Sunday 22 June 2014

The Irrational Fear

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?

2 comments:

  1. It's a dull one, but spiders for me. There's really no reason to be afraid of them - unless you live in Australia - but they look creepy, like teeny disembodied hands, so they scared me. Fortunately you've made me eject spiders for half a dozen years or so*, and I'm pretty much over it.

    Do tornadoes count as irrational?

    *Because of YOUR fears re spiders and death. Sigh.

    NB: Those stick men are a bit different. Why did you draw them that way?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thus I cured you. You're welcome.

      NB: I am god of this blog and can draw things however I want.

      Delete

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