Hope you don't mind if I start a new topic here, but since Halloween is coming up I figured this might be a good subject. What scares you? It could be books, movies, something around you, something you fear might happen.
I bring this up because I usually take my dog out to pee around 5:00 a.m. This morning I awoke from an unusually nasty nightmare. Normally they don't bother me and, in fact, usually I find them interesting. But this morning was different. I took Molly outside. Of course it was still dark, and this house has about 100 trees surrounding it. I was nervous anyway from the dream but as I opened the garage door and walked outside, it just didn't feel right. I felt like someone or something was watching me. Molly is black, and it was hard to see her darting among the trees. I walked down the driveway to the mailbox to get the paper. It was pitch dark at the mailbox. I could hear dogs barking in the distance. It still felt like I was being watched, and I was filled with this awful sense of foreboding. I turned tail, screaming at Molly and ran back into the house. I slammed and locked the doors then checked them all again.
The weird thing about all this was that when dawn came and the sun arose, I went outside and this planter I have near the garage was cracked into tiny pieces. The plant had been torn out.
Could've been a dog, could've been a coyote, could've been a monster.
ohmygod. I'm not sure there's enough room here to discuss what scares me!
Serial killers scare me. Hospitals terrify me. Medical shows scare me. Other drivers scare me. Not seeing the rattlesnake first scares the bejeezus out of me. Bugs flying at me, falling on me (especially in the shower) or crawling on me in my sleep scare me. Death, and whatever may cause it, scares me. Most of all though, the death of my sons or husband or pets scares me so badly I can't breathe.
It's interesting that you say that you find your nightmares "interesting" rather than scary. I've found that to be true as well. I've long suffered from terrifying nightmares, but for the last decade or so I've somehow ceased to be frightened. They've become more like a mystery to be solved or a foe to be vanquished. Is this an age and experience thing I wonder? 20 years ago, if I'd dreamed someone was standing outside my window in the darkness, trying to break in, I'd have waked up unable to breathe I'd be so panic stricken. I had that dream about 6 years ago and rather than being terrified I grabbed a length of chain (I'm not making this up, my dream did) and beat the intruder into a coma. I'm thinking that says I've gotten too crabby in my old age to put up with buttheads.
I did have one nightmare just recently that was scary and disturbed me for several days. I dreamed that William and I had decided to have ourselves cremated. I'm not even sure why. I think we were sick and decided we'd just go ahead and die earlier rather than later. We were laying on some kind of conveyor belt with a lot of other people and it would move us through this giant furnace at a hospital. My brothers, cousins, etc were all in the waiting room, hugging each other and mourning us. As we lay there, slowly rolling toward this furnace, watching the people in scrubs ignoring the live people on the conveyor belt, and listening to the suddenly cut off screams of the people entering the furnace, I decided I'd just die a normal slow death thankyouverymuch and hopped my butt off the belt. William didn't want to get off and I begged, pleaded, and yelled. He just kept saying "but they told us this was for the best." I finally dragged him onto the floor. The hospital people were complaining because now we'd have to be rescheduled and how I was being unreasonable. I dragged William out into the waiting room and my family looked up in shock and then started complaining about me being so hardheaded and why didn't I just lay down and die like I was supposed to. I was upset for days after that stupid dream.
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Some people are like slinkies. They don't have a purpose But they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down the stairs
I'm scared to fly, but I won't let it keep me from flying. It's just not fun while I'm on the plane--I white knuckle it all the way.
Natural bodies of water terrify me! If I'm at the beach (ocean or lake front) and it's really hot, then I can go in up to my waist (staring at the water the whole time), splash water on myself and then get the heck out of there quickly. I can't even handle a lake, river or pond. If I end up in one over my head, I start getting panicky and feel like I can't breath. I'm not even crazy about aquariums that have those floor to ceiling tanks with tons of salt water fish in them. If I'm watching a movie that takes place in the water, I can't watch. If it takes place on top of body of water, then during the underwater scenes, I have to watch through my fingers. If I'm to go on a boat, then the size of the boat has to be comparable (my opinion of comparable) to the size of the body of water. I could canoe in a river, take a motor boat in a lake and in the ocean, it has to be at least the size of a larger fishing boat. Those people who kayak in the ocean are insane! I get faint just thinking about it.
I used to be plagued with nightmares, but I've had a really good run over the past few years. They've been down graded to anxiety dreams. I have three recurring anxiety dreams: One that involves a roller coaster (something I don't care for), one that involves an elevator crashing with me inside it and one that involves a plane crashing with me inside it. The odd thing about the two crashing dreams? I don't die--I end up walking away from the uninjured.
Here's one that you all will appreciate: I had a dream that I was looking at a bull and talking to it. Suddenly, it turned toward me and started talking back in English. It startled me awake in the same way a falling dream would.
I have a morbid fascination with thunderstorms and tornadoes. When I was four, we had a housekeeper who when there was a thunderstorm would set us kids on a bed with pillows all around us. She told us if we moved, lightning would strike us. Then she'd go to the door and look for tornadoes. When we got older and no longer required the services of a sitter, we would be on the look out for tornadoes during the spring. My dad was a volunteer fireman and had a radio in the kitchen. It would issue tornado watches/warnings. Twice when there were watches and we were home alone, my sister and I went outside and gathered up the dogs, cats and horses and put them in the basement. Then we captured all the chickens, put them in burlap sacks and put them in the basement. We couldn't get the cows or pigs. Then we'd go sit on top of the car and look for tornadoes. Needless to say, our parents weren't too pleased when they got home. I still have nightmares about tornadoes to this day and have been close to a couple. I get really nervous during thunderstorms, but I kind of like them now in a weird way.
Speaking of bull dreams, last week I dreamed I bought a genetically-engineered bull from Cesar Millan. He was 4" at the shoulders and was black and white, kind of like Chicken on a Chain. He could paw on the ground, bellow, charge you with his head down but it wouldn't hurt you since he was so small. He cost $1,600 and would live for 6 years.
Dams, or more broadly, any man-made waterworks that involves the movement of large quantities of water, scare the crap out of me, and not in the "Oh, that's pretty scary but I know it's safe" horror movie sense either. A large hydroelectric power plant like the Glen Canyon Dam is almost enough to unnerve me in the light of day, and REALLY horrible things like the glory-hole spillway at the Hungry Horse Reservoir in Montana give me the screaming fits. Only a serious sadist could have designed such a dreadful thing.
There are a lot of things I'd say I'm concerned about, like nuclear war and so on, but dams are #1 on the list of things that scare me sideways.
I've had several sets of recurrent dreams over the years. One of the earliest involved operating a bulldozer in what I took to be Hell - it was a cave and it was lit by reddish-orange light from leaping flames; what else could it be? At the bottom of the cavern was a still, oily pond of a fluid I knew was called "vitreol", and I knew that if I got the dozer into the vitreol, it would explode in flames and kill me. But the traction was extremely poor and no matter what I did, the dozer always seemed to slip backwards, a fraction of an inch at a time, toward the pool of vitreol. Most of my dreams are just strange - Adolf Hitler driving a road grader, that sort of thing - but the dozer in Hell dreams (or the Army truck on the off-ramp, it's the same general idea with different props) was pretty scary.
Aren't dreams the weirdest things? Do you dream in color? I do and sometimes, I can feel and smell things in them, too.
"I have a morbid fascination with thunderstorms and tornadoes."
I'm a weather fanatic, so I love thunderstorms (although the really loud, close ones make me a little nervous). I'm not sure how I'd feel about tornadoes. I'm fascinated by them, but chasing them seems a bit extreme. We had a wind storm here once that was pulling trees up by the roots. In many cases, chunks of sidewalks came up with them (among other things like electricity being out, 18 wheelers not being able to drive through it, etc). The speeds were just a couple of miles short of tornado speed and I remember thinking that as much as I was awed by it, I knew then and there that I'd never be able to live in tornado alley. It was starting to really unnerve me. If there's a hurricane coming in, I have it on TWC as much as possible. Same with snow storms. I hate the devastation these storms bring, but the pure power of them leaves me awe struck.
Hurricanes used not to bother me too much as a child. We had several come by as they left the coast. There's never too much thunder and lightning unless you happen to be on the east side. All that changed in 1989 when Hurricane Hugo roared through. Although it had been downgraded to a Category 2 by the time it came over Charlotte, it was still a monster. There were huge oak trees hundreds of years old in our neighborhood that were uprooted. There were flashes of green lightning which turned out to be transformers going down. The winds were blowing at about 80 mph, and the howl was deafening. In downtown Charlotte glass from the skyscrapers was blown out and embedded in the concrete of nearby buildings. If it had come during the day instead of the middle of the night, a lot of people would've died.
I enjoy bad weather too, but only up to a point. Most of the time that point is when I think the storm is about to damage the house. I love a good thunderstorm, but only if I'm reasonably sure there won't be any damage. A friend of mine used to say that thunderstorms were full of something he called "orgone energy" (I guess that's how you spell it) and he said people could become addicted to it...
One winter I went fishing with my brother at Kinnikinnick in north-central Arizona. No trees to be found there, just a million acres of antelope grass, and a terrible thunderstorm came up. We were the highest point for about fifty miles in all directions, so we figured we were safest sitting in the truck and not touching anything metal. I don't know that we got hit by lightning, but it seemed that we were surrounded by green and blue skyglow for the longest time, and then there was a grassfire sparked by lightning that was going on while the truck itself seemed to be bleeding ghostly fingers of electricity into the air...
We haven't been back to Kinnikinick since, oddly enough.
Whew! I just saw the movie, Halloween, for the umpteenth time, and it never fails to scare the beejiggers out of me! I think it was one of the first teen slasher movies, and to me it's the best. There's something about that eerie music, the heavy breathing behind the mask and that humongous knife of course.
Maybe it scares me so much because I saw it for the first time when I was just a little kid. My parents were out of town, and I was staying with one of my friends at my next door neighbor's house. Her father took a bunch of us to the drive-in to see this movie. We were in a van, so I guess that's how I got in. I had nightmares for the longest time, and I don't know how long it took before I'd go outside after dark, but it was a pretty good bit.
You'd think my neighbor's dad, a grown man, would have had better sense than that.
Yikes! That's even worse than my story. When I was 8, our town had a Halloween Movie night for just a couple of dollars entrance, plus $.50 for popcorn and $.50 for a drink. My mom gave our baby sitter permission to take us, so her dad dropped us off. What did they decide to show for a movie? "Theater of Blood". By horror movie standards, it was fairly tame, but not to me, my then 5 year old brother and apparently many other kids since the next year, they showed "Superman". I imagine they got a lot of complaints. To this day, I get chills the sound of Vincent Price's voice and most especially that laugh.
Oddly enough, though, I've watched other horror movies over the years and the ones that scared me the most were "Nightmare on Elm Street" (just the first one, though) and later, "Scream" (I enjoyed that whole series).
Whew! I just saw the movie, Halloween, for the umpteenth time, and it never fails to scare the beejiggers out of me! I think it was one of the first teen slasher movies, and to me it's the best. There's something about that eerie music, the heavy breathing behind the mask and that humongous knife of course.
Maybe it scares me so much because I saw it for the first time when I was just a little kid. My parents were out of town, and I was staying with one of my friends at my next door neighbor's house. Her father took a bunch of us to the drive-in to see this movie. We were in a van, so I guess that's how I got in. I had nightmares for the longest time, and I don't know how long it took before I'd go outside after dark, but it was a pretty good bit.
You'd think my neighbor's dad, a grown man, would have had better sense than that.
I remember being absolutely staggered that there was Blue Oyster Cult music in Halloween. At the time I was quite a BOC fan and this was almost like cultural nirvana, finding out that John Carpenter knew of them too.
There was a little drive-in theater outside of the little town of Avondale, where I grew up, and they had triple-features on Friday and Saturday nights, and their security people didn't really care if the carload of people were of R-rated age or not. Sometimes the movies were really oddly mixed - I remember seeing "The Blue Max" and "2001" in the same night. But where the drive-in really excelled was screening horror movies, often three in a row, so that by the time you left were half-lost in a delerium of fatigue, hot dog stomach unrest, and bloody horror (this was before I'd managed to get any dates, so when I went to the drive-in, I actually watched the movies).
Anyway. One night they screened "They Came From Within" as the final movie, Cronenburg's debut movie if I'm not mistaken, and a very disturbing mishmash of stuff. The movie disturbed me to the point that I had to convince myself that whatever I was drinking from moment to moment was fatally poisonous to the parasites. Eggnog, for example. Being supremely unconcerned about the health of my coronary arteries, I drank lots of eggnog, and had to convince myself that if I poured eggnog on the parasites, they would fizz and smoke and die. Even now my chief memory of that drive-in theater (which is now, I believe, a car lot) is the jittery mess it made of me after "They Came From Within".
