The Mind Has Teeth

Since I have throughout my blog written much about monsters and other scary things I thought I would write about something that scares me. Throughout my life I have been scared of many things, but throughout my adult life it has been only one thing.  The song “One” illustrates this one thing very well,  It is being totally alone in the dark with nothing but my own mind for company.  This fear began to arise in High School there where a few times when I woke up in the morning and my mind was awake but my body was not, (or better put my conscientiousness was awake and alert while my body was still sleeping) I would tell myself to move but it wouldn’t this has happened to me many times in my life sense then and it is why I refuse to sleep on my stomach anymore because most of the times it has happened has been when I did.  It took many years to figure out what was happening that my brains serotonin levels (the chemical that keeps you asleep among other things) had worn off while the rest of my body had not.  Every time it has happened my mind has panicked; it even got so back when I was in college that I didn’t dare to go to sleep at night.  To better understand this fear I have dug deeper to find out more about what drives it.

The mind is meant to solve problems both ones you are aware of and ones you are not aware of.  As one tries to reflect inward on their live one would do well to remember when we voyage in the mind it has nothing to pull on but itself.  There were times in my life that being alone by myself was one of the things that frightened me most.  Without the stimulation that the outside world gives I would lie down and try to sleep only to find my mind grinding its teeth on itself, pointing out my flaws and shortcomings.  Feelings of angst towards the world and loathing myself there was, it felt as though my mind was sinking me deeper and deeper into an ocean and not allowing me to come up for air.    This ebbed in and out of my life for years until it got to its absolute worse.  I could feel my mind cracking under the pressure and gravity it had placed on itself and each crack kept pulling me more out of touch with myself and reality.  It was only when I felt as though I was totally shattered crying myself to sleep nearly every night that things started to change.  Through interaction with others and bouncing my own emotions off of others I slowly began building myself back up.   It was only though learning how to step outside of myself, and my own thought process that I was able to learn how to logically counter the thoughts and emotions which were at one time my bane.  In a sense I have learned to analyze my own analyzing, and pick apart my own picking apart of myself.

Now every time I watch the music video for the song “One” by Metallica I think about how terrible it can be to be left alone in your mind with only your own devices and the total and udder hell one must get through to feel normal again I shudder to think of it ever happening again.