Things That Should Bump in the Night: We Continue to Defy Logic

Last week, we talked about some of the strange things we (mostly Paul) are afraid of. Catch up here!

Spoiler! This adorable creature makes him shudder

Now we’ll have to get back to Anya, whose fear of being attacked by one the perps of SVU only kicks in when she is alone, in the dark, trying to get to her car. Not so crazy, in this day and age. However. She has a few other deep seated phobias that make much less sense. You can guess from our twenty somethings tagline, that we are children of the 1990s. Great. (Someday that will fucking shock people. “You were born BEFORE the year 2000?!!??!” No time for that crisis right now, but damn.) So we all saw Free Willy, right? The inspirational tale of a troubled young white kid who starts hanging out with an orca that lives in a sad, dirty park and the mysterious old tribal dude who trains him.

When Anya first saw that movie (as a small child), she was totally on board with the whole “abandoned kid living on the streets resists his foster parents until a spiritual connection with a whale helps him become a functioning human and connect with other people” thing. Not so on board with the part where said kid is cleaning graffiti from under the tank (why?!) and the fucking orca POPS UP OUT OF GODDAMN NOWHERE! It probably doesn’t even happen that way, but as a child she did NOT see that coming. To this day, she hates that noise of deep water that you hear in movies. You know that weird gurgle that always happens when submarines/marine life/etc. is submerged? Hates it. Can’t watch the beginning of Titanic, she hates it so much. Can’t deal with Flipper, Jaws, or anything that involves people diving. That part in Skyfall where they were under the ice? UGH.

Conducting the Google search for this picture was physically uncomfortable, that’s how much I hate it.

We’ll wrap it up with what is perhaps the most far fetched fear of all. We all watched The Magic School Bus, right? Remember that episode where Arnold’s stupid cousin comes with them and Ms. Frizzle takes everyone through the solar system and he takes off his helmet on Pluto and comes back with a bad head cold? That might have started this one. Anya is deeply horrified by outer space. This is possibly (probably) also stemming from that time she watched Armageddon in fifth grade and Bruce Willis fucking got left on that goddamn asteroid. No amount of Xenon: Girl of the 21st Century could assuage her concerns, and she has stated more than once that if the world gets into a Wall-E type situation, she will just stay on Earth with the landfills and the sad robot. Not fucking flying into outer space. Ever. Something about the idea that you could just float away...forever. And suffocate on your own air. People do not fucking belong up there!

Except no. Not impressed.

So we’ve both got some questionable hang ups, fine, great, moving on. What is probably worse and more telling than the things we are afraid of, is the things we aren’t afraid of.

We love the wacky people we call “those Victorians” in our best wistful/condescending voice. The Victorian era was a time of some truly terrifying shit, but we’re strangely okay with the vast majority of it. If you’re unfamiliar with trends in Victorian era photography, google that RIGHT NOW PLEASE. Maybe you’re sufficiently horrified by the fact that they made a habit of things like hiding mothers in the background under tapestries, taking pictures of dead people (especially kids), and playing around with exposure times to make themselves look headless. Aren’t they hilarious? We’re not even close to horrified enough.

Anya was spending some quality time browsing collections of these photographs and playing “which kid in this picture is dead?” while at the Libertarian’s house the other day:

Anya: Oh my GOD, they opened its eyes back up, how CRAZY!

Silence.

Anya: Are you seeing this? How many candles are in this picture?? (counts 21) That coffin is going to catch on fire!

Silence.

Anya: Seriously are both of these kids dead? I love this. Oh my god the headless ones! Look how funny they think they are! It’s like old timey memes! Look at this grouchy old lady holding her head under her own arm!

The Libertarian: I don’t know if I can look at the headless ones, it’s kind of making me sick.

Anya: Just a few more! Or you can go over there. Sorry!

Not fooling anyone wearing that, girlfriend

(If you’re interested in looking at the exact pictures this conversation was centered around, they’re here).

Alright, so we’re pretty down with all of those creepy pictures of stern looking women you see in horror movies. One thing we can’t handle from the Victorian era? Fucking hair wreaths. No joke, that shit is not ok.

You’ve already read about Anya’s unfortunate affection for feral animals, and you know Paul hates raccoons as much as she loves them. Some people might say she lacks a healthy fear of the various critters that wander the forest (or city) at night. You should have seen her cackling with fiendish delight at this scene from the hit television series, Bunheads:

You might be shuddering with horror when you see that opossum hissing at good old Sutton, but Anya was honest to god all “awwwwwwwww look how precious!” (which is also how we assume Spacey Secretary would react, speculating on whether or not Sutton had ham in her bed). It’s a problem. Especially a problem when you live someplace that they could be hanging out in your backyard at any given time. Especially when seeing them squished on the road makes you sincerely sad for the rest of your drive, and this occurs probably every three miles on the highway. That’s some misplaced motherfucking empathy.

We’ll leave you with this gem: while brainstorming for this post, Anya asked Paul to add anything to the lists of fears and should be fears that he thought was missing. Without even looking at the draft he immediately responded “things we should be afraid of but aren’t: dying alone”. Little did he know, the first and only thing Anya had added to that list was...dying alone.

Minds. Melding.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream THE FUTURE

I have had incredibly vivid dreams for my entire life. When I was a kid, my family used to talk about our dreams over breakfast and we had to stop doing it because mine were so long and detailed that everyone got bored and I was late getting ready. Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s entirely possible that this was more of a “I, a self centered nine year old, hold court every morning over cereal and tell my family about my nightly adventures in Imagination Land even though they clearly give not one fuck” rather than actually talking about dreams over breakfast as a group. I distinctly remembering my sister saying “When is this going to be done? It’s BORING”, but it wasn’t! To me.

I’ve had a lot of dreams that involve me breathing underwater, which sounds awesome until you realize that it looks less like this:

Silly little underwater friends!

And more like this:

Yes, a very boring pool

Usually I’m swimming someplace pretty barren like a huge version the gross pool above, but there is some kind of terrifying orca or hell seal that is going to kill me/my dream soulmate/a little orange puppy named Macaroni. I even recounted that dream about Macaroni for a creative writing assignment in fifth grade, that doesn’t count as cheating, right?

I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about falling, but I dream about swimming all the time. Dream interpreters, do your thang.

I also used to dream about flying sometimes as a kid, but I sure as shit wasn’t soaring above the clouds effortlessly. No magic carpet involved either. I just started running until I ran into the air like it was a staircase, and I totally thought I was a special little snowflake because my subconscious recognized that it would be actual physical work for a human to fly, just like it is for birds, or Pegasus.

Nope, that shit doesn’t fly here 
(oops, forgot to warn you about my love of puns!)

As it turns out, that is actually not what makes me a special snowflake. That particular distinction stems from the fact that I have had at least TWO prophetic dreams. Maybe I should have caps locked AT LEAST, because I remember having a few days where something happened and I was like “hey, that’s crazy, I dreamed that last night” not to mention countless instances of déjà vu. I’m sticking with only those that can be corroborated by witnesses, meaning I bored someone to tears in the morning with my detailed account of the night before, and then later that EXACT THING HAPPENED and I was like “holy shit, I’m so glad I told you that, aren’t you glad you sat through it so you could bear witness to my PSYCHIC POWERS?!”

It’s like when I know what’s going to happen at the end of a movie that I’ve never seen, and I face a dire struggle. The angel on my shoulder is like “Don’t be a dick and ruin the ending for them!” and the devil on the other side is like “You have to tell them, otherwise they’ll never believe in your impressive powers of observation when it comes to foreshadowing! They’ll think you’re just saying that you guessed that plot twist in the first twenty minutes! Don’t you want to prove that you were right all along?” I try really hard to just settle for the satisfaction that I know I knew...really hard. But I’m not great at settling, so you probably don’t want to watch movies with me.

Have you seen the twins episode of Law and Order SVU?

Totally called it.

So! My first future telling dream was a few years ago. I woke up, showered, went down for breakfast, hooray all is well. I sit down at the table with my granola (every morning, every day, Meijer brand with raisins, don’t judge me), and the conversation goes thusly:

Anya: So, last night I had a dream that there was an outbreak of the whooping cough and it started with like four people and then everyone in [my college town] got it. (By this time I had learned to seriously pare down my dream reporting).

Mom: No way!

Anya: Jesus, you don’t have to be sarcastic, I got it down to one sentence!

Mom: No I just read in the paper that there are a couple kids in [college town] that just came down with the whooping cough.

Anya: Holy shit, I guess I’m a prophet(ess?). In my dream it was like kind of a plague and a bunch of people died, hope that part’s not real.

Mom: Oh, great.

Pretty impressive? I thought so, that’s for sure. I can’t tell you how many times Paul has brushed off a nightmare I had about someone we know, and inevitable he hears “But remember when I predicted the whooping cough outbreak? IT COULD BE REAL!”.

The other one is less fun (I mean I guess the whooping cough wasn’t fun for the people that actually came down with it). I was dating this guy a few years ago, and things ended badly. Like cheated on me, lied to me, pulled some things that are a blog article unto themselves badly. And honest to God, one night I had a dream that he confessed that he had lied to me, was sleeping with someone else, blah blah blah. Lo and behold, the very next day we have that exact same conversation. As hurt as I was at the time, I was still totally like “Aw fuck, prophecy dream number two, moving on up in the psychic world!”

Next stop, TLC

I mean what are the odds? Nate Silver could probably tell me that, meh. The problem is, it’s not really helpful when only like one dream every three years comes true the next day. Or when I wake up from it about two hours before it actually happens. I’ll work on it?

-Anya