Being Afraid

Sitting around the office waiting to wrap up the evening. Our IT pro is wandering back and forth to get us set up proper and Dennis (who is worthy of a blog himself) is rambling around doing...something. It gets me thinking though about how somethings, and places, can get awful creepy. Take churches for example, specifically ones constructed prior to 1980 with stained glass. Beautiful during the day and when full of people, but something about being the only person there with the lights out has another effect. How about porcelain dolls, beautiful in one light and terrifying in another. I could keep going, but each example I want to use I find there is one common element, it's unfamiliar. The place can be somewhere you are all the time, but one change can create an unfamiliarity. I'm sure there is a ton of research on this and I'll leave that to the pros, or your own curiosity, to seek out.

Really, all that was just a lead up for my own personal experience. Yesterday I came home, and the shorter days had made it a bit darker on my walk in. I'm confident in the knowledge of my surroundings and worked my way to the bathroom, successfully navigating around furniture to a even darker hallway where I have to hunt for the door handle. Thankfully construction standards help place the doorhandle fairly quick. Then as I open the door the even darker interior of the bathroom seems to wash over me. My pulse quickened as I gasped and held my breath. A rush over my body as the hair down my neck and arms stood in attention. I hastened to flick the lights on, hitting both the lights and the fan (personal pet-peeve of mine), and paused to recover from a feeling of vertigo. After turning the fan off and laughing at myself there came a serious moment. What scared me so? Especially in my own house? The rational side goes with a combination of sensations and a lack of external references for balance. The religious side questions the prescence of something beyond the physical. The rational side then shakes a finger at my choice of entertainment, scary movies and suspensful literature, for messing with my religious side.

I brought this up with Jess and shared how suprising it was to be afraid of the dark, especially after having no issues with it in the past 15 or so years. She expressed similar feelings with coming home to a dark apartment and made a deeper revelation. The anxious feeling of being confronted with darkness didn't come from the dark itself, instead the anxiety came from WHAT IS IN the dark.

With that in mind, the IT pro has gone home and Dennis left about 15 min. ago. I've sufficiently gotten into my own head now and have to walk around the office turning off the lights and walking down one particularly long and dark hallway lined with open doors to even darker rooms. Time to go home and HULU Nickalodeon's "Are You Afraid of the Dark?"

Till next time, stay in the light.