Author: Doktor Leech

Rat’s naturally fear cat urine. Makes sense, right? Except there’s a brain parasite that makes rats not only lose their fear of feline piss but seek it out. The parasite works quite precisely, eliminating and reversing only the fear of cats while leaving other innate fears intact.

Rats, Cat Urine and Brain Parasites

And this reminds me for some reason of a guy I knew in college (Hi Scott!) who never liked the “No Fear” motto because he thought it was a cop-out. The real challenge he thought was to feel the fear all the way and to use it, to “surf” on the crest of the fear. And there seems something right about that at least as far as it goes.

Fear, I suppose, is somewhat like pain in that both pain and fear are ways our bodies tell us to be careful. Pain and fear are like that annoying warning beep that so many appliances have. We generally think that it’s OK nowadays to use anesthetics to remove pain, especially after we’ve recognized that there is an underlying condition that is causing the pain. Incidentally, this wasn’t always the case. Anesthesis used to be virtually forbidden on moral grounds. Would it be prudent, though to pop an anti-fear pill occasionally if we could synthesize such a thing? Perhaps to reduce stress, if stress is indeed an aberrant “flight or fight” residue inappropriate for the modern era. The army, police, fire departments would likely be very interested as well.

Yes, yes, synthesizing an anti-fear pill isn’t that simple. The research seems to show some nasty relationship to schizophrenia. And of course the study shows that specific fears could be pinpointed, not a broad attenuation of all fear. But aside from those quibbles, I come back to a couple key questions:

Would we want to be fearless?

And even if we wanted to have no fears, would that really be a desirable state?

A friend of mine endured some quite significant abuse as a child and, as an adult, much of that abuse was re-presented to her in nightmares. In her conscious life, she quite bravely worked through the trauma, bit by bit, by various techniques.

But the nightmares continued, occuring whenever they wanted.

My friend refused to be victimized a second time by these same events. She chose to see a veiled but therapeutic value to the nightmares. Although this attitude allowed her to see a continuity between her waking and dreaming therapy, it didn’t make her nightmares any less horrifying. 

She needed comfort that was a little more tangible. 

My friend decided to reward herself when she had one of “those” nightmares. She had limited means at the time so the reward wasn’t grand, but my friend would treat herself to a bagel and cream cheese at a deli on the way to work.

I lost touch with this friend years ago but I’m curious if she still has these nightmares and if she still rewards her bravery with a bagel in the morning.

In nightmares, we dreamers are afraid, truly afraid. Our hearts race, sometimes our limbs thrash and we wake disturbed as if presented with the same terrifying situations in waking life.

But sometimes the fear we experience is unique to a dream state.

For instance, I have had a recurrent dream image for years, probably decades where I suffer from claustrophobia. Sometimes I’ll be forced to go into a small space or travel through a narrow corridor and I will be struck with panic. What is particularly interesting about these dreams is that in waking life, I don’t noticeably suffer from claustrophobia. Elevators, even tiny elevators pose no particular terror in everyday life but in the context of these dreams, I would be beside myself.

My initial interpretation is that claustrophobia must itself be a dream figure. For some reason, my dreaming self wants to make believe that it is afraid of small confined spaces. To use a computer metaphor, my brain is running another kind of brain in “emulation mode,” the fear that it is exhibiting is truly fearful but it also is “virtual.”

I am still processing what this kind of layered dream life might mean. Ideas?

For that matter, does anyone else experience a similar kind of “make believe” terror either occasionally or recurrently in their dreams?