Hollywood 1, my phobias 0.
Jan. 27th, 2005 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ldhensonI feel rather silly making this confession, but I'm so pleased and intrigued by it that I'm going to make it anyway.
Ever since I watched Van Helsing, I've been sleeping better.
Here's a little background: I can't stand sleeping alone in the dark. I can remember my sleep habits back to when I was five, and it's been like that all along. I need a nightlight in the same room, minimum. I've gone though a phase where I had to have three nightlights. I've turned on my closet light and left the door wide open. I've slept with the TV on, with a small bedside lamp on, with all the lights in the room on. Those are rare; my norm is one to two nightlights. I don't have panic attacks or anything like that; I just get nervous and don't want to close my eyes.
Thing is, I don't find vampires, werewolves, what have you to be particularly scary. It's not like I'm worried someone's going to break in. No, what keeps me up nights is The Unknown, populated by my own overactive imagination. It's a very, very vague fear; I can't even pinpoint it. You tell me that something is unsolved, is mysterious, is unidentified, and that's the fastest way to make me uneasy. Try this on for size: when I was a kid, I watched a filmstrip on math. At the end, they intoned--with melodramatically eerie music--that a certain famous problem, probably Fermat's last theorem, remained unsolved. Right on cue, I was spooked. By math. Simply because it was unknown.
I've tried logic, of course. There's the whole "nothing's there in the dark that wasn't there when the light was still on" notion. And I don't really believe in an afterlife, ergo I shouldn't really think ghosts or spirits exist. And so on. But I think sometimes logic only goes so far for amorphous fears like this.
Now, as for VH: I'd be the last to call it a great movie. I haven't fallen for it, its characters, or its actors half as hard as I've fallen for other fandoms. So right there, I can rule out any sort of avid preoccupation with the movie as a mechanism for this. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm now sleeping comfortably with a single small nightlight in the next room these days.
My best theory for now is that my "sleeping in the dark" phobia is just so primal that logic can make only a little dent in it, and that it needs something something equally as primal to counteract it. And what's more primal than the notion that, once you're confronted by things that go bump in the night--no matter that the movie's version of "things" doesn't match mine--you can just beat them the hell up?
The big hole in that theory is that years of watching Buffy should have had the same effect, and it didn't. But then again, when watching BTVS I concentrated more on the plots, and less so on the fights. Not primal enough, maybe? Heh, I don't know.
Whatever. All I can say is, it cost me $3.99 for a rental and a few hours' worth of viewing time. Huh. Professional therapy should be so cheap and so fast. I'm >thisclose< to buying the movie, just out of gratitude.
Anybody else ever have something like this happen to them?
Ever since I watched Van Helsing, I've been sleeping better.
Here's a little background: I can't stand sleeping alone in the dark. I can remember my sleep habits back to when I was five, and it's been like that all along. I need a nightlight in the same room, minimum. I've gone though a phase where I had to have three nightlights. I've turned on my closet light and left the door wide open. I've slept with the TV on, with a small bedside lamp on, with all the lights in the room on. Those are rare; my norm is one to two nightlights. I don't have panic attacks or anything like that; I just get nervous and don't want to close my eyes.
Thing is, I don't find vampires, werewolves, what have you to be particularly scary. It's not like I'm worried someone's going to break in. No, what keeps me up nights is The Unknown, populated by my own overactive imagination. It's a very, very vague fear; I can't even pinpoint it. You tell me that something is unsolved, is mysterious, is unidentified, and that's the fastest way to make me uneasy. Try this on for size: when I was a kid, I watched a filmstrip on math. At the end, they intoned--with melodramatically eerie music--that a certain famous problem, probably Fermat's last theorem, remained unsolved. Right on cue, I was spooked. By math. Simply because it was unknown.
I've tried logic, of course. There's the whole "nothing's there in the dark that wasn't there when the light was still on" notion. And I don't really believe in an afterlife, ergo I shouldn't really think ghosts or spirits exist. And so on. But I think sometimes logic only goes so far for amorphous fears like this.
Now, as for VH: I'd be the last to call it a great movie. I haven't fallen for it, its characters, or its actors half as hard as I've fallen for other fandoms. So right there, I can rule out any sort of avid preoccupation with the movie as a mechanism for this. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm now sleeping comfortably with a single small nightlight in the next room these days.
My best theory for now is that my "sleeping in the dark" phobia is just so primal that logic can make only a little dent in it, and that it needs something something equally as primal to counteract it. And what's more primal than the notion that, once you're confronted by things that go bump in the night--no matter that the movie's version of "things" doesn't match mine--you can just beat them the hell up?
The big hole in that theory is that years of watching Buffy should have had the same effect, and it didn't. But then again, when watching BTVS I concentrated more on the plots, and less so on the fights. Not primal enough, maybe? Heh, I don't know.
Whatever. All I can say is, it cost me $3.99 for a rental and a few hours' worth of viewing time. Huh. Professional therapy should be so cheap and so fast. I'm >thisclose< to buying the movie, just out of gratitude.
Anybody else ever have something like this happen to them?
