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-- Afraid of the dark
Afraid of the dark
Hi guys. Please take this seriously.
A week ago, as a result of watching "Pet Semetary" me and my parents had a existential discussion about fear and illogical scares. (Yeah, we're somewhat weird.)
Basically, my mother was advocating that when she felt uncomfortable going to the other end of the house during a dark evening, she felt it was an effect of her basic fears that some evil person had slipped into the house during the day and was now lurking in the bathroom. Pointing out the unnecessary waiting involved in this scheme, and the swift resolve of charging the livingroom with whatever weapon instead, I reasoned that the fright of venturing into the dark unknown was rooted in fear of something supernatural. Some ancient evil that is hard to fathom.
Later I've discussed the matter with friends, and even those who say they're never scared of such things, go nuts when I stare at some point two feet behind their left shoulder - thus proving that people *are* scared even in safe surroundings. Now, how about you: If you have experienced the illogical terror of waking up in the middle of the night, sensing someone else in the room (who obviously is not your girlfriend/boyfriend or roommate), do you fears spring from "probable" threats such as psychopaths or from supernatural ones?
The reason why I ask, is a compulsion to place this fear in my view of the world. Is it a part of our legacy (phobias), that (according to popular belief) stems from real threats in the dawn of mankind, or is it something rooted even deeper in our psyche (hello Jungs)?
I can't see which explanation would have least scary consequences, but I still feel a need to have clarity.
Trancaholic,
heheh, here you go again with that better english than americans stuff.... well, i'll take a crack at this, b/c i know a lot of people don't like to use engage in thought in the chillout....
HELL yeah i get scared sometimes... i don't know why though. i've always thought it might be subconcious, that in some weird way, maybe i like getting frightened b/c it upps your adrenaline? And Pet Cemetary is like one of the scariest movies to me. Just the guy walking down the hall, and the dead runner was RIGHT there saying "PASCOW"...... i haven't seen that movie in like 10 years, and i refuse to watch it, too scary.
But yes, i know what you're saying. Sometimes when i'm walking up the stairs to my room, (and its dark), i will haul ass up the stairs, b/c i'm afraid that someone or something would "pop out" from behind the staircase... afraid that someone will run out of the kitchen with a gun and shoot... i know it sounds stupid, but for some reason these thoughts enter my mind, and i run as fast as i can up to my room.
Another time i was lying down in the bed of a pickup truck with a friend in a national park/desert in Utah. It was PITCH black - the moon was not out, the stars were not bright at all, and of course no streetlights. That is the scariest thing to me. I was literally HIDING in the bed of the pickup, afraid that some guy with a gun and infrared goggles might be creepin' up... and i was constantly watching the sides of the truck, waiting for some mass-murderer to pop up and bloody us all.
Am i psycho? I don't think so. I think this is normal. I think everyone has these thoughts. Some just choose to forget them, or some have them to a lesser degree. In all these thoughts and actions, i honestly know that isn't going to happen. But i think the soul likes a little action, wants things to be intense sometimes. It might be a subconscious mechanism of the left side of your brain coming up with shit to scare you, JUST to get your blood pumpin' or your adrenaline going. Same concept when you go to a haunted house on halloween... you KNOW nothing is going to happen to you in there, hundreds of kids have gone through, but its STILL scary, and you STILL want to haul ass through it.
Anyways, not to lose everybody. But i agree. 
-ABT-
Fear has exists for centuries in mankind of the supernatural and the unknown. The first Roman accounts of when they met my annsestors the Celts in Alps describe of the fear felt in the Roman legions that day, because the Celts were a very unsocial race, agressive, violent and psycially superior to the Romans so they feared this strange new race they encoutered that day. Also with the discovery of the new world I'm sure the abrigonal natives of the new world feared the Europeans and vice versa. also with travel in the middle ages saliors would make accounts of ships been swallowed up by giant squids and sea monsters. everyone fears the unknown, like whats round the next corner?.
I think everyone has felt fear in their life, i can remember back to when I was 5 hearing the wind blowing on a cold december day, and the floorboards in the landing of my old house creaking and me being petrafied thinking a ghost or a monster was going to get me lol.
fear comes from deep down too, everyone watches a movie and the film plays tricks on their mind once they begin to relax afterwards i.e sleep. Also people suffer from moral panics which the media are to blaim for recycled stories of serial killers, and social statistics which are printed on our society puts the fear of god into some people. Also theres paranoia i've got friends who watch their backs constantly weather they've had over protective parents or made mistakes in the past and made enemies from them mistakes some people feel fear more like that but saying that I've settled all my old scores with people, and I don't have any enemies at all, but sometimes when I walk down a dark deserted street I look behind me to see whats happening just for the fact i don't know who else is in the street with me could be a couple walking back from a romantic meal, could be a gang of drunken lads looking for trouble, or it could be psychopath, its a natural defense fear, and I'm glad that we all fear things I'm a corageous person, but when I feel that someones watching more or I'm in danger the adrenalin starts to pump and I feel more alert of my surroundings, therefore I'm more careful and ready for something to happen.
And for the fear of the supernatural again we all fear the unknown I'm sure if a picture flyed off the wall at me I would run a mile from the scene.
by the way good thread tranceholic keep the ball rolling people
i don't think I'm going to sleep well tonight...
and to make matters worse I'm not even sleeping in my own bed because my bf is out of town with the car so I'm staying at his sister's downtown and she's already in bed in the other room...
*shudder*
....scared to look under the bed and turn out the light
bug_bite
Well, yeah I think it's natural to be scared of the dark.
It makes sense - I mean, you're deprived of your vision, so it's perfectly natural to have all your other senses perk up and start "hearing things" or "imagining" things that aren't really there. You have to remember that vision is the brains main link to the external world, and when it is deprived of it it has to compensate. If it didn't give us things to be scared about in the dark, we wouldn't have been alert enough to the threat of night predators to have survived very long back when we were living in the jungle with sabre-toothed tigers and whatnot.
So yeah, fear is the brains best way to keep us alert to the dangers that may have been lurking in the dark a few thousand years ago, and I guess we've never really lost it since we became civilised.
It probably is just instinct not to like being in the dark, mostly because humans have (compared to other animals) really bad hearing, poor sense of smell and a brain thats over active with imagination on a subconcious level most of the time.
On an upside, it does hide little wrinkles
On a completely unrelated note. That piercing is cool, bug_bite.. is that yours?
Thanks for the different viewpoints, I'm frankly a bit surprised that so few has been able to answer this, fairly simple, question, but then again, as ABT said, maybe lots of people fear discussing emotional stuff in public? Or it could be the subject matter that is simply too boring, what do I know?
I think Renegade is the one that has gotten closest to my own theories on the origin of these emotions, but I've noticed that most of you mention real-life threats as the basic objects of fears (ABT: that description of the guy with the infrared goggles was really hillarious to read, although it probably wasn't fun experiencing at first hand). I on the other hand has never been able to be terrorised by real-life objects, perhaps because they - belonging to this world - need to obey the same physical laws as me. Like O'Callaghan I remember when I was a kid being frightened of ghosts when going to bed - and where do kids get these fears from? After all I certainly hadn't seen any horror movies at that point of my life.
Likewise, some years later, there was a episode where I came up with my own fear again: The city I lived in had a museum where a 2000 year old corpse found in a bog was displayed. The guy had been hanged and for some reason only his head and foot was preserved. Now, I've never understood why atrocities like this are being put up for public display, and I only saw a simple brochure of the place, but nevertheless I had horrible visions of this head floating into my room while the foot would follow on the floor - doing some blasphemous imitation of a real-life man.
Today, it's easy to see the lack of sense in an 2000 year old man having a beef with a random kid, but I can assure you that wasn't what went through my mind at that point. My point is that at these points of my life, I had seen my share of news-footage, and as such had an idea of what war and murderers were, yeat I choose to focus my fears on supernatural things.
Of course, I'm not plagued by the same fears today as when I was five, but I do notice that reportedly scary movies such as Silence of the Lambs don't scare me in quite the same way as The Shining, Kingdom (Riget), Blair Witch Project or the Poltergeist-series which all downplays tension and shocks in favour of that trickling down the back effect. I find it difficult to belive that I'm the only one that focus on supernatural fears, but then again maybe I'm a fruitcake and that's the explanation.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Dj O'Callaghan . fear comes from deep down too, everyone watches a movie and the film plays tricks on their mind once they begin to relax afterwards i.e sleep. |
It's funny to me that ABT and Juricimo (still hot 
) fear someting touchable...a mass-murderer or psychopath. WHen I'm alone in the dark I fear the non-human things (
)..such as monsters and stuff After I'd seen the movie Blair Witch I had been having persecution mania for 2 or 3 weeks! It always felt as if something invisible was right behind me, trying to hurt me..brrrrr
And when my BF is already in bed, and I'm in the bathroom, turning off the light, I have to walk maybe 4 steps to reach the bed (we have a small appartment) I get scared that something runs at me from out of the kitchen...even when my BF is so close to me! Strange....
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