For me, it’s disappearing. That someday something will happen to me and no one will ever know what it was and where I am. That I will become one of those mysteries you see online and on TV shows. Whenever I think about it I feel nothing but dread.
Even though I am an arachnophobe, I also just can’t stand insects in general. They’re unholy creatures that I wouldn’t mind if we removed without destroying the world. The worst part is I’m pretty sure my fear of insects comes from an early childhood cub scouts(?) day camp(?) trip where I opened a tarp on a wooden tent frame and saw a bunch of ants, so it’s an early, somehow traumatic, childhood experience.
Dementia
Alzheimer/Dementia is one of those few situations where I really can’t blame someone for going out on their own terms. The idea of being trapped inside your own effectively disintegrating mind is terrifying.
The same thought for your physical body also seems reasonable to me. Or just for intolerable pain.
Yeah I think its weird that it’s considered more morally sound to make them waste away in agony then let them willingly end their suffering through controlled means.
Like, if they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna do it. Wouldn’t it be better to make sure they do it in the cleanest way possible?
This or some kind of psychosis… Mental health, neurocognitive abnormalities scare the shit out of me. That its very possible it can happen to me.
I once met a guy who was stuck in a drug enduced psychosis when I was 12 or something. It shook me pretty badly. I’m not opposed to drugs at all, but I’ve always had an irrational fear of halucigenic drugs since.
My biggest fear is that my office chair might break in such a way that the hydraulic piston breaks through the seat and punctures my colon.
Having to work for another 20 years.
I was in this crystal clear cliffside cove and could see in front of me maybe 10 m or so but the Rock only went out about 5 and then just plunged into the abyss. and after exploring the coastline I swim out about 10 ft past the rocks and realized that I could see nothing but the deepest blue I’d ever seen.
literally anything could be just a few body lengths away watching me were sensing me, it was almost overwhelming.
I felt this visceral terror, that I’ve felt before in the middle of reading a Lovecraft story.
very much looking into the eye of something unknowable.
Oh fuck no! Dark water is a big fear of mine. I like swimming, scuba diving, snorkeling BUT those dark patches in the water make me truly feel paralyzed and electrified at the same time brbrbrbr. One time I went to the Yucatan penninsula to swim in a couple of cenotes and boy did it make my body shiver! Let alone the meaning of cenotes in mayan cosmogony and what not but the pure sheer terror that that black water gave me was like nothing else.
Oh shit, just reading about this scares me. It must have been so terrifying, not knowing what’s in the deep water
I understand thalassophobia. The deep is scary. Funny thing is, though, I can handle being on a ship or flying over water, even though I think about how far down it might be.
mountains of madness.
I had similar chills with other Lovecraft stories, but then my roommate in college told me that the first time he read mountain of madness he had like a mini breakdown because it was so terrifying, and I hadn’t read that story yet.
and the way he describes the immensity of surreal psychotic landscape is pretty terrifying.
I actually read through the story like three or four times in a week to feel the chill more than once.
I haven’t reached that one yet, but I’m close. I really enjoyed A Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, Rats in the Walls, The Temple, Call of Cthulhu, and the very beginning of The Festival, when he describes wandering along the seaside road toward the distant twinkling lights of a wintery village. The opening pages of that book are beautiful.
