Re: Our Fears
 

My eyes ache slightly when I look straight on at sharpened pencils. I'm perfectly honest. Plus, after watching the opening sequence of "Manhunter" I've become slightly wary of being killed in my sleep. Oh, Yog-Sothoth, how paranoid am I :lol: ?

I'm afraid of somebody breaking into my house er something. I always have these dreams where it happens and I go to scream, but nothing comes out and I get this weird feeling in my throat.

Re: Our Fears
 

I also fear when I'm walking through a graveyard, even at a funeral, that I'll fall through the ground through a rotten casket.

Re: Our Fears
 

While I do not share haemophobia with Silent, I DO find the numerous animals which feast upon the blood of humans repugnant. During my archaeology field work in college, we were doing a dig in the Mobile River Delta. Very swampy. I put a foot wrong, and ended up with a half dozen leeches on my calf. Can you say "ugh"? At least their saliva is anaesthetic...

Now, if I were to ever get a lamprey eel stuck to my person, I'd probably pass out faster than any given HPL Narrator you could name.

Ugh...
Aether

Re: Our Fears
 

Amen to that. Now, show of virtual hands: Who is interested in vampiric animalia but does not want to be their host, and if such were to happen they would be very ill?

Re: Our Fears
 

I am interested in both sanguivorous fauna and carnivorous plants.

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
-William Wordsworth

But if you're in the mood to stay indoors, I recommend the book "The Red Hourglass, The Inner Life of Nature's Predators" by Gordon Grice. I would describe it as Edwin Way Teale meets Edgar Allen Poe, or Memoirs of Gothic Naturalist. The book is about interactions with, and meditations on, predators. Mainly, the creeping and crawling variety, but also pigs and dogs. You just know that anyone that decorates their tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture is going to have an interesting perspective on things. At times, the book borders on the poetic and philosophic. I have been eagerly awaiting a new Gordon Grice book for years.

As for les fleurs du mal: the venus fly trap, the pitcher plant, the butterworts and the from-out-space-looking sundew, to name a few. They are all different, but they are all the same, if you know what I mean. If I had a window box with all the different species represented, I would only see a hideous garden grown from a single seed. I never actually owned any of these botanical monstrosities because of that whole "feeding them" thing. Who knows how prodigious their appetites would grow? Feed me! I know how the story goes: one day you buy a pot of venus fly trap plants on ebay, the next thing you know, you are skulking around back alleys with a burlap sack and a hacksaw looking for 'food'.

Re: Our Fears
 

Bendk,

As a child I did own a little terrarium witha Venus' Fly-trap in it, and kept it for many years.

As a note of extreme historical coolness for my ancestry, one of the first Europeans to study the various insectivorous flora we know today was one Arthur Dobbs. He was the royal Governer of the North Carolina Crown Colony, and is an ancestor of mine on my maternal grandfather's side.

I always thought this factoid very groovy as a child, and actually still do, come to think of it! What a cool thing to be "first to record"!

Re: Our Fears
 

I've had recurring tornado dreams all my life. I'm glad (sort of) to know what they represent. A "loss of control in one's life" definitely maintains the theme.

Even though I used to be a very social creature, my main phobia nowadays is that of crowds. I used to love to get stoned out of my gourd and walk arounfd shopping malls - by myself, to boot! - but now, just going to the grocery store becomes a sort of race.

Inexplicably, I've noticed fears cropping up that never heretofore existed. Even little things, like a fear of spiders or a fear of heights: never had them as a child or a teen, yet here they are to greet me when I'm in my early thirties. How awesome.

And whoever mentioned it, I too have a strange fear of airplanes crashing atop me. Maybe it's a post-September 11 thing (for me anyway). I can't remember imagining that sort of scenario beforehand. However, I do remember being afraid that highway overpasses were going to collapse as the family car sputtered beneath them.

I'm also quickly developing a fear of the "Religious Right" in this country, but that's a sermon for another day, heh heh.

Re: Our Fears
 

I have an extreme fear of the Deep of the ocean. Whenever I see a vast mass of water stretching ahead of me, let it be live in the beach or even in print, I'm overwhelmed by a primitive form of fear that I cannot quite describe; perhaps it has to do with my notion of "drowning" as the worse form of possible Death.

I once had a dream where I was drowning in the middle of some unknown alien ocean; I remember the sky was orange-red in color and very dark and long clowds hanged in the sky, the water was dark blueish-green and I remember feeling ancient forms, or shadows of forms, swimming just a few metters bellow my battling legs. When I woke up I was actually fighting for some fresh air, "in the flesh", and for some time I couldn't pull out of my mind the idea that some other "me", in another form of reality, had just died, drowned in an alien sea.

We architects have dreams like that always!

Tu be sincere, I have no idea where this fear comes from... I suppose the image of the Deep fills me with dread. To imagine what lays bellow the waters, living (or unliving) in those profundities and the promise of death that this deepness brings forth with it... it touches a very primitive, pre-human, strain in my nerve system, I guess. Just think for a moment that most of our land mass was, in a time, under the watery mass of some pre-historic ocean.

...gives you a perspective of the horror of it.

Re: Our Fears
 

Me too, forgot to mention that in my last message. Whenever I take my girlfriend to a shopping mall, or anywhere with large crowds of people, I feel strange and uneasy. I feel like I'm being observed by all fronts by many pairs of curious and morbid eyes, like all my moves are being secretly recorded and filed in some obscure shelf, just to be used against me by someone.