I Am My Own Worst Enemy
This is perhaps my worst Nanowrimo cheat so far - not a story or a character study - not even an essay so much as straight ahead self-indulgent journaling. And a bit redundant journaling at that as I have touched on the some of this topic before.
I would like to remind anyone reading that sometimes when a writer journals - they slip seamlessly back and forth between reality and a fictionalized account.
I tell you this, because I don't want you to know how much of this is true.
Which is all of it.
I am a horror genre fan; as a child I’d thrill to the black and white horror classics on the now defunct Channel 48 which I watched with my Dad. I read gothic horror novels, graphic novelizations, and gorey comic books. I watched The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside, and The Munsters. I watched the classic horror movie marathons on AMC.
By age 8 I knew the full litany of Universal Movie monsters – and with no uncertainty that Frankenstein was the name of the doctor – not his creation. By ten I was reading Stephen King and seeking out Vincent Price titles at the video store. (I would stare hungrily at the rental boxes in the horror section that promised more gore – but it was a neighborhood store with a very strict rental policy.) At angsty 13, I lay in the upper bunk in a distant cabin in the woods – packed full of girl scouts – wishing real-life vampires would come and spirit me away. (After all, being trapped in the woods with two dozen tween girls is a scary thing.) I had dreams and fantasies where I would appear in black and white – sometimes trying to escape these nefarious creatures, but most often walking among them; I would meet my demise, cold and lovely, my hair fanned out perfectly at the bottom of a spiraling staircase in a stone tower.
Even when I was 18 (and fancied myself an adult) – I had a dream right after I got engaged (the first time around). In it, I was visited by a (pack? Coven? Pride? Flock?) of vampires – all elegant in Victorian and Renaissance regalia. The leaned over the bed I shared with my finance and laughed at me, mocking me in leering whispers. I was a fool, they jeered – I had given up my chance to be with them, to be one of them – they who understood me. By giving up my “innocence” I had irrevocably turned myself away from the freedom and adventure I begged them for that night in the woods when I was 13. Missing the blatantly obvious metaphor at the time – I woke up saddened, like I had truly lost something.
I am not putting this all down to demonstrate my tendency to be a bit morbid (I am) or to put into question my sanity (31 years and never certified!) – I assure you I also played in the sun and with Barbie ™ dolls and emotionally tortured my younger siblings just like every other normal child.
My point here is that these Hollywood and book monsters never frightened me. They had a fascination – even a life for me, certainly (the armchair pop-psychologist in me suggests that being a lonely child I may have empathized with their being societal outcasts and exploited – and even jealous of the very things that made them special – rather than being frightened by their otherworldliness. (This is why writers’ journal, folks. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than therapy!) )
Additionally, most of the classic monsters: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and Dr. Frankenstein’s Creature, had been through the sanitizing blender of pop culture by the time I learned to recognize ideas and concepts and attach them to faces and shapes. Franenstein’s monster had become a clumsy, addle brained oaf, thanks to the pathetic portrayls by Karloff, the camp of The Munsters, and countless cartoony Halloween decorations. (It wasn’t until I actually read Frankenstein in high school that I learned that the Creature had sharp intelligence, superhuman powers, and a tragic need for vengeance. Just thinking about that book gives me the shivers.) Dracula, the Werewolf, and hundreds of ghosts suffered similar fates at the hands of Scooby Doo, & Abbot and Costello and William Castle. (Hammer Horror Productions (filmed at Pinewood Studios) also heightened the psycho-sexual aspects of the stories for me – but that, I feel is another essay for another time.) After this sort of treatment – how could any of these monsters or their movies frighten me beyond, perhaps, a silly little thrill?
It occurs to me that I’m taking the long way round this topic – and I’m not entirely sure why.
I didn’t intend to talk about the monsters that don’t scare me. I meant to talk about the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night that do.
While discussing with a friend the horror movies that had the greatest effects on me (Nightmare on Elm Street, Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives, Candyman) I came to a somewhat surprising realization – these are all films in which the protagonist may be battling external forces or their own sanity.
I don’t fear violent, otherworldly creatures who leap from the darkness and endanger both my life and my immortal soul. Oh no.
It seems I am most afraid of myself.
Of my own mind.
Of going mad.
It’s reassuring, really. I never have to worry that this night will be the night my worst fear attacks me in the alley. Because my worst fear is with me all along.
I’m not sure from whence this fear springs. I am imaginative – yes – perhaps overly so – but I’ve always been able to separate the facts in my life from the fiction.
But of course, everyone thinks this about themselves; and for some people – it is most simply not true.
I never did worry about being a solipsist…it’s not that I mind the responsibility really – I mean – if I were a solipsist I wouldn’t feel badly about things like genocide because the people dying in it wouldn’t be any more real than the horrible acts themselves; you can’t destroy what was never there. No – the reason I can’t buy into solipsism is because – although I do consider myself very creative – I can’t begin to believe that my humble brain could conceive things like the Taj-Mahal, the Mona Lisa, and the entire socio-economic history of Norway. It is too much – and I can not have simply created it all from nothing.
Maybe that’s why my brain punishes me from time to time; it thinks I think of it as an underachiever.
And let’s face it – this is an enemy who will always know what I am thinking.
My brain and I have a good relationship – but from time to time it gives me the most hideous of nightmares – dreams cycles in which I believe myself to be awake and interacting with the real world – in such minute detail to my real life – only to realize I am dreaming – then I wake up and interact with the real world only to realize I am dreaming …..
It sometimes goes on all night. They are fully sensory too – these particular brand of nightmares. I feel the air - the quality of light is always just as it was when I went to sleep – my blankets are always just out of place. And then there is touch too – I once kicked over a glass at that was resting on an table near the end of my daybed – only to find it shattered on the floor. It’s as if although even with my brain in deep REM sleep I am still completely tapped into all 5 of my senses. I don’t know what I ever did to them, but they help feed the dreams.
When I do wake from these sorts of dreams I am terribly disoriented, and suspicious of everything around me. I once spent the better part of a day not entirely sure I hadn’t killed someone – because a dream had barreled back at me one morning like a repressed memory. (I even did some online research for the crime). In college – I spent a night with my muscles tensed – unwilling to turn over or even stretch my legs – because I dreamed the room just as it was – only Jack Nicholson’s voice had been speaking from my closet, telling me to kill myself.
If you’ve ever had aural hallucinations on pain killers – it was much like that. Hyper real.
Now – with Jack Nicholson – I knew it was a dream, it frightened me terribly at the time – because it is a terrible thing to hear anyone – Hollywood celebrity or not – suggest that you take your own life – but I didn’t feel compelled to do it or for a moment believe that it was real. There were three logical things to do here: (1) get out of bed, pull back the closet curtain, and see that there was no Jack Nicholson in my closet (and if there was a Jack Nicholson in the closet – get an autograph before calling Campus Police!) (2) tell Jack Nicholson to take a flying leap (perhaps not the most realistic option. After all, no one talks to Jack Nicholson that way) or (3) try to wake up my roommate – who I could plainly see sleeping in her bed not 5 feet from me.
All easy enough.
Except for, well, the paralysis. That’s right. Since the brain controls the whole body – it’s not content just to toy with my psyche – oh no – it’ll lock the body down too just to make it difficult for me to escape. Oh, I can move around find in the dream scape – but once I determine that I am dreaming and must therefore either wake myself up or try to make enough noise for someone else to hear me and wake me up – my body goes into total rebellion. My dream limbs become too heavy to move - and if I can move them – I can tell the movement isn’t being mirrored by my actual limbs – because everything feels tingly - as though there has been no blood circulating. I always try to cry out or scream – or even just talk – but my vocal chords go taut. I think the best I’ve managed is a strangled whisper – or the sound of a small, hurt bird. If I try this…and in these situations I always try this…I will wake up with a terribly sore throat.
Being a product of The Information Age – I have, of course, researched these types of dreams (it is somewhat relieving that I am not the only person ever to have suffered them. I’ve always referred to them as “Dream Loops” but other people have deemed them “False Awakenings”; a kind of “Lucid Dreaming”) In my research I have picked up a few tips on how to rouse yourself from them; mostly dream actions to perform. And I’ve tried them too.
But here’s the rub.
My subconscious knows whatever my consciousness knows – and the dreams were ready for me.
One such trick is to attempt to operate something electronic – particularly a light switch (for some reason switching a light switch allegedly doesn’t work in dreams). I was stuck in a particularly vicious dream loop – I was so many loops in that I would recognize almost as soon as the loop started that I was dreaming – and would immediately try to wake up. In this particular loop I directly confronted my subconscious (in the dream it was in the guise of my then – husband – the only other person actually in the house.) In the dream I told him all I had to do was flip the nearby light switch – that it wouldn’t work, then I will have proven it was a dream. And my subconscious laughed and told me all it had to do was tell me not to do it – and I wouldn’t be able to.
And you know what – it was right. (It is my brain after all; controls the whole central nervous system. Very difficult to disobey it when it tells you no.)
What have we learned here, children? Never tell your adversary your plan.
The worst part about these dreams is I have to ride them out. I don’t wake up until either (a) the alarm sounds or (b) my brain is good and ready to let me go. When my lizard brain wrestles my people brain – the lizard brain usually wins.
I should say, I do have dreams where I realize I am dreaming and which are not at all adversarial.
But when they are – let me tell you – I am totally my brain’s bitch.
This explains why, even before ever seeing the film – I found the idea of Freddy Krueger so terrifying; I’ve had a wise-cracking dream villain in my head all my life. And no plucky Heather Langenkamp nor a team of teens to help me fight it.
It’s not as though I wander around day to day, worrying that the line between fantasy and reality was irrevocably fade for me – or even that one day I’ll get caught in a dream loop and never get out. I worry about banal things – like paying my rent, doing my laundry, and finding a benevolent sponsor who will fund all my desires for travel and personal artistic projects.
But still, the fear is clearly nestled there – or I would simply laugh at pitiful, spineless Rosemary, or inwardly cheer when Tony Todd appears at the bonfire (the way I do for most horror movie monsters).
Instead of the monsters – it’s the heroes that haunt me. Them, and their struggles.
If only my conscious could know my subconscious the same way my subconscious knows it. Then I would be prepared. Then I could take it on without fear.
Then I wouldn’t worry about waking up.
Perhaps – then – this is why I write. To pull back all those curtains in my subconscious to see what manner of beast if mimicking Jack Nicholson, hampering my motor skills and taking away my voice. To face the monsters inside so I’m not afraid of those on the outside.
To keep away horror of these wicked dreams.
And now that I’ve called my brain out to battle – I worry that I shall sleep tonight.
I would like to remind anyone reading that sometimes when a writer journals - they slip seamlessly back and forth between reality and a fictionalized account.
I tell you this, because I don't want you to know how much of this is true.
Which is all of it.
I am a horror genre fan; as a child I’d thrill to the black and white horror classics on the now defunct Channel 48 which I watched with my Dad. I read gothic horror novels, graphic novelizations, and gorey comic books. I watched The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside, and The Munsters. I watched the classic horror movie marathons on AMC.
By age 8 I knew the full litany of Universal Movie monsters – and with no uncertainty that Frankenstein was the name of the doctor – not his creation. By ten I was reading Stephen King and seeking out Vincent Price titles at the video store. (I would stare hungrily at the rental boxes in the horror section that promised more gore – but it was a neighborhood store with a very strict rental policy.) At angsty 13, I lay in the upper bunk in a distant cabin in the woods – packed full of girl scouts – wishing real-life vampires would come and spirit me away. (After all, being trapped in the woods with two dozen tween girls is a scary thing.) I had dreams and fantasies where I would appear in black and white – sometimes trying to escape these nefarious creatures, but most often walking among them; I would meet my demise, cold and lovely, my hair fanned out perfectly at the bottom of a spiraling staircase in a stone tower.
Even when I was 18 (and fancied myself an adult) – I had a dream right after I got engaged (the first time around). In it, I was visited by a (pack? Coven? Pride? Flock?) of vampires – all elegant in Victorian and Renaissance regalia. The leaned over the bed I shared with my finance and laughed at me, mocking me in leering whispers. I was a fool, they jeered – I had given up my chance to be with them, to be one of them – they who understood me. By giving up my “innocence” I had irrevocably turned myself away from the freedom and adventure I begged them for that night in the woods when I was 13. Missing the blatantly obvious metaphor at the time – I woke up saddened, like I had truly lost something.
I am not putting this all down to demonstrate my tendency to be a bit morbid (I am) or to put into question my sanity (31 years and never certified!) – I assure you I also played in the sun and with Barbie ™ dolls and emotionally tortured my younger siblings just like every other normal child.
My point here is that these Hollywood and book monsters never frightened me. They had a fascination – even a life for me, certainly (the armchair pop-psychologist in me suggests that being a lonely child I may have empathized with their being societal outcasts and exploited – and even jealous of the very things that made them special – rather than being frightened by their otherworldliness. (This is why writers’ journal, folks. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than therapy!) )
Additionally, most of the classic monsters: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and Dr. Frankenstein’s Creature, had been through the sanitizing blender of pop culture by the time I learned to recognize ideas and concepts and attach them to faces and shapes. Franenstein’s monster had become a clumsy, addle brained oaf, thanks to the pathetic portrayls by Karloff, the camp of The Munsters, and countless cartoony Halloween decorations. (It wasn’t until I actually read Frankenstein in high school that I learned that the Creature had sharp intelligence, superhuman powers, and a tragic need for vengeance. Just thinking about that book gives me the shivers.) Dracula, the Werewolf, and hundreds of ghosts suffered similar fates at the hands of Scooby Doo, & Abbot and Costello and William Castle. (Hammer Horror Productions (filmed at Pinewood Studios) also heightened the psycho-sexual aspects of the stories for me – but that, I feel is another essay for another time.) After this sort of treatment – how could any of these monsters or their movies frighten me beyond, perhaps, a silly little thrill?
It occurs to me that I’m taking the long way round this topic – and I’m not entirely sure why.
I didn’t intend to talk about the monsters that don’t scare me. I meant to talk about the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night that do.
While discussing with a friend the horror movies that had the greatest effects on me (Nightmare on Elm Street, Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives, Candyman) I came to a somewhat surprising realization – these are all films in which the protagonist may be battling external forces or their own sanity.
I don’t fear violent, otherworldly creatures who leap from the darkness and endanger both my life and my immortal soul. Oh no.
It seems I am most afraid of myself.
Of my own mind.
Of going mad.
It’s reassuring, really. I never have to worry that this night will be the night my worst fear attacks me in the alley. Because my worst fear is with me all along.
I’m not sure from whence this fear springs. I am imaginative – yes – perhaps overly so – but I’ve always been able to separate the facts in my life from the fiction.
But of course, everyone thinks this about themselves; and for some people – it is most simply not true.
I never did worry about being a solipsist…it’s not that I mind the responsibility really – I mean – if I were a solipsist I wouldn’t feel badly about things like genocide because the people dying in it wouldn’t be any more real than the horrible acts themselves; you can’t destroy what was never there. No – the reason I can’t buy into solipsism is because – although I do consider myself very creative – I can’t begin to believe that my humble brain could conceive things like the Taj-Mahal, the Mona Lisa, and the entire socio-economic history of Norway. It is too much – and I can not have simply created it all from nothing.
Maybe that’s why my brain punishes me from time to time; it thinks I think of it as an underachiever.
And let’s face it – this is an enemy who will always know what I am thinking.
My brain and I have a good relationship – but from time to time it gives me the most hideous of nightmares – dreams cycles in which I believe myself to be awake and interacting with the real world – in such minute detail to my real life – only to realize I am dreaming – then I wake up and interact with the real world only to realize I am dreaming …..
It sometimes goes on all night. They are fully sensory too – these particular brand of nightmares. I feel the air - the quality of light is always just as it was when I went to sleep – my blankets are always just out of place. And then there is touch too – I once kicked over a glass at that was resting on an table near the end of my daybed – only to find it shattered on the floor. It’s as if although even with my brain in deep REM sleep I am still completely tapped into all 5 of my senses. I don’t know what I ever did to them, but they help feed the dreams.
When I do wake from these sorts of dreams I am terribly disoriented, and suspicious of everything around me. I once spent the better part of a day not entirely sure I hadn’t killed someone – because a dream had barreled back at me one morning like a repressed memory. (I even did some online research for the crime). In college – I spent a night with my muscles tensed – unwilling to turn over or even stretch my legs – because I dreamed the room just as it was – only Jack Nicholson’s voice had been speaking from my closet, telling me to kill myself.
If you’ve ever had aural hallucinations on pain killers – it was much like that. Hyper real.
Now – with Jack Nicholson – I knew it was a dream, it frightened me terribly at the time – because it is a terrible thing to hear anyone – Hollywood celebrity or not – suggest that you take your own life – but I didn’t feel compelled to do it or for a moment believe that it was real. There were three logical things to do here: (1) get out of bed, pull back the closet curtain, and see that there was no Jack Nicholson in my closet (and if there was a Jack Nicholson in the closet – get an autograph before calling Campus Police!) (2) tell Jack Nicholson to take a flying leap (perhaps not the most realistic option. After all, no one talks to Jack Nicholson that way) or (3) try to wake up my roommate – who I could plainly see sleeping in her bed not 5 feet from me.
All easy enough.
Except for, well, the paralysis. That’s right. Since the brain controls the whole body – it’s not content just to toy with my psyche – oh no – it’ll lock the body down too just to make it difficult for me to escape. Oh, I can move around find in the dream scape – but once I determine that I am dreaming and must therefore either wake myself up or try to make enough noise for someone else to hear me and wake me up – my body goes into total rebellion. My dream limbs become too heavy to move - and if I can move them – I can tell the movement isn’t being mirrored by my actual limbs – because everything feels tingly - as though there has been no blood circulating. I always try to cry out or scream – or even just talk – but my vocal chords go taut. I think the best I’ve managed is a strangled whisper – or the sound of a small, hurt bird. If I try this…and in these situations I always try this…I will wake up with a terribly sore throat.
Being a product of The Information Age – I have, of course, researched these types of dreams (it is somewhat relieving that I am not the only person ever to have suffered them. I’ve always referred to them as “Dream Loops” but other people have deemed them “False Awakenings”; a kind of “Lucid Dreaming”) In my research I have picked up a few tips on how to rouse yourself from them; mostly dream actions to perform. And I’ve tried them too.
But here’s the rub.
My subconscious knows whatever my consciousness knows – and the dreams were ready for me.
One such trick is to attempt to operate something electronic – particularly a light switch (for some reason switching a light switch allegedly doesn’t work in dreams). I was stuck in a particularly vicious dream loop – I was so many loops in that I would recognize almost as soon as the loop started that I was dreaming – and would immediately try to wake up. In this particular loop I directly confronted my subconscious (in the dream it was in the guise of my then – husband – the only other person actually in the house.) In the dream I told him all I had to do was flip the nearby light switch – that it wouldn’t work, then I will have proven it was a dream. And my subconscious laughed and told me all it had to do was tell me not to do it – and I wouldn’t be able to.
And you know what – it was right. (It is my brain after all; controls the whole central nervous system. Very difficult to disobey it when it tells you no.)
What have we learned here, children? Never tell your adversary your plan.
The worst part about these dreams is I have to ride them out. I don’t wake up until either (a) the alarm sounds or (b) my brain is good and ready to let me go. When my lizard brain wrestles my people brain – the lizard brain usually wins.
I should say, I do have dreams where I realize I am dreaming and which are not at all adversarial.
But when they are – let me tell you – I am totally my brain’s bitch.
This explains why, even before ever seeing the film – I found the idea of Freddy Krueger so terrifying; I’ve had a wise-cracking dream villain in my head all my life. And no plucky Heather Langenkamp nor a team of teens to help me fight it.
It’s not as though I wander around day to day, worrying that the line between fantasy and reality was irrevocably fade for me – or even that one day I’ll get caught in a dream loop and never get out. I worry about banal things – like paying my rent, doing my laundry, and finding a benevolent sponsor who will fund all my desires for travel and personal artistic projects.
But still, the fear is clearly nestled there – or I would simply laugh at pitiful, spineless Rosemary, or inwardly cheer when Tony Todd appears at the bonfire (the way I do for most horror movie monsters).
Instead of the monsters – it’s the heroes that haunt me. Them, and their struggles.
If only my conscious could know my subconscious the same way my subconscious knows it. Then I would be prepared. Then I could take it on without fear.
Then I wouldn’t worry about waking up.
Perhaps – then – this is why I write. To pull back all those curtains in my subconscious to see what manner of beast if mimicking Jack Nicholson, hampering my motor skills and taking away my voice. To face the monsters inside so I’m not afraid of those on the outside.
To keep away horror of these wicked dreams.
And now that I’ve called my brain out to battle – I worry that I shall sleep tonight.
