Dreams, Fiction, and Fear

Marianne Janack

The other night, I woke up suddenly, so frightened that my heart was beating hard and fast, and I was sweating.

In the dream, a former colleague of mine (who was always very nice to me) was an artificial human and was trying to shoot me with a gun.  She and I were in a dark office; I hid behind metal file cabinets so that she wouldn’t find me.  But as she moved around the room, I knew she’d find me. 

When I woke up, I knew it was a dream, but my body didn’t seem to respond to that knowledge.  My heart thumped; I sat up in my bed; I couldn’t get back to sleep.

I think the dream came from the classes I was teaching.  In one of them, we were discussing the difference (or lack thereof) between humans and machines.  In another class, we were discussing gun violence and death.  I think this dream was a result of thinking about these issues together—my subconscious, processing these ideas, produced for me a movie, of sorts, in which an artificial human who looked like someone I knew and who was trying to kill me.

 I consulted the internet about the meaning of this dream, and the best I got was this: “Dreaming about being hunted by an artificial human could symbolize a deep-seated fear of being controlled, manipulated, or replaced by technology in your waking life, potentially reflecting anxieties about the increasing role of artificial intelligence and automation in society; it could also represent a feeling of being judged or scrutinized by others based on your actions or decisions, with the "artificial human" acting as a symbol of a critical, impersonal force.”  According to another article about dreams that I read, nightmares and dreams of being chased are more common when one is stressed.

Illuminating, huh?

 I don’t think I need a nightmare to deliver the message that I’m stressed.  My stress isn’t in my subconscious—it’s right here in my conscious mind.  I already know that I’m stressed and anxious, thank you very much, brain.  

And the deep unpleasantness of the fear I experienced upon waking left me with this question: why do some people seek out and enjoy feeling afraid?

I remember being nearly paralyzed by fear when I was climbing the open staircase of a church in London, on my way to the bell tower. The staircase was made of metal and spiraled around a center pole until it became a ladder.  As I climbed the staircase, I tried not to look down, and I focused on my hands, which clenched onto the banisters on either side. Behind me was a line of tourists, all of us climbing the staircase, like some kind of mechanized caterpillar.  I could hear some labored breathing, and the creak of the metal treads.  I couldn’t go back, I told myself; this was strictly a one-way trip—the staircase was too narrow to accommodate traffic up and down.  I assumed that there was another staircase on the other side of the tower which allowed tourists like me to descend, again single file.   

But when we got to the ladder, I stopped.  I could see up to the top—it was only a matter of another twenty or so steps—but I was frozen in place.  I heard people behind me explaining to the people behind them that someone had stopped, and that they couldn’t move.  I suggested to the person behind me that he should go ahead, but we both knew that there wasn’t really enough room for both me and him on the step. “Just take a minute, and then keep going,” he said.  I needed to make myself keep climbing, but the longer I stayed put, the less inclined I was to start climbing again. “Keep going,” I told myself.  “This isn’t rational.  You aren’t going to fall.  And you’re holding up the line.  Keep going.”  And yet I stayed put.  The fear was far from enjoyable, and it felt like something I simply couldn’t overcome.  

René Descartes and William James are usually thought to be theorists who explained fear as a mechanical, bodily response—and as such, not really a topic to which philosophers ought to be paying attention. This conclusion fits well with the dominant account of fear as a bodily response that has as its primary markers an increase in cortisol and adrenaline levels.   To characterize it as a mechanical bodily response fails to address the fact that fear is sometimes horrible, sometimes pleasurable. 

So, while psychologists like to explain this in terms of cortisol and adrenaline, maybe good old Aristotle is whom we should consult.  In his writings about tragedy, he says that we like to feel sad or frightened sometimes—fear, for Aristotle, is not to be understood as something totally inside us, defined by cortisol and adrenaline levels–– but is instead an experience. Experiencing unpleasant emotions provides us with catharsis because it allows us to purge ourselves of those emotions, in turn.  And the result is a peculiar kind of pleasure.

Watching a scary movie or reading a scary book—like Peter Straub’s Ghost Story—is a pleasure, not an analogous experience to that horrible staircase, even if it makes one more likely to feel fear.  In the arena of fiction, we know the fear does not reflect a real danger to our existence,  indeed the fear we feel is something we’ve sought out in order to feel that catharsis afterward.  By contrast, the nightmare or the climb up the narrow spiral staircase suddenly shows us our own vulnerability––how easy it would be for us to die, or be hurt by conditions we currently occupy, conditions we often cannot escape.  

I did make it up the staircase.  I forced myself not to think, but to act like an automaton, a mechanical body, putting one foot in front of the other.