h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

LOL
What a wimpy bunch of scaredy-cats.
Spiders, butterflies, insects in general never hurt anybody.
It's the idea that something that small has a mind of its own that's really bothering you. Try talking to them, and please, please, never kill them. You'll only make things worse. They outnumber us.

~jwf~ (a good night's sleep cannot be had unless a slips into bed with me and spins my dreams)

hehehe I know
But when we put our "scared" into little inconsequential things, it somehow make the bigger, more nebulous, truly scary issues easier to manage, doesn't it?

DOLLS - ever since, as I a child I saw a horror film about a blood-sucking doll I won't have them in the house (luckily I have four sons, so it's not a problem).

Three things scare the hell out of me. They're the sources of all the troubles in the world, and are virtually indistinguishable from each other:

- Government
- Religion
- Stupidity

Hear hear!

***B

And there there too! It's everywhere.

*back to insects and fear if I may*

The fear insects have of us, as we blunder and murder our way through the natural world, is so great, so terrifying, that we can sense it.
They communicate it to us. We 'hear' it, and empathise it.
Fear, like many emotions, comes in many shades. And, like love, it feeds off feedback from another person, creature, whatever, and it grows and grows as long as the reciprocal process continues.
The initial first-contact fear we have of insects is not from ourselves but something we sense in the critters. But we feel it and it makes us feel we're alive. (And killing something makes us feel even more alive.)
So just stop thinking the fear is in you, and realise it's because of you. You are listening to the terror of a minute creature. Restrain yourself from killing the critter. You'll feel better immediately. The way gods and kings do when they spare a life. It's a nice feeling.
peace
~jwf~

Except fruit flies.

***B

Yeah, ok. You can eat them.
And anything else that's silly enough to get in your food.
Yes of course we'll all step on them by accident, and mowing the grass is sheer insecticide (as a verb not a noun). I'm not saying let any critter run your life. The gods gave us dominion over the earth, and everything else has to hop to or get trampled. I'm just saying there's lots of times when 'live and let live' is a happier formula for peace. I've been known to rescue drowning moths from my toilet bowl. I am a king, and I call for my bowl and my fiddlers three, being as I am a merry old soul.
peace
~jwf~ (A PESTICIDE FREE ZONE)

Being out in the middle of a field in a thunderstorm, but the real nasty ones are the ones that you don't even want to think about. Death of a loved one, fatal illness ------------.

There are some insects I don't *like*, such as daddy-long-legs and large moths, but only when in enclosed spaces and I'm not *scared* of them. I can only think of two things that really scare the hell out of me. One is being in any situation where I think I may fall. I guess it's the thought of the pain when I hit the ground that scares me, 'cos I'm fine with high places as long as I think there's no danger of me falling. Rock-climbing, abseiling and bungee-jumping are no-noes - I don't trust the equipment to protect me.

The other fear is a potentially life-threatening one - hypodermic needles. It doesn't matter whether it's a blood test or an injection, I just can't stand having one near me. I can't even look at them on TV, although I can just about cope with them in photos. Why hypos? I honestly don't know. I was fine with injections when I was a kid, and even went and gave blood once. However, some time in my mid-20s I went to give blood. I swear that the needle looked like a hollowed-out knitting-needle. I went through with it, but I was shaking at the end. A cup of tea and a biscuit wasn't enough - I could have used a stiff drink. I put it down to having an off day but a short time later I had to have an injection. The needle looked about a foot long! The next time I gave blood was as bad as the first, if not worse. I haven't gone since. Back in August last year I had to have injections for a holiday in Egypt. Fortunately Richard needed them, too, so he was there for moral support and it wasn't too bad. Then in December I needed a blood test. I was so terrified that the nurse thought there was a danger that she wouldn't be able to do it - they can't force you to have the test if you don't want it. Again, Richard was there, but I was petrified. In future I may be able to cope better with injections, but blood tests will always terrify me.

ooo. yuk. i don't *like* needles, but i can stand to get an injection if i don't look.
one that occured to me after i posted: pregnancy. (not on other people; i don't run screaming away if i see a pregnant woman, just in *me*) no special reason for this as near as i can tell, but it just seems so awful. that's one reason i'm pro-abortion.(saying pro-choice always seems a bit much to me, and it seems like it could be confusing to someone not aware of the euphemisms.)

The world isn't exactly kind to those of us with irrational fears. For instance, why do they think it's nice to have glass lifts? Ughhh.
I know of a man whose wife is scared of moths. Not life-threateningly scared, but not fond. So the workmates of this man, including my dad (of whom I am not proud), caught a very large moth and put it in his lunchbox. When she emptied the box, the moth made a bid for freedom.
I'm not sure what her revenge was.

The thought of me driving a car. I used to be happily riding along on my bike. Think about something. Forget I was riding a bike. Then wake up in hospital, with a head full of stitches. Apply this behavour to driving a car and...

Milton Keynes. One day, the whole of Britain will known as Milton Keynes. When the sky is filled with orange light, you'll never get to see your guiding star.

Guns. God, they're scary.

Temporal Lobe Seizures. Wake in the night. Can't move. Paralized. Something pressing on your chest. You want to move, scream. You do not want to be who you are, where you are, right now. You are enveloped by a darkness, darker than the darkened room, and with it comes oblivion, that feels like universal death. You wake. Sometime. Sheets soaked by pungent, fear induced sweat.

Oh...and George W Bush. Obviously.

'When the sky is filled with orange light, you'll never get to see your guiding star.'

Yes, I am afraid of that too.

***B

So that's what those night things are.
For no apparent reason, the fear that suddenly gets you in the dark when you're trying to go to sleep. It can be brought on by anything- random mental images, or an unpleasant sentence from a book etc. Then
it just won't go away, and before long you are so scared you can't even move an arm out of the quilt to switch the light on and make it go away.

One of the many reasons I love going to the mountains is because I get to see the night sky, as I did when I was a child. Now the Milton Keynesianisation surrounds me like an orange sickness.

The city kids don't speak, they swear, and the city lights don't shine, they glare. As the late, great Jimmy Alan Hull once wailed.

I'm ashamed to say that as a teenager, I really believed I was regularly being abducted by aliens. An Horizon documentry on TLS put me right. Hasn't stopped them happening though. I'm never sure if I'll see the morning.

Some fears may be physiologically based. For example, I used to be terrified of heights. It annoyed me, simply because I knew it was irrational, but there it was. Until I obtained eyeglasses, correcting a defect in my vision that affected perspective in some weird way -- I no longer require corrective lenses, but at the time they completely removed my fear of heights.

As for the Really Big Fears, such as incipient global disaster caused by government or corporate stupidity, these are evils that we can, in small but significant ways, contend against -- even if it is in vain.

Being frightened of the dark, of insects, or of some otherwise innocuous object -- is possibly a learned behaviour, or the product of an overactive imagination. When I was very young I was afraid, not of the dark, but of strange noises in the night -- for example, when sleeping over at a friend's house, the ticking noise caused by expansion and contraction of the furnace ducts sounded, to me, like skeletal feet creeping along the hallway toward my room. I didn't sleep a wink that night!

Some fears are actually misinterpreted survival responses. There are poisonous creatures -- rattlesnakes and black widow spiders -- in the area where I live. When I encounter such creatures, my heart just naturally beats quite a bit faster, my breathing becomes more rapid, and my body trembles, as adrenaline floods my system. This can be interpreted as fear, and we generally call it that.

There are unfortunate individuals who suffer from unassociated fear attacks. They suddenly feel sensations commonly associated with fear, much as I just described, but with no obvious object associated with the feeling. This is commonly associated with some form of physiological imbalance, often related to dietary deficiencies or allergies. I once dated a person who suffered from such attacks, fortunately they were infrequent, and subsided when certain items were removed from their diet.

The ultimate fear most of us have is fear of loss. We fear losing our lives, and we fear losing loved ones. The idea of death is so profound that I think it transcends fear, and becomes deep sadness.

For myself, the thing that Scares The Hell Out of Me is the thought of contracting a certain type of disease that I learned about in neurology. It is worse than Alzheimers, in that you lose your mind, and your faculties, and you are aware of the process. It is a kind of a living death of your identity.

And with that pleasant thought...

BTW, although we have deadly snakes and spiders around here, you can still see the Milky Way at night

I don't fear death (I am not religious- not in an organised way at least) because it's so much of an unknown there's nothing tangible there to be scared of. Slight apprehension, maybe, but not terror.
Some things in the dark I am terrified of. Actually, I'm scared of my imagination- when it gets bored, it filters through some bizarre and nasty stuff. I have something of a photographic memory for images and bits of text that affected me, which seem to only come out at night. There was one particular illustrated book about ghosts which I read at 11, and a couple of the pictures therein are still with me. Sounds I'm not really bothered by, since our house is creaky. However, one night the door was being moved about by the wind, and although I knew exactly what it was and what was causing it, it still scared me slightly.
Currently I have to shut the curtains when I'm in the bathroom since the combination of dark, security lantern and ripply glass makes the hanging baskets look remarkably like faces staring in.
The dark does odd things- even after I've puzzled them out, they're scary.

I agree about fear of death - I accept that it's going to happen one day, so it doesn't bother me. I am more aware if its unavoidablility since my father died, though.

My fear of needles is *not* a learned response or the result of a bad event. It just happened, and I don't know why. As for 'over-active imagination', why should I start imagining bad things to do with needles after 20+ years of no problems? My doctor says that hypno-therapy might be worth a try. After the last blood test, I just might give it a go. Does anybody out there have any experience with hypno-therapy as a means of treating phobias?

*bug alert - or more about insects*

Today a large fluffy bumblebee going for my left ear was intercepted by a faster smaller waspy thingy who also wanted to check my earhole for pollen. I saw the big bee coming at me and heard the other come up behind. They squabbled in a dogfight-of-buzzing not three inches from the side of my head. I daren't turn to look at them lest they set at my eyes. Startled yes, but I had no irrational fear and simply focussed on the sound, listening for meaning in the buzzing. I made no attempt to move away or bat at them with my hands.
After a few seconds they buzzed off to inspect the garden I was sitting beside and a moment later they were at it again over a large purple flower. Then it occured to me maybe they weren't fighting they were [moderator alert] ..well let's just say I may have witnessed the creation of a new species.
peace
~jwf~