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.
Category: “What We Fear”
Brief essays examining nightmares, horror, fear and its uses throughout culture
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.
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Cat Urine Rat Courage
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?
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A Treacherous Method?
Yup, I get grief here at the Dailynightmare for various things but one of the criticisms I should probably address is that of the structural method of the site. Some critics suggest that I’m doing more harm than good by abstracting nightmares so fully from the contexts that gave rise to them. A real psychoanalyst would want to know, for instance, more about what happened during the day preceding the nightmare to see if certain images are derived from recent events. And that same cigar-smoking busy-body would also want to know about how the nightmares relate to the dreamer’s ongoing neuroses and everyday crazinesses. (Like anyone would post that stuff to a public blog?) But the nub of the criticism is that without this kind of context, the nightmares themselves are unfit case studies. And since no scientific insight is shed on the nightmares, the terror they inspire is being re-inforced, leaving the dreamers worse off.
Certainly, the Dailynightmare does not pretend to be a series of scientific case studies. (Like who would want to read THOSE?) In fact, as the site develops, I don’t anticipate much scientific, or heck, even verbal discussion about the nightmares themselves. (If you’ve ever been woken up by a partner’s nightmare, you can probably agree that it’s not really THAT much fun to talk about other people’s dreams.) But other kinds of “commentary” will very likely start to appear in the ‘Nightmare possibly very soon, like comics and illustrations, maybe dreams set into poems or even songs. One guy I know does stop-motion animation like the Brothers Quay and he’s interested in filming some of the nightmares. And that seems appropriate. Dreams are movies that we make and screen for ourselves alone, personal art that deals with very personally important topics.
One of the things that is so often terrifying about our dreams though, is that we ARE all alone with them. The Dailynightmare can’t be there with you while you dream but we can provide a communal workshop where we can investigate the meaning of our fears. Ultimately though, we dreamers ourselves have to examine and confront our own fears. Writing down our nightmares and phobias is one way to start. Sharing them is a second step. Maybe illustrating them, giving them some kind of tangible artistic form might be the next step, one that allows us all to examine the shape of our fears and to imagine what might lie beyond them.
At least that’s my answer to Uncle Sigmund.
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The Political Uses of Fear
Wow, here’s a clear, relatively non-brainiac description of how fear contributes to “intractible conflicts” as well as some positive suggestions as to how fear can be acknowledged and moved beyond. A really interesting read
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.
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“Nightmare Death Syndrome”
Though this item sounds like the premise to a cheesy horror movie (in fact, the premise of a very enduring horror movie franchise) there is actually a medically recognized condition where normally healthy people fall asleep and never wake up.
Current explanation as to why? Nightmares.
These cases occurred in modern times–the first in 1977– in American cities– Sacramento, Chicago… and claimed more than 100 lives. Named apparently “Nightmare Death Syndrome” or “Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome” (SUNDS) there is one other key piece of information about this phenomenon, namely that it effects a very precise demographic: immigrants primarily male from south east Asia.
Read in its full political and historical context, the whole story of these Hmong immigrants is perhaps more a tragedy than horror story.
But what would cause them to die asleep in such numbers? Some have suggested the stress of acculturation compounded with guilt about leaving relatives behind. Another researcher examined the traditional culture of the Hmong and discovered a notion “dab tsog” or a nightmare that is not just a bad dream but an actual visitation. These visitations can be so traumatic, it is hypothesized, that dreamers die of shock.
Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome
I will reserve commentary on the very fruitful topic of such “visitation nightmares” to another time but I’ll close with the thought that if our dreams are stalked by malevolent entities who threaten our lives, why are there not entities equally powerful who protect us? How can we populate our dream life with them? That might be the ultimate task in coping with nightmares.
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Nightmares and “Virtual” Fear
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?