[mild claustrophobia] + [mild vertigo] + [mild childhood issues around body-weight and the perceived inability of man-made constructs to support it] = [phobia of elevators]
I used to have nightmares about being in a falling elevator, or worse: the floor of an elevator opening up or falling out.
Also, spiders. They're eldritch and otherworldy and they just move plain wrong. Kind of a standard phobia, but here's a story for you.
Spoiler below!
Nine year old kid in a new family home, I go to take a shower for the first time. It's a free-standing shower with curtain on three sides. I reach in without looking, turn the tap and let it warm up. I get undressed. By now it's nice and steamy, so I reach in again to check the temperature. It's just right. I step straight in, pulling the curtain closed behind me.
That's when I notice them. They're not huge, but they're everywhere. There must be between ten and twenty of them. They're above and below me, on either side of me, they're on the tiles in front of me and they're on the curtain behind me. One is on the underside of the tap where my hand had been.
My sudden splashing knocks some of them off and I watch them flounder beside my feet, frozen by fear until one of them touches my foot.
Ripping the curtain out of the way I stumble out, screaming, frantically checking my body and shaking out my hair. A few seconds later both my parents are in the open door. I shakily point to the still running shower and tell them about the spiders. They look. My dad turns off the shower. There are no spiders.
Later, I rationalised it to myself thus: we'd just moved in and I was the first person to use the shower. Maybe there was an egg-sack in there or nearby that had gone unnoticed and had recently hatched. The spiders were washed away by the shower, so nobody else saw them. At the time I firmly believed this. My adult self doesn't buy it however.
The only reasonable explanation is that it was a hallucination.
Now what's worse than spiders? Giant, amphibious, armoured spiders with pincers. Image search for "giant spider crab", coz I'm not gonna.
Just thinking and writing about has made me need to check the room and put socks on.
Perfectly understandable. I'm generally afraid of anyone who might potentially stick me with a needle. Although, lucky me, I have quite a good dentist. He's a drummer in a band, as well, so we have something interesting to chat about xD
(07-14-2014, 04:44 AM)VaeVictis Wrote: Plague doctors.
Fortunately I only have to worry about them around Halloween.
I fully agree with you on this one.
A show about Poveglia left me even more spooked by them.
(07-14-2014, 09:00 PM)Ashtoreth Wrote: When I travel by car or bus, I always imagine that we're going to crash or fall into a ravine or something of that sort. I don't panic but it's enough to keep me uneasy and vigilant the whole ride. For this reason I've never felt the willingness to get a driver's licence, and I tend to refuse or avoid lifts from people I don't know that well (for example, co-workers) or people I don't know at all (friends of friends, etc.). Even when I used to work night shifts, I'd rather take the train than a lift from a co-worker.
I'm scared of driving. Even though I owned a car at one point in time [which later got junked], I've never gotten my license and so I have to get rides everywhere. Good thing I work from home, I guess.
(07-14-2014, 11:26 PM)Artsyracoon Wrote: I have a phobia of having to talk to someone on the phone. Is that odd?
Oh and going to the dentist.
Lol I can actually relate to that. I hate talking on the phone - especially if there's a possibility of me not being able to understand what the other person is saying to me.
(07-15-2014, 07:08 PM)MrBehemoth Wrote: [mild claustrophobia] + [mild vertigo] + [mild childhood issues around body-weight and the perceived inability of man-made constructs to support it] = [phobia of elevators]
I used to have nightmares about being in a falling elevator, or worse: the floor of an elevator opening up or falling out.
Also, spiders. They're eldritch and otherworldy and they just move plain wrong. Kind of a standard phobia, but here's a story for you.
Spoiler below!
Nine year old kid in a new family home, I go to take a shower for the first time. It's a free-standing shower with curtain on three sides. I reach in without looking, turn the tap and let it warm up. I get undressed. By now it's nice and steamy, so I reach in again to check the temperature. It's just right. I step straight in, pulling the curtain closed behind me.
That's when I notice them. They're not huge, but they're everywhere. There must be between ten and twenty of them. They're above and below me, on either side of me, they're on the tiles in front of me and they're on the curtain behind me. One is on the underside of the tap where my hand had been.
My sudden splashing knocks some of them off and I watch them flounder beside my feet, frozen by fear until one of them touches my foot.
Ripping the curtain out of the way I stumble out, screaming, frantically checking my body and shaking out my hair. A few seconds later both my parents are in the open door. I shakily point to the still running shower and tell them about the spiders. They look. My dad turns off the shower. There are no spiders.
Later, I rationalised it to myself thus: we'd just moved in and I was the first person to use the shower. Maybe there was an egg-sack in there or nearby that had gone unnoticed and had recently hatched. The spiders were washed away by the shower, so nobody else saw them. At the time I firmly believed this. My adult self doesn't buy it however.
The only reasonable explanation is that it was a hallucination.
Now what's worse than spiders? Giant, amphibious, armoured spiders with pincers. Image search for "giant spider crab", coz I'm not gonna.
Just thinking and writing about has made me need to check the room and put socks on.
Strangely enough, I've never been afraid of regular elevators. Just those open framework contraptions from way back. I had to ride in one when I volunteered at the hospital, and I was practically on the verge of a nervous breakdown by the time it came to a stop. Fortunately I wasn't alone in it, at least.
While I understand people's fear of spiders, I always liked them for some reason [as well as most arthropods, in general] - this being the case despite how frequently I was bitten by them growing up.
At the risk of sounding like a total lunatic, I'll mention that I enjoy watching them build webs around the light by my front door, and I'll actually talk to them as though they're my friendly little neighbors sometimes. Yes, I know; I'm completely insane xD.
That does seem slightly unlikely. But what would I know? I have experiences I can't quite rationalize pretty frequently - rather, I just tell myself to ignore everything whether it turns out to be real or not lol.
...The only people worthy of consideration are the unusual ones. Common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed. - L. Frank Baum
(This post was last modified: 07-17-2014, 04:25 AM by ThatCrazyShaman.)
Basements, huh? You've never seen my basement - it's so dark in there even during the day that I refused to step foot past the threshold until I managed to flick the light on [without looking to see where the switch was lol]
And, for some reason, it smells like oil paint. Always has.
...The only people worthy of consideration are the unusual ones. Common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed. - L. Frank Baum
(This post was last modified: 07-19-2014, 10:15 PM by ThatCrazyShaman.)
I've suffered from various symptoms of a pseudodysphagia. They come now and then, completely randomly. May last from a day to a month, but then disappear.
Don't know can you count that as a phobia per se, but it's somewhat related, I think.
Feel of fear, having anxiety againts something particular.
(07-19-2014, 10:28 PM)eliasfrost Wrote: Sleeping in big, open areas. It makes me extremely uncomfortable.
I'm actually surprised that isn't a really common one, since you'd think it would be a natural instinct in humans.
(07-19-2014, 10:31 PM)Red Wrote: I've suffered from various symptoms of a pseudodysphagia. They come now and then, completely randomly. May last from a day to a month, but then disappear.
Don't know can you count that as a phobia per se, but it's somewhat related, I think.
Feel of fear, having anxiety againts something particular.
It qualifies as a phobia as far as I'm concerned.
My grandmother had an issue with that after she choked on her pills one day. I kept telling her that taking them all at once was a bad idea, and she wouldn't listen. Come to think of it, certain types of clowns. Something I’m working on got me thinking about this.
Spoiler below!
While a lot of people are scared of clowns as kids, I think my distaste for them stems directly from one of my earliest memories, which, as far as I can recall, might have been the earliest in my life I experienced a hallucination.
I was very young at the time [I can’t be quite certain how young, but it was very early on], and I had probably just been put down for a nap, but I was wide awake and kept walking about to occupy myself. My aunt and my cousin came in to say goodbye before leaving, and once they’d gone, I was all alone in the room again, which was a tad frightening to me at that age. The room, which later became my grandfather’s study, was always rather dark; it was part of the short hallway that led back to two of the bedrooms and the bathroom, with one window that barely let in any light thanks to the mass of hydrangeas growing outside. I really wouldn’t be surprised if this memory is the reason why I refused to sleep with the lights off until I was six.
I couldn’t fall asleep, so I was just sitting there, looking around the room. Everything seemed normal until suddenly I was greeted by the sight of a three-headed clown [each head with a different facial expression – happy, neutral and sad] stepping out of the darkness and walking towards me. I completely lost it until my mother finally came and retrieved me.
As a result, I was utterly petrified of clowns as a child [except Emmet Kelly, oddly]. I couldn’t get within thirty yards of one without getting upset. When I was in the hospital, a pair of clowns came to visit me and I hid under the covers until they finally left. I didn’t get over this phobia until my teenage years, and even then, I still dislike some clowns – primarily Harlequin clowns, which resemble the three-headed monstrosity from my childhood.
...The only people worthy of consideration are the unusual ones. Common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed. - L. Frank Baum
(This post was last modified: 07-19-2014, 11:00 PM by ThatCrazyShaman.)
I have a severe, yet ridiculous fear of dentists.
I'm gonna be honest, I haven't been to one for at least 8 years. I brush my teeth several times a day, they never hurt, but I know pretty well that that doesn't mean they're healthy. I have occasional nightmares about dentists. The doctors themselves never appear in my dreams, but my teeth get damaged/fall out which means that I have to visit one and that is the point when I wake up in cold sweat.
It's RIDICULOUS! I NEVER had a bad experience with dentists, in fact, all of them were pretty decent. I have no idea where this fear comes from, but it's strong enough to stop me from calling and making an appointment when I want to do it.
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