were going to hunt me down and
rip me to pieces.
Then I grew up a little bit and The Irrational Fear, while
thematically the same, graduated from Hellhounds to Dinosaurs. Although I knew dinosaurs didn’t exist any
more, I was too good at imagining what would happen if they did.
But when I reached adulthood I left those irrational fears
behind. Sure I kept hold of plenty of
irrational phobias, like of
and
but I lost the ability to form that irrational but ruthlessly
extreme sense of threat that chokes the life out of you.
At least I thought so.
A few years ago, when I was an assistant manager at a
theatre, I was shown what to do in the case of a fire.
and this is The Favourite Part,
being the expendable one,
After learning this, my fire alertness was heightened to
excited levels but there were no fires to quench it. So The Brain vented it into a vivid dream,
crisply clear in clarity and feeling startlingly real days after waking.
In the dream,
After I woke and had to go to work, it was a long time
before I could go to the Upper Circle on The Own.
And a new irrational fear was born.
When I was a kid it was The Overactive Imagination that got
me worked up. Now, it’s kind of the
opposite.
It’s not that it was a bad dream that bothers me; it’s not that
the ghost lady who wished me harm unsettles me.
It’s not that the fear and horror were emotions that I felt with all the
strength of reality, perhaps stronger for being in a state of dream. None of that matters at all. It was, after all, just a dream.
It’s that I realised I didn’t believe in ghosts, so then I
was faced with something The Mind couldn’t comprehend (it opens up waaaaaaaaay
too many questions about the nature of existence).
I have never seen a ghost, and I don’t particularly believe
in them either. It is that which makes
them so mind-dribblingly scary. Because
I know if I ever saw a ghost, if their existence was suddenly confirmed in
front of me, that I’d die right there of shock.
It’s not like being a kid and making stuff up to scare
myself; it’s The Lack Of Imagination that’s harming me. The Irrational Fear as an adult isn’t of
ghosts. It’s of experiencing something I
don’t understand. Head-exploding,
mind-boggling incomprehensible dread and terror and wonder.
My irrational fear is of Awe.
Do you have an irrational fear?