I just had a nightmare. Well, the closest thing to a nightmare I get.
In it, my family had moved into a new house, which is something that actually happened fairly recently. (In the dream, as in real life, there was a basement which my brother had taken as his room and an empty in-ground pool near the house.) Weird stuff was happening all over the place.
The back door kept opening. At one point, I saw that it was open, but there was a screen door still closed. It was raining at the time, and I told my parents that if the screen door hadn't been closed, the kitchen floor would be soaked.
My mother's mental state was abysmal. During the time it was raining, I went from one room to another to get a bag of chips for my father, and due to some misunderstanding, I shouted something at him. I was a little angry, but I mostly shouted because the rain was loud and making it hard to hear. That, for whatever reason, tore my mother up, and she started sobbing and acting like she was having a mental breakdown. Nothing I did to console her did any good.
Space didn't seem right in the house. It was like the dimensions didn't add up correctly. There was a woman there (not sure who she was, but it was as if she was the realty woman, though we were already moved into the house and settled), and I asked her to show me the layout of the house, because I didn't quite understand how everything fit. We started at the corner of the left side of the house and went from the living room (which had a very small bathroom, with only a small toilet, nearly hidden to the side; I had never seen it before, in fact) through the kitchen. Instead of turning and going into the next room, she kept going straight and went out the back door. I heard some loud noise but couldn't figure out what it was. Then I saw that she had driven her car into the empty pool, which was beside where we had walked through the house, and it was as if she was trying to get into a space beneath the pool, like that was the next part of the house and she had to show it to me.
The worst thing was how the TV messed up. This happened later in the dream, after I had declared that the house was haunted, specifically the basement. We gathered in front of it, and it scrambled so that you couldn't make out anything. We had some friends over to show it to them, and it messed up again, but this time the picture, in addition to messing up, changed to a view of us, like there was a camera in the TV that was recording us. I think it would also show scenes from the lives of our friends who were visiting, as if they were recorded on a tape we were playing. What really made it disturbing is that it seemed like the TV would mess up when we were talking about the house being haunted.
For the longest time, excluding when I was a kid and was easily scared at everything, I've said that I wanted to be scared by movies and books and stories. I love creepy atmospheres. I've stated my intention to live in a haunted house because one, the price would be incredibly low (because that's how it always works, right? gigantic house for dirt cheap means it's haunted), and two, I'd see it as a sort of challenge. After all, how could a ghost actually harm me?
Bravado. All of it. In reality, I'm still the scared little boy I was when I had to close my eyes whenever the scene in Little Monsters with the boy in the suit came on near the end of the movie. There is a world of difference between me now and me back then, but most of it comes from the fact that very little scares me. Look at haunted house movies and books - they're all either over-the-top or focused on the characters or history of the house, and neither one of those does anything for me. Over-the-top things like poltergeist activity and visible apparitions that practically sing and dance aren't believable. They're not subtle, and they keep you from putting yourself into the role of the characters. Everyone can say, "I've heard odd sounds at night. What if my house is haunted?" No one could say, "Stuff flies around my house, this is just like my life!" Similarly with stories focused on the personalities of the characters involved or the history of a house being haunted. Knowing that the head of a household is a former alcoholic that still struggles with booze can help you relate to the character, but it can keep you from placing yourself into the story and imaging that the haunting is happening to you. If you know that the lights turn on in a certain room at a certain time because that's when a previous owner fed her beloved cat, it takes the mystery out of it, and it's not scary.
But when something comes along that does genuinely frighten me, I hate it. And I have to wonder, how could anybody like being scared? I love the horror genre, but not because it scares me. I like it because it's interesting and it can make my blood pump. The Puppet Master series is a personal favorite because many of the dolls scare the hell out of me. In particular, the guy with the drill on his head can keep me up at night, due as much to his blank expression as the deadly instrument on top of his head. But I know that no doll is going to start running around and trying to kill me. So, it scares me, but really, it makes my heart race. The bad kind of scary, and what really fits the term "scare," is when something makes your heart stop, when you're frozen with fear. If you can scream, you're not really scared. Your instincts may be activated, something may surprise you, but you're not filled with dread and disbelief and the absolute knowledge that things are not right.
The best way to scare me is to make me feel as though I am powerless. That's why haunted house stories and ghost stories (the rare times that they are done well) frighten me so. How do you make a door stop opening when there is no cause? How do you keep a room from being cold all the time? How do you fight a ghost? How do you control something that is beyond the realm of physics as we know it? Ghosts may have rules, and indeed, if they do exist, they are governed by some set of rules, but when we have no knowledge of such rules and no idea how to make use of them or if we even can, how does that help us? If we know nothing about a situation, how can we analyze it, how can we exert control over it?
Needless to say, I'm talking about more than just ghosts and haunted houses.
Man, I hate bad dreams. I might hate them less if I could actually be bothered to turn them into stories.
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