what do you... fear? by eitje. Forum: General.
user 347 posts 2007-10-14 01:04:07 |
in the interest of learning more about folks, let talk about what ALWAYS scares us or freaks us out, no matter how grown up and logical we try to be. |
user 347 posts 2007-10-14 01:08:08 |
personally, it's open doorways & uncovered windows w/ darkness on the other side. when i was a little kid, there was a ghostbusters cartoon about the boogeyman. He always came out of kids' closets. so, starting from a young age, i had to sleep w/ all of the doors in my room closed. i think it started there, but i can't be sure. i'm getting better about it these days, but i still end up freaking myself out thinking about what might be there, if i'm walking someplace at night and i see a unlit doorstep or window w/ no drapes or light on the other side. |
user 167 posts 2007-10-14 16:41:51 |
Insects. I can't stand the thought of them crawling on me, going into my mouth when I sleep. It's fairly mild, but I still have to steel myself to do it every time I need to kill one with nothing but a thin tissue between it and my hand. |
user 10 posts 2007-10-14 17:10:08 |
Spiders. The vast majority, and pretty much all of them in NY are quite safe, but they freak me out nonetheless. |
user 19 posts 2007-10-14 17:10:48 |
Poisonous insects, needles, and rejection. |
administrator 467 posts 2007-10-14 17:19:00 |
Spiders. Last night there was this dark thing in my closet that I thought was a spider. I screamed until my dad came downstairs to spray it with bug spray and then try to catch it. After spraying it, he came to the conclusion that it was just a piece of feather boa. Convinced that the actual spider had escaped his grasp and put this decoy in place, I refused to return to my room for about three hours. Eventually I had to come back to scan the comic, but I slept in fear for the rest of the night. Hopefully the spider is gone now, having realized that my room is not the best place for a spider to be. |
user 46 posts 2007-10-14 18:23:01 |
Spiders, Bees, Hornets, Wasps, Other Flying Stinging Insects, Needles, a lack of computers |
administrator 467 posts 2007-10-14 18:24:17 |
Nuclear apocalypse. |
user 347 posts 2007-10-14 18:43:00 |
how does that work? do you think about a dramatic escalation of tensions between foreign powers resulting in nukes landing in your home town a lot, or something? |
user 31 posts 2007-10-15 00:05:29 |
Escalation of powers? Hardly, it's gonna be a microwave with a spoon in it. |
administrator 115 posts 2007-10-15 01:45:46 |
I believe the proper term is "Nukuler Pockyclypse." I fear waking up only to find that the past 42 days have been but a dream. |
user 19 posts 2007-10-15 03:12:10 |
Dust mites bees global warming e. coli UFOs landslides clowns the inevitable heat death of the universe nanotech supervolcanos yet the illuminati papercuts asbestos centaurs |
user 2 posts 2007-10-15 21:57:11 |
people. Unless they are stick figures. |
user 122 posts 2007-10-15 23:57:18 |
Being alone. |
user 18 posts 2007-10-16 01:17:03 |
"Being alone." What do you want to bet everyone else was thinking this, but afraid even to say it out loud? <i>Jim wanted to do something legitimately scary, as opposed to Halloween-scary. "Ghosts aren't scary..." he told me before explaining that before writing the strips he went around to everyone he knew and asked them what truly scared them. The answer he got most often was "being alone" or "dying alone". Just that simple.</i> http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/05/death-of-garfield.html |
user 18 posts 2007-10-16 01:19:00 |
I'd like to add that one of my newest (albeit most minor) fears is "looking foolish when you discover that you're posting on forum software that doesn't allow HTML tags". |
user 167 posts 2007-10-16 06:24:07 |
"Being alone." I think I could probably handle being alone, but being alone with nothing to do would be hell. I hate being bored. test [b]test[/b] test [i]test[/i] |
user 347 posts 2007-10-16 12:48:36 |
for the "being alone" crowd, i suppose the apocalyptic movies like "28 days later" have a lot of horror content in them for you, right? |
user 18 posts 2007-10-17 04:10:28 |
SPOILERS: "28 days later" has "being alone" type horror, but in practice it didn't work as well as it could have because even when the protagonist didn't know what had happened to everyone, you did. You could sympathize with him but not empathize with him. It was just (a well done example of) standard survival horror, with a bit of "Lord of the Flies" / "Heart of Darkness" style horror at the end. The most powerful "being alone" horror I've seen was the darkly solipsist end of Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger". After a long depressing process, the narrator discovers that the entire universe is his own imagination, "a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!" Of course, it didn't help that I read this story as a child, or that after I finished it I spent several disturbing minutes searching a silent empty house for my inexplicably vanished family (who without mentioning it to me had simply gone outside to talk)... |
administrator 879 posts 2007-10-22 00:37:12 |
Spiders for me too. And not just in a way of "I wouldn't want to hold a spider in my hand". More in the sense of "I have to disable images in my web browser before opening the Wikipedia entry on Arthropods" and "I may have read the chapter 'Shelob's Lair' in LotR without skipping pages once, but if so I've repressed the memory." None of my family like spiders much, but they all agree that I take it to the point of psychosis. |
user 347 posts 2007-10-22 05:09:58 |
are you sure you're not emo? maybe your sister knows something you don't... |
administrator 879 posts 2007-10-22 11:33:21 |
Why, do emos fear spiders? |
user 456 posts 2007-10-23 02:42:33 |
Spiders (sometimes), anything that flies and has a stinger, heights, not being able to breathe, confrontation, initiating conversations with people I don't know (especially if it involves a phone call). I think that's a representative list for me. |
administrator 879 posts 2007-10-23 04:05:34 |
initiating conversations with people I don't know (especially if it involves a phone call) I forgot that one. I've nearly got over it (compared to the arachnophobia at least, which only got worse), but when I was 15 or so I couldn't call strangers at all. |
user 42 posts 2007-10-30 01:00:13 |
Religion and it's preference for dogma over discovery. |
user 1 posts 2007-10-30 10:02:00 |
The Amish. Went on a field trip to Amish country in PA while in elementary school. There was a group of old Amish men that were talking, then turned to look at me with these evil expressions, or maybe just a lot of wrinkles, either way, ever since then I just don't want to go near them or have them see me. |
user 241 posts 2007-10-31 04:25:05 |
I like spiders, even though they sometimes surprise the Hell out of me. Crickets are worse though, because they hide in my shoes. I fear sharks, but not real sharks. I don't really have an escape route if I come up against a selfish meme. But this isn't so bad because I used to be afraid of my own House. I still don't trust my House, but we've come to a cease-fire type of alliance. |
administrator 467 posts 2007-10-31 04:51:12 |
New fear: crickets in shoes. ...I have only recently stopped having nightmares about staircases. |
user 241 posts 2007-10-31 05:06:26 |
"A is for Alice who fell down the Stairs..." ~ Edward Gorey |
administrator 879 posts 2007-10-31 09:27:58 |
Wow, I just read that online somewhere. Staircases? So far I've had just one nightmare about escalators that I remember. It went on forever... And I wouldn't find a cricket in my shoe terrible as such, but it would shake me up badly because there is always that split second where I find something creepy with an exoskeleton and find out it's not a spider. |
user 347 posts 2007-11-02 13:53:33 |
yeah, i hate going down stairs, especially when the steps are kinda small and the incline seems a little too steep. i also don't like coming down ladders for the same reason. i think it's rooted in an irrational fear of moderate heights. |
user 14 posts 2007-11-02 21:13:09 |
the only stairs that i could imagine to be scary are those at the kukulkan pyramid at chichen itza. those things look horrifying. |
administrator 467 posts 2007-11-03 00:04:06 |
And I wouldn't find a cricket in my shoe terrible as such, but it would shake me up badly because there is always that split second where I find something creepy with an exoskeleton and find out it's not a spider. Weirdly, even before looking closely, my mind tells me what's a spider and what's not. There was once something big and crawly on my floor, and I routinely covered it with the 'Ha! You can't get away now!' thing I put on bugs that are in my room, without a bit of fear. I didn't look closely for fear that I'd find a spider, but I didn't /really/ think it was a spider because I wasn't terrified. It ended up being a cricket. |
administrator 879 posts 2007-11-03 10:53:40 |
That doesn't work for me, unfortunately. When I see something crawly, they are assumed spider until proven insect. Curiously, in recent years this fear of *actual* spiders has slackened a bit. Now I just feel "paralyzed" for a moment when I see one, and I don't panic as long as I'm about 2 meters away. Living on my own has trained me to get rid of them on my own (I even let it out with a glass instead of crushing it). I still cannot easily look at *pictures* of spiders. But this is likely because the size sample is skewed. In these parts (which is why I'd hesitate to visit Australia, an otherwise altogether cool continent), spiders larger than a matchbox are rare. On pictures, there's no limit. |
user 7 posts 2007-11-03 11:04:36 |
I inherited a bit of my mother's fear of spiders, but not much... But every time I watch a horror movie and walk through the house afterwards, every last shadow in the house (especially if I turn my back to it) scares me for no good reason. Maybe that's all because I'm sometimes too lazy to just switch the lights on :D Also, I'm _always_ scared of misinterpreting someone's emotions and hurting them because of that. |
user 6 posts 2007-11-05 12:53:07 |
Darcey spotting my home, dressing up as giant spider, flying through the window and eating my brain. Also nuclear warfare and global warming. |
user 35 posts 2007-11-05 23:31:30 |
Ontological limbo. |
user 19 posts 2007-11-09 05:03:34 |
Death? Just, as a stand-alone thing. Death. |
user 158 posts 2007-11-10 13:02:47 |
I don't suppose I have any fears of physical things. . . I'd probably say ignorance terrifies me. That's the best I can do. |
user 4 posts 2007-11-10 17:56:08 |
Moderate to large amounts of flowing blood especially my own. Also spiders scare me. |
user 241 posts 2007-11-11 01:44:24 |
I don't suppose I have any fears of physical things. . . I'd probably say ignorance terrifies me. That's the best I can do. But aren't the intangible fears the worser of the two being that you can't simply avoid the object? Unless you can see Greek gods and simply get the ones on the good side of the ones who represent the intangible fear to have them leave you alone. |
user 437 posts 2007-11-11 17:39:45 |
Many things scare me, the thing that worries/scares me the most though is waking up one day to find I've been in a Matrix like world. |
user 7 posts 2007-11-11 19:33:47 |
Velociraptors. And needles. |