Fear of the dark

I didn't know you knew my mum - and I'm not sure what that thought has to do with this.

Oh, the things that made me scared of the dark. Do you think its an innate fear or is that just a fancy we have, a pseudo-bollocks link to a romantic idea of cave dwelling.

The dark, it does seems intuitive that it would be scary and for good reasons. The dark is where we trip over things and step on plugs. The dark is where we loose things. The dark is where the murderers lurk; they lurk in the dark and around corners. Perhaps we should fear corners too - and hidden dips.

So a fear of it seems fine. We could leave it at that. So why do we do the other things to people? Put the willies up 'em....

When I was little I often stayed in my Grandpa's big, old, scary house.

I was scared of it in the day - there were odd people about, staff, patients, Johnny the odd job man and Mr Thing (I forget his name, he lived in a lodge up the driveway) and Mr and Mrs Other thing that lived in a cottage built into the side - she being deaf for years through shock at the death of her child.

There were lots of odd staircases and cupboards in the walls and odd trap doors in the floors. There were religious pictures and crosses and paintings of my Grandpa healing the sick - his big, caring hands reaching out... black and white photos of him with his hands healing children in callipers.


Scared the wotsits out of me... And the pipe organ. And the dead wheelchairs. And the old tellies the size of tables sitting in dead damp rooms... and the lofts with rotten beams for floors where my cousins locked me in the inky black, terrified to move and fall off the beams and through the ceiling below.

Big old scary paintings and busts, beheaded dead people, masks and the gong.... Everything creaked and went thud in the day...

The night. As a small child I was put to bed on the top floor, up the back stairs, 2 flights, and up the extra twisting flight to the old servants floor, through the narrow door. Along the long corridor, up more steps, room on the right.

In the bed under the large painting of furious charging elephants. I was about 5 mins from another human, all down dark corridors, down dark stairs, around corners... I was not even that sure of the way and not in the dark.

I loved Winnie the Poo but for the Hefalumps that filled my nightmares. They were not the lumping beasts as drawn in the books, no. Mine were the huge, furious, charging bull elephants in the painting above my bed. They seemed to swell with rage as they were picked out by the moonlight through the window with the trees and the evil faces that lived in the branches.

I wanted to come down to my parents - downstairs chatting in the warm, in the light. But I wasn't going to move. I lay there fixed with terror.

Perhaps I could have managed to trick the elephants, sneak out without being seen. Out into the dark long corridors. Past the old bathroom with the toilet high on a plinth in the middle of the room its chain hanging like a noose. The smell of cold water - Edwardian plumbing smells of lead and rust and cold.

Past all of those old dark cupboards, down all of those dark stairs. But no.

No because of the Boggiemen. They lived in the darkest deepest cupboard set into the wall of the lower back stairs. I knew they were in there. My mum told me so. She said they were in there and she said "the Boggiemen will get you".

I'd looked in the cupboard in the day light (and looked again recently after not having been there for 30 years) and it is backless and bottomless. The Boggiemen live in its unfathomable depths. The Boggiemen will get you - the fear of them seemed to crush my chest.

Perhaps when I catch a Boggieman and take him by his heels writhing into the daylight I will see that he is just as fearful as me and at least I don't have to live in a cupboard on an old mostly forgotten staircase as a child catcher.

The dark - we walked in woods once so dark that I could not see my hands. We crashed about stoned and scared dozens of screaming crows - and down on the ground we saw the phosphorescent emerald green glow of fungus. Deep in the wood in the black of the night - alive.

And, my mum, I do love her so deeply.

Dogs

I can almost smell the dogs barking on the other side of the door
Scratching at the paint
Barking at the air they can sense - air from my side
They can smell my fear

Let them in
Just die
Give in
Let them tear you to bits

My head creates them and it wants me to let them kill me

Doors of perception - healing in 5 dimensions

It is a year now since I went on a journey into space, time and probability. Since then I have glimpsed the same journey again, but not made the trip.

We, a fellow traveller and I, met with a profit - she warned us the risks of our adventure, furnished us with fuel and wished us luck on the trip. We took the potion, creation's great delusion - a flower of death - and waited for time to take us into a journey into sound and vision... that was as far as I had thought we would go.

I became scared, feeling sick - colours and sound twisting around, couldn't deal with with low ceilings, the people or the lack of air. We went outside where the footpath and the road, the shops and all of reality breathed in and out - colours changing, pulsing, spinning. The ground moved, sinking with each step like walking on an elastic sheet. The shop windows were filled with magical goods - the footpath, like a conveyor, never ending our steps took us nowhere though we walked lots for eternity.

I was blinded in reality but colours so vivid filled my mind - every now and then I could see and fear the streets, the cars, trams, bikes, taxis, buses, water - how could we walk when we could not talk, or hear, or think. I had to sit, to try to sit and not vomit as I breathed the world in and out of my mind like smoke.

We sat, transfixed in amazement, joy and terror, and technicolor time tripped around and sound danced spiral, paisley, patterns in the sunshine of the past and the future. People passed, echos of reality, looking in, looking on, passing by.

What have you done? what have you done? Time began to play, life passing by - all my past, present and future as vivid as day; a crystal clear, holographic encounter with my soul - laid bare on those streets, drooling - unable to sit, loosing the ability to breath.

Time turning, playing again, running to its ultimate, darkening, shrinking, freezing, stultifying, inescapable death. I shut my eyes, surrendered to the void, embraced death in fear, loss and horror.

Through a void, a compression of reality, through time and back to the start - this vision played again while my loved ones watched: calling "what have you done, oh no, what have you done" looking at me, vegetating, calling "what have you done" - my journey through time repeated again and again - though I may have died many times before I realised that this was happening.

As time continued, repeating, running fast, the snap-shot of life grew smaller until I could see life, time, reality, in its true state. Everything was a matter of an increasingly small, timeless nothing - repeating, repeating, repeating - the only speck of reality, siluetted, in an endless, timeless, dimensionless, void of improbability.

Everything was, as it always had to be, nothing. Nothing - life - ran faster, faster, faster. A vacuum eating a vacuum eating a vacuum - all of everything turning inside out at each and every point at the same time.

So cold, so lost, so trapped - a turmoil of ultimate fear.

So, we sat - heads full of universes, visions unimaginable but nonetheless imagined into reality. We span and shivered all through the night while all about us - through doorways into the madness, reality poked, drunken, violent, accusing, staring.

And - after hours we walked - me blind to any reality, colours spinning four dimensional spiders webs of fractals.

I'm not sure now how much good or bad that night caused me.

I do know that I was pleased to feel the streets beneath my feet and to feel warmth in my clothes - to see again and to hear. I am wiser for the journey and pleased to have returned to life however much I know, as I guess we all do, that life is no more real than that which we perceive and what we perceive is merely a snippet of time - dust on the window of a train from here to infinity.

Love and stuff, P