Category — "What We Fear"

I can cope with fear. I’ve got rational categories and ironic perspectives all set up to deal with even the most disturbing nightmare or distopic vision. To be honest, I *enjoy* a good bit of white-knuckled terror because it wakes me out of the complacent greyness of my everyday life. But recently I’ve encountered something worse than nightmares. [Read more →]

The funny thing about fear is that it isn’t that funny when you’re experiencing it. Perhaps that’s why a little comedy is so useful in scary movies as a counterpoint for rising tension. While collecting the nightmares found on this site, I’ve encountered a common reaction that people laugh while trying to tell me a dream that obviously was quite disturbing to them. Overlooking whatever Freud had to say about laughter, fear and the unconscious, what these people often say they’re laughing at is the inability to make the story sound as scary as it was to them in the dream. In some cases, even THEY aren’t convinced that one should be afraid of the dreams as they’re retelling them.

It’s just not easy to make others really understand the same things that scared you. Maybe that’s why we get some delight — IF we get some delight — from well-told scary stories.

I have also collected a small number of discarded fears, things that people said they were afraid of once but that they are no longer fear. These stories were always surrounded by laughter, that embarrassed laughter that means on one level “I can’t believe I used to be afraid of something so LAME as this.” On another level perhaps this reaction means “I was so naive then to find THAT scary. NOW I’m older and more mature and now I know what’s REALLY scary.” It’s a fun list that I’ll certainly add to over time. In nearly all cases, they’re images from movies that they probably shouldn’t have been watching at that age, but then again, who am I to say?

(Female, 40’s) Birds especially large groups of them, after seeing Hitchcock’s “The Birds” as an elementary school child. Walking home from school was sometimes a problem, especially in the late fall as birds massed in the trees getting ready to migrate south.

(Male, 40’s) The Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz.” Especially the scene where she appears suddenly on top of a roof and hurls a fireball at the Scarecrow.

(Male, 30’s) The Ghostly Librarian from “Ghostbusters.” He says what was so scary to him was that she appeared to be friendly at first but then turned terrifying.

(Male, 30’s) The Robot named Maximillian from Disney’s “The Black Hole” (Look it up on IMDB! It was a relatively early attempt to use digital imagery, I think) The whole design of the robot is a little scary plus he was depicted as being nearly invincible.

(Female, 30’s) A ghost that mysteriously appears in the back seat of a car as someone is driving at night. “I’m sure it came from a movie–probably LOTS of them– but I just can think of which one.”

Needless to say, send in your childhood fears! To grimgnome (a) dailynightmare.com

Up until yesterday, everything I knew about grave robbing I learned from The Bodysnatcher (1945) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037549/ (an enjoyable thriller that was the last movie to feature both Karloff and Lugosi)Then I read Scott Carney’s work on the Bone Trade from India.

Scott Carney’s Blog

His piece in Wired

His piece on NPR

The guy really did his research, from the bizarrely fascinating process used to create world-class medical skeletons, to the (post)colonial economics of the business to the laws that supposedly limit the trade today. He wore out shoe leather, knocked on doors and saw and touched stuff that I suppose I’d rather not see or touch. This is journalism at its best, vital but not lurid though slightly off-beat, focused on the humans involved. The centuries old traffic in human skeletons was finally banned in India after one dealer started selling child skeletons in great quantities, quantities that could only have been acquired by murder. Understandably, folks got upset, VERY upset even attacking foreigners suspected of being involved. But wouldn’t the existing laws against murder have been enough to address this problem? Was it primarily people from the other castes upset at the financial boon?

What the reaction suggests to me is an underlying set of values and fears related to human remains. If I understand correctly, Hinduism considers dead bodies to be unclean, hence their disposal is relegated to the lowest castes. Christianity by contrast with its insistence on some form of bodily resurrection has tended to nearly venerate human remains, lest there not be enough “left” to be resurrected. (I have heard that the decay of remains is enough of a theological problem that at least one sect determined the minimum requirements for bodily resurrection were that the skull and both femurs be in tact. Allegedly, this determination somehow related to the skull and crossed bones of pirate and Masonic symbology.) Bones are also used, I think, by some forms of Buddhism to indicate the transient, illusory essence of reality. But the contrasting value system posed in these articles is the enlightened practices of Western medicine and education. And of course, good old fashioned economic value. The black market nature of this economy has helped prices rise greatly.

The final thing that I was left wondering about was how many folks die in India during any given year. It surely has to be enough to supply all the medical schools that want them, doesn’t it? Perhaps I’m naive as to the real scope of this market. The industry also sounds like a mature one, where a fully manufactured product is exported, in contrast to a more colonial system where raw materials are exported to be refined in foreign factories with the products re-imported. The only way the ban makes secular sense to me is if India wants to stock its medical schools first before supplying the rest of the world.

Anything that can spark such trains of thought is definitely worth reading, especially you’re intrigued by the idea of grave robbing.

We’re afraid of zombies. Or at least peculiarly fascinated with them at the moment. Add up the zombie-related nightmares that appear on this site, the zombie-related movies and games of recent years, the zombie-flash-mobs that have occurred in Toronto, San Fransisco… heck just about everywhere in North America. Those cold-hearted crypt creepers are hot.

Zombies are the perfect enemy. They don’t have any of those irritating human qualities that real enemies possess. Sure they look human enough but when it comes down to things, they’re dead and they won’t stop until we’re dead too. Don’t waste compassion on them; once they’ve changed they can’t change back. You can’t brainwash a zombie into not craving brains. Nobody seems to question the absolute right of self-protection so we can kill them without a twinge of moral regret. Zombies are the perfect metaphor for “the bad guys” during wartime.

But I don’t think that’s why they’re scary.

We’re afraid of zombies, because we’re afraid the zombies are us. Forgive this rehearsal of obvious information, and these qualities are the same for slow-moving, original style, Pittsburgh zombies (Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead“) or speed-freak, extra crispy zombies (”28 Days Later“):

• zombies are mobs, un-individuated groups;
• zombies consume voraciously, mindlessly;
• zombie-ism has no internal mechanism to limit itself. The “zombie-lifestyle” is excessive and exhaustive. It will not stop until there is nothing left alive;
• zombies have pure desire. It is not complicated by dogma or propaganda. There is no zombie religion; no zombie government.

Looking through the mirror of metaphor at the everyday world, zombies could be seen as a critique of rampant consumerism. We respond to the stimulus to buy, buy, buy quite brainlessly, without much consideration for our own fate or that of anyone else. This lack of limiting concern is NOT a “liberal thing,” either. Zombies can be depicted as a critique of capitalism in general but the brainless consumption portrayed by zombies also runs afoul of the old-time conservative values of thrift and frugality. Fiscal conservatives cringe at the prospect of a generation of folks who max out their credit cards while saving nothing for retirement. Who will cover all that defaulted debt when those self-indulgent hordes grow too old to work at McDonalds? The liberal spin on zombie consumption emphasizes the human degradation of near-cannibalism as mobs of once-humans feast on current humans, leading up to total environmental collapse.

While none of the zombie traits are laudable, perhaps that collection of qualities particularly grates against American values, especially individualism and “puritan” self-restraint. Zombies are post-human masses who seek to wipe out individuality. Americans cherish the notion that somehow maverick individuality is what made us what we are. Zombies threaten that identity, a fate worse than death. Zombies also are non-critically self-indulgent. Whether left-ish or right-ish, Americans tend to distrust indulgence, ironically enough while acting quite self-indulgent and privileged. However, we have elaborate justifications of our indulgences.

Zombies might be so scary because they’re what we see in the mirror.

When vampires and werewolves seem a bit stale and tame, check out the catalog of real world horrors at Dismal World.com. Particularly striking is the “Must See” area and in particular “Unforgettable Photos.” There are also competently written essays about many topics of social and political horror. This cavalcade of atrocities was enough, perversely, to make me feel extremely fortunate, if even just for the moment.

http://dismalworld.com

You’re asleep. Dreaming. And you become aware that there is no air getting into your lungs. You try harder to decompress your chest but nothing works. You’re suffocating. You force yourself up, up, up through the layers of sleep, like a diver rising quickly too quickly toward the surface, aching for breath. Once awake enough to control your body again, you sit up quickly in bed, your chest heaving, forcing air into your lungs. Your heart hammers inside your chest. Perhaps a bit of vomit has begun to rise at the back of your throat. You sit on the edge of your bed, panting, confused as to when and where you are, peering into the dark room. Eventually you are able to breath regularly. The alarm clock tells you it’s still the middle of the night, that there are hours until morning. Adrenaline disapates and you feel the weariness of your body again. Do you go back to sleep and risk another terrifying incident of apnea, of premature burial, of nocturnal suffocation? Or do you choose to haunt your house yet another night, to surrender to insomnia and drift from room to room ’til dawn? Apnea seems more likely to strike following days when you’ve worked hard physically, on nights when you most need a deep rejuvenating sleep.

You’ve always snored but in recent years, you’ve been told it’s gotten worse. You find it hard to find a position to fall asleep in. You haven’t slept on your back in years; your throat closes off immediately. There’s one position, on your side, propped up with a pillow that allows sleep. All others are uncomfortable. Your body has become picky, peculiar about sleep, as finicky as an elderly cat that sniffs its bowl of food disdainfully before forcing down a couple mouthfuls.

Perhaps the treatments for apnea seem intrusive. Losing weight is recommended. Excess fat around the neck - that double chin - contribute to night time strangulation. But you’ve tried losing weight before and it keeps returning. There are also other treatments, masks that retain enough air pressure so that your passageways don’t collapse. But regardless of how much you read about them, the idea of wearing something on your face is sickening, terrifying. Yet another thing to get in the way of breath. An inanimate hand clamped around your face.

When you were younger, you joked with your friends about decadent rock stars who choked to death on their own vomit. Now, you think differently about those stories.

And this is the nightmare. It’s not one you wake from. It’s one you carry all day, every exhausted day, each horrified night. Sometimes it recedes, hides but the threat of night suffocation is always there.