This isn’t strictly a fear, but it is fear. I’ve been looking for an excuse to write and talk about this, and this prompt was a perfect opportunity.
(Yes, nothing to fear but fear itself is a clique. I just don’t have a better explanation. That’s also where the title comes from, in case you were wondering.)
I’ve had one recurring nightmare for as long as I can remember. Yes, at the same time, I’ve had other nightmares; other nightmares, though, occur only once, whereas this one, though, has repeated itself again and again.
There’s no easy way to characterize this nightmare other than by feeling. It isn’t accompanied by any sensory information at all: I don’t remember smelling, hearing, or touching anything, and all I see is black. It is, though, a contradicting set of feelings. I feel like I am in an out of body experience, floating above and away from myself; at the same time, I feel like my point of view is drifting into my body. Everything feels like it’s getting larger, and my body and point of view shrinking into it; one second later, I’m growing, and feel like everything is tiny, like toothpicks in my hands. I feel my body elongating and stretching, each distance — the length of my arm, the height of my torso — feeling increasingly long, but at the same time unchanged. Then, I wake up with a cold sweat, profoundly unnerved.
If everything is tiny and huge, what, then, is “everything?” What makes this nightmare odd, then, is that “everything” is nothing: it’s not that I see my bedroom getting bigger and smaller at the same time; rather, it feels like my surroundings are getting bigger and smaller, without actually seeing anything. I don’t see my body; i feel that I’m no longer in my body. I don’t see my legs and hands going further away; I just feel like they are further away, only, in an instant, for them to revert to familiar feelings and lengths.
Recently, this dream has occurred increasingly rarely — I remember it only once in the past year — there has been an interesting development: last time I had this dream, it wasn’t just a dream — it was a lucid dream. Being cognizant of this recurring dream, I tried to explore this dream of exaggerated proportions. In the end, I still saw nothing: I tried to concentrate on my surroundings and see what I could; I tried to listen and hear what I could; I tried to smell; no sensory information, however, was discernible. I woke up the same as before: no sensory information; no “thing” that I’m afraid of; just pure, primal, fear.
Thus, I conclude that this must simply be fear. I don’t see, hear, or smell anything that would induce fear; described above, it probably seems more puzzling and odd than frightening. I can almost imagine Alexander Ober sharing such a dream: cool, dude! What was that? Each contradiction, though, while deep asleep, translates to only one thing: fear.
My hypothesis on this that this dream really is just fear: the contradictory feelings and pseudo-sensory information are just manifestations of that fear. In sleep, my brain must simply interpret that raw fear as that contradicting changes in point of view.
It’s been proposed that this dream does indeed correspond to a fear: that this blackness, this contradicting mess of feelings, corresponds to a fear of confusion and the lack of knowing. It is certainly possible that my desire for knowledge, in the right circumstances, becomes an irrational fear of not knowing.
For now, though, I still have basically no idea what this dream is about. Next time it comes up, though, I’ll be sure to see how much further I can lucidly go.
The Null Alephant 