It occurs to me sometimes that I'm scared of an awful lot of things. Spiders are perfectly reasonable things to be afraid of; nasty, crawly things. The dark, as I have explained, is also an arguably rational fear. To a lesser extent I'm also bothered by injections, crowds and anything in the clown/doll/dummy range. None of these give me much difficulty on a day to day basis though. There are things, however, which cause me more trouble. For instance, I have a problem with paperwork - personal paperwork, I should say, as it doesn't seem to affect me at work - But opening my mail freaks me out, especially if it looks official, and filling in a form is enough to give me a panic attack. I'm dreading the census already! I also have a consuming fear of getting things wrong, to the point where I often have to force myself to do things that put me in a position to make mistakes. As these things include such everyday basics as Having a Job, Trying Anything New and Talking To People, it's fortunate that I generally succeed at this.
Alongside this list of, I imagine not uncommon, fears, is one rather odd one. Since I was little, many of my nightmares have in some way incorporated a certain kind of rock. It has a very specific dusty, faintly gritty texture, which I'm occasionally reminded of by the sound of things like scuffing shoes on pavement, and it's so dense and heavy that a piece of it, held in the hand, will tear though your palm like a lead weight through thinly stretched dough. Sometimes my dreams see me buried alive in a casket made of this stone, or scrabbling to move scraps of it or, on one memorable occasion, with a ring of it around my ankle, which held me underwater as I drowned. Sharing this was meant to be mildly humorous but, reading it back, I'm aware that it sounds more than a bit mental. Does anyone else find themselves nonsensically haunted by banal inanimate objects, or is it just me?
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