Wednesday, March 29, 2017

What irrational fear did you hold as a child?


I thought a meteorite was going to crash through my ceiling and hit me while sleeping. For this I blame my dad, who was once talking to my uncle about a woman in Alabama who'd been hit by one while sleeping. I overheard and asked "but that won't happen to me tonight, will it?" My dad responded with "you never know, it might!"
That if my parents got fired from their job that they'd actually be set on fire.

There was a book on Reading Rainbow where a volcano suddenly appeared in a farmer's field. I spent the next month or so terrified whenever I'd find a "hot spot" in my house or backyard, because there would obviously be a volcano in that spot soon. And dammit, no one believed me about how much danger we were in.

I had a VERY realistic dream my brother got eaten by our 1989 era VCR. I was pretty scared to put tapes in for a while. It flattened him in my dream :(

Mascots. They terrified me. Especially the Chuck E. Cheese mouse.

I had an irrational fear of being mentally disabled and just feeling normal in my head. And that my parents and peers were just being nice and trying to include me like a normal child. Probably because my cousin was and I always thought "Maybe he sees it all normally in his head."

9 comments:

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I've must've had some but since I'm not remembering any it could mean they may have been fleeting.

Leland said...

Mondale had a chance.

ricpic said...

I had a four block walk to school, PS 76. Anyway, the first block had a Chinese laundry, the door of which was always open. I flew past that door! To this day I don't consider my fear of The Chink Within to have been irrational. Some instinct told me to race past his door. So I did!

I didn't have a fear of sidewalk cracks. Sometimes I stepped between the cracks. Other times I hopped from crack to crack. We had slate and concrete sidewalks in the neighborhood. I was big on sidewalks as a kid.

edutcher said...

Zulus.

AllenS said...

The mummy. He couldn't walk very fast, because he had to drag one leg, but nobody could outrun him. Scary.

ndspinelli said...

I was afraid my parents would leave when I fell asleep. I would yell down to them 10,20,30 or more times, "Goodnight mom and dad." And they would always patiently yell back, "Goodnight, Nicky." This continued until I was 7 or 8. My siblings weren't so understanding or patient.

Donny Genaro said...

Bumblebees in the daytime and even June bugs at night because their buzz sounded like it came from the same corner of hell.

Synova said...

I had nightmares about my dad being fired from a cannon. No lie.

ken in tx said...

I remember that story about the volcano in the corn field. It didn't scare me because it was in Mexico. We didn't have volcano's in Alabama--Just tornadoes, I had night mares about them--not irrational.