This is part and parcel of growing up, of maturing as an imagining, dreaming entity: an evolution of our abstract selves, that is too often neglected or denied by the materialistic proscriptions of our cultures.
The fears of children are often without reason or logic: what is designed specifically to scare or frighten often doesn't, to the point whereby even actual, physical dangers are ignored, whereas images and experiences that have no overtly horrific qualities at all become icons of profound disturbance.
Whilst memory is itself a very poor medium -go and read any study you care to find on the nature of memory; one thing they universally concur on is that the phenomena we call “memory” does not function as a clear or precise record of experience, rather a kind of endlessly self-editing dream or nightmare-, what I recall of childhood is that certain images and experiences lodged in my mind like thorns and, from there, elaborated into nightmares of such detail and florid excess, they still maintain a fascination to this day.
Very often, those experiences would have meant nothing to the casual observer or anyone else engaging with them:
I remember narrow alleys cutting through abandoned industrial estates, overgrown with weeds, littered with filth, their twists and turns leading to labyrinths of underpasses and old housing projects, sink estates etc. I remember the strange thrill of fear standing at their entrances, peering into the grey and dismal murk, smelling their faintly chemical filth on the air, imagining what strange minotaurs and spectres must haunt them. I remember them later featuring in actual nightmares, the paths and ways torn up from their actual locations and cobbled together into dreamscapes that boasted their own bizarre topographies and structures.
I remember, when I was very, very young indeed, the winding stairwell and strangely claustrophobic upstairs landing of a friend's house, its atmosphere so bizarre in the dark, as though there was always something lingering there, unseen, waiting to make itself known. Again, another location that featured heavily in my nightmares.
I remember the old stone fireplace of the house I grew up in, its grey and crumbling structure rising up to pierce the ceiling, in parody of old fashioned chimneys, its strangeness, its incongruity, fascinating me as a child, but also proving potent stuff for nightmare-imaginings:
A particularly vivid scene coming to me in the midst of fever, sleeping downstairs, on the sofa, coughing and spluttering, shivering and boiling hot, the stone seeming to part and peel away from itself, revealing a vivd, glowing red interior, a series of tunnels that wound through some underground place, through which I was forced to crawl, losing myself, hearing but barely seeing the creatures that haunted and burrowed through the condition.
I remember a farmer's field where my grandfather would take us walking with his dog of an evening. One particular evening, late Autumn, already dark, the air shivering cold, we found the field carpeted in a low-lying mist, so still and dense, it seemed almost blue. I recall being fascinated and terrified by it as we walked through the field, on a raised bank of earth that led to the stiles and public paths on the opposite side. What my imagination populated that mist with, what it conjured from the dirt and darkness. . .I can barely recall with any specificity now, only vague images and impressions; flashes of distorted form and feature, things formed of the mist, clotted with soil and worms.
So, so much was frightening when I was a child, as I believe it is for many children: we lack the context and capacity to understand the physical parameters of reality at that point in our development; the same ignorance and lack of experience that allows us to believe in Santa Claus and Tooth Fairies. Imagination is a fevered engine, and the distinction between it and waking reality has yet to be determined: we don't understand that the world is staid and bound by physical laws, by constraints of probability, and, as such, it is a playground of magic and miracles; of potential wonders, but also of monsters, phantoms and horrors.
Every shadow, every unlit room, every stairwell and strange pathway, becomes a site of potential terror; places where ghosts might manifest, where demons might crawl from the darkness, where undead things might shamble from the night.
For a child whose imagination was well fed -and often with material that might, ostensibly, have been too disturbing or horrific in nature-, that was emphasised to the power of N: so, so much scared me as a child, so much coalesced from unfamiliar spaces, that I learned to not only accept it, but to enjoy the experience. It became something of a thrill to find old, abandoned buildings alongside disused rail-tracks, their crumbling interiors pregnant with potential, to explore unfamiliar pathways cutting through woodland and swamps and farmer's fields, where strange sounds and rustlings escalated as dusk fell. Those same monsters, those same demons and entities that my imagination conjured, that scared and made me smile so earnestly, are still very much here, with me; still parts of who I am, what I love and obsess over, what my imagination conjures again and again.
No matter how scared I might have been of them as a child, they have become so much more than icons of fear, nightmares to be projected on the world: As Ogden Nash once stated: “Wherever there's a monster, there's a miracle.” They are my miracles, my therapy, the projections and concepts by which I explore the condition of my own mind, my neuroses, my issues, my concerns, as they once were, but unacknowledged, lacking the language or capacity to define that state, as I did, back then.
As Rowan Fortune Wood, of Rowan-Tree Editing (links below) once pointed out of my fiction: “. . .it is a utopia of freaks,” and that is sublimely true, in a way I never consciously considered during the act of writing: those same beasts and demons that have haunted me since my earliest years are still here, in some shape or form: possessing entities that express the shape and nature of my mind, that then feed and inform it, for better or worse: they are not simply creatures to be disturbed by or afraid of any longer: they are as much projections of love and lust, of beauty and desire, of transcendence and aspiration, as they are of abomination and disturbia. They and the environments that spawned them have become far more ambiguous, both to me and, I hope, to the world at large:
This is part and parcel of growing up, of maturing as an imagining, dreaming entity: an evolution of our abstract selves, that is too often neglected or denied by the materialistic proscriptions of our cultures.
When asked: “What frightened you as a child?” I immediately experience images and recollections that I now obssess over, that recur again and again in my idle imaginings, my dreams, my fiction. Those environments, those images, those strange perceptual distortions and existential crises that children almost universally experience, have become beloved rather than denied for their disturbing qualities. The very experience of disturbance has become welcome, one of transgression and transcendence.
As such, I try to relive those experiences, to conjure and express them through my fiction, through every idle, day-dreaming moment:
As Tolkien and myriad others have expressed, we can never go home again: we cannot conure the exact same experiences and states of mind we inhabited as children, because we're not any more: even if we could somehow contrive to revisit the same situations and places in exactly the same circumstances, we would perceive and interpret them differently. That makes even those strange moments of childhood terror obscenely precious, ephemeral artefacts that will never come again and will never be in quite the same states, shapes or forms. They are the nightmare-gospels of our mythic selves, the stories that inform who we are, what we dread and desire.
So, when I vaguely recall the immense house spider that ran across the back of my hand when I was barely born, thus exciting an arachnophobia that sustains to this day, I do so with a perverse and shuddering joy. When I recall the way shadows used to pool in one particular corner of the room I shared with my brother when we were very young, seeming to form monstrous shapes and figures I used to scare myself to sleep with, it's with a thrill of excitement at the storytelling potential. When I recall the persistent nightmare that haunted my childhood of the silent, abandoned town that I used to reach by descending a ladder from the clouds, the distressing, gaunt guardian who wandered its streets, his immense eyes far too vast for his wasted, skull-like features, their mad glare enough to make me flee into the surrounding alleys and shadows, I do so with a fascination that some might consider morbid, but which I can't deny.
There were stories, when I was a child: rumours and fragments of myth that would spread around playgrounds and schoolyards, parks and street corners, of local houses where murders, suicides and Satanic rites were conducted, friends of friends who'd dared to trespass in them, witnessing things that the storytellers often struggled to detail, but which I and my friends devoured with the appetites of starving creatures, no matter how they terrified or repelled.
Stories of ghost-children inhabiting particular classrooms or corridors, whose faces could sometimes be seen pressed against windows from the outside or in doorways we were obliged to pass. Stories of black, yellow-eyed shapes seen in the darkness of crumbled-down buildings, in the lengthening shadows of fields where we used to play, barely half a mile from home. Stories of aliens in gardens, of psychic fits, visions of tomorrow, of lights and shapes in the sky, of angels on rooftops. The world boasted so few parameters back then, the images that most horror films and books presented seemed so tame by comparison:
The things we imagined, that we gnawed over, that rendered us insomniac sometimes for weeks at a time. . .so much more distressing, so much more vivid and personal, nothing created by others could possibly equal them.
As a child of the 1980s, there were also vaster, proscribed terrors at work: I was one of the last generations to still shiver beneath the looming shadow of the mushroom cloud, the threat of nuclear annihilation, that seemed so real back then, so tangible, almost every element of our media suffused with it, stoking that proscribed fear, amongst numerous others:
Cancer, AIDs, economic and environmental collapse, drugs and addiction, kidnappings, serial killers. . .even our damn cartoons and comics concerned themselves with this material, ensuring that we were a generation perpetually afraid, awaiting the myriad “Swords of Damacles” that had hung over us since before we were born to fall.
It's hardly any wonder that we were and are a generation of fear. That we obsess over our nightmares and express them at every opportunity, that we are depressive and anxious and uncertain in our adult, waking lives, that our childhoods were riddled not only with celluloid and printed terrors, but with projected and imagined ones, too.
I distinctly recall being terrified by the likes of Threads, When the Wind Blows et al, obsessing and imagining over and over what it would be like to be caught up in those holocausts, to be blistered and burned down the bone whilst still alive.
I recall a BBC documentary about Cancer which caused me sleepless nights, programs about the effects of pollution and global warming that made me terrified of tomorrow.
My Dad was and remains a smoker; a fact that will likely kill him or contribute to some significant ailment in his later years. That used to terrify me.
So much to fear, but also so much to exult in, to draw on, to express. It's now amazing to me, confusing and baffling, how what terrified, repelled or disturbed began to exercise its own fascination and obsession, which now consumes and defines me utterly, as an early middle-aged adult, that is the primary focus of my imaginative output, what I seek to consume through literature and art, film and video games.
The fears of childhood have become the welcome nightmares of my adult imagination. Long, long may they continue to swell.
Whilst memory is itself a very poor medium -go and read any study you care to find on the nature of memory; one thing they universally concur on is that the phenomena we call “memory” does not function as a clear or precise record of experience, rather a kind of endlessly self-editing dream or nightmare-, what I recall of childhood is that certain images and experiences lodged in my mind like thorns and, from there, elaborated into nightmares of such detail and florid excess, they still maintain a fascination to this day.
Very often, those experiences would have meant nothing to the casual observer or anyone else engaging with them:
I remember narrow alleys cutting through abandoned industrial estates, overgrown with weeds, littered with filth, their twists and turns leading to labyrinths of underpasses and old housing projects, sink estates etc. I remember the strange thrill of fear standing at their entrances, peering into the grey and dismal murk, smelling their faintly chemical filth on the air, imagining what strange minotaurs and spectres must haunt them. I remember them later featuring in actual nightmares, the paths and ways torn up from their actual locations and cobbled together into dreamscapes that boasted their own bizarre topographies and structures.
I remember, when I was very, very young indeed, the winding stairwell and strangely claustrophobic upstairs landing of a friend's house, its atmosphere so bizarre in the dark, as though there was always something lingering there, unseen, waiting to make itself known. Again, another location that featured heavily in my nightmares.
I remember the old stone fireplace of the house I grew up in, its grey and crumbling structure rising up to pierce the ceiling, in parody of old fashioned chimneys, its strangeness, its incongruity, fascinating me as a child, but also proving potent stuff for nightmare-imaginings:
A particularly vivid scene coming to me in the midst of fever, sleeping downstairs, on the sofa, coughing and spluttering, shivering and boiling hot, the stone seeming to part and peel away from itself, revealing a vivd, glowing red interior, a series of tunnels that wound through some underground place, through which I was forced to crawl, losing myself, hearing but barely seeing the creatures that haunted and burrowed through the condition.
I remember a farmer's field where my grandfather would take us walking with his dog of an evening. One particular evening, late Autumn, already dark, the air shivering cold, we found the field carpeted in a low-lying mist, so still and dense, it seemed almost blue. I recall being fascinated and terrified by it as we walked through the field, on a raised bank of earth that led to the stiles and public paths on the opposite side. What my imagination populated that mist with, what it conjured from the dirt and darkness. . .I can barely recall with any specificity now, only vague images and impressions; flashes of distorted form and feature, things formed of the mist, clotted with soil and worms.
So, so much was frightening when I was a child, as I believe it is for many children: we lack the context and capacity to understand the physical parameters of reality at that point in our development; the same ignorance and lack of experience that allows us to believe in Santa Claus and Tooth Fairies. Imagination is a fevered engine, and the distinction between it and waking reality has yet to be determined: we don't understand that the world is staid and bound by physical laws, by constraints of probability, and, as such, it is a playground of magic and miracles; of potential wonders, but also of monsters, phantoms and horrors.
Every shadow, every unlit room, every stairwell and strange pathway, becomes a site of potential terror; places where ghosts might manifest, where demons might crawl from the darkness, where undead things might shamble from the night.
For a child whose imagination was well fed -and often with material that might, ostensibly, have been too disturbing or horrific in nature-, that was emphasised to the power of N: so, so much scared me as a child, so much coalesced from unfamiliar spaces, that I learned to not only accept it, but to enjoy the experience. It became something of a thrill to find old, abandoned buildings alongside disused rail-tracks, their crumbling interiors pregnant with potential, to explore unfamiliar pathways cutting through woodland and swamps and farmer's fields, where strange sounds and rustlings escalated as dusk fell. Those same monsters, those same demons and entities that my imagination conjured, that scared and made me smile so earnestly, are still very much here, with me; still parts of who I am, what I love and obsess over, what my imagination conjures again and again.
No matter how scared I might have been of them as a child, they have become so much more than icons of fear, nightmares to be projected on the world: As Ogden Nash once stated: “Wherever there's a monster, there's a miracle.” They are my miracles, my therapy, the projections and concepts by which I explore the condition of my own mind, my neuroses, my issues, my concerns, as they once were, but unacknowledged, lacking the language or capacity to define that state, as I did, back then.
As Rowan Fortune Wood, of Rowan-Tree Editing (links below) once pointed out of my fiction: “. . .it is a utopia of freaks,” and that is sublimely true, in a way I never consciously considered during the act of writing: those same beasts and demons that have haunted me since my earliest years are still here, in some shape or form: possessing entities that express the shape and nature of my mind, that then feed and inform it, for better or worse: they are not simply creatures to be disturbed by or afraid of any longer: they are as much projections of love and lust, of beauty and desire, of transcendence and aspiration, as they are of abomination and disturbia. They and the environments that spawned them have become far more ambiguous, both to me and, I hope, to the world at large:
This is part and parcel of growing up, of maturing as an imagining, dreaming entity: an evolution of our abstract selves, that is too often neglected or denied by the materialistic proscriptions of our cultures.
When asked: “What frightened you as a child?” I immediately experience images and recollections that I now obssess over, that recur again and again in my idle imaginings, my dreams, my fiction. Those environments, those images, those strange perceptual distortions and existential crises that children almost universally experience, have become beloved rather than denied for their disturbing qualities. The very experience of disturbance has become welcome, one of transgression and transcendence.
As such, I try to relive those experiences, to conjure and express them through my fiction, through every idle, day-dreaming moment:
As Tolkien and myriad others have expressed, we can never go home again: we cannot conure the exact same experiences and states of mind we inhabited as children, because we're not any more: even if we could somehow contrive to revisit the same situations and places in exactly the same circumstances, we would perceive and interpret them differently. That makes even those strange moments of childhood terror obscenely precious, ephemeral artefacts that will never come again and will never be in quite the same states, shapes or forms. They are the nightmare-gospels of our mythic selves, the stories that inform who we are, what we dread and desire.
So, when I vaguely recall the immense house spider that ran across the back of my hand when I was barely born, thus exciting an arachnophobia that sustains to this day, I do so with a perverse and shuddering joy. When I recall the way shadows used to pool in one particular corner of the room I shared with my brother when we were very young, seeming to form monstrous shapes and figures I used to scare myself to sleep with, it's with a thrill of excitement at the storytelling potential. When I recall the persistent nightmare that haunted my childhood of the silent, abandoned town that I used to reach by descending a ladder from the clouds, the distressing, gaunt guardian who wandered its streets, his immense eyes far too vast for his wasted, skull-like features, their mad glare enough to make me flee into the surrounding alleys and shadows, I do so with a fascination that some might consider morbid, but which I can't deny.
There were stories, when I was a child: rumours and fragments of myth that would spread around playgrounds and schoolyards, parks and street corners, of local houses where murders, suicides and Satanic rites were conducted, friends of friends who'd dared to trespass in them, witnessing things that the storytellers often struggled to detail, but which I and my friends devoured with the appetites of starving creatures, no matter how they terrified or repelled.
Stories of ghost-children inhabiting particular classrooms or corridors, whose faces could sometimes be seen pressed against windows from the outside or in doorways we were obliged to pass. Stories of black, yellow-eyed shapes seen in the darkness of crumbled-down buildings, in the lengthening shadows of fields where we used to play, barely half a mile from home. Stories of aliens in gardens, of psychic fits, visions of tomorrow, of lights and shapes in the sky, of angels on rooftops. The world boasted so few parameters back then, the images that most horror films and books presented seemed so tame by comparison:
The things we imagined, that we gnawed over, that rendered us insomniac sometimes for weeks at a time. . .so much more distressing, so much more vivid and personal, nothing created by others could possibly equal them.
As a child of the 1980s, there were also vaster, proscribed terrors at work: I was one of the last generations to still shiver beneath the looming shadow of the mushroom cloud, the threat of nuclear annihilation, that seemed so real back then, so tangible, almost every element of our media suffused with it, stoking that proscribed fear, amongst numerous others:
Cancer, AIDs, economic and environmental collapse, drugs and addiction, kidnappings, serial killers. . .even our damn cartoons and comics concerned themselves with this material, ensuring that we were a generation perpetually afraid, awaiting the myriad “Swords of Damacles” that had hung over us since before we were born to fall.
It's hardly any wonder that we were and are a generation of fear. That we obsess over our nightmares and express them at every opportunity, that we are depressive and anxious and uncertain in our adult, waking lives, that our childhoods were riddled not only with celluloid and printed terrors, but with projected and imagined ones, too.
I distinctly recall being terrified by the likes of Threads, When the Wind Blows et al, obsessing and imagining over and over what it would be like to be caught up in those holocausts, to be blistered and burned down the bone whilst still alive.
I recall a BBC documentary about Cancer which caused me sleepless nights, programs about the effects of pollution and global warming that made me terrified of tomorrow.
My Dad was and remains a smoker; a fact that will likely kill him or contribute to some significant ailment in his later years. That used to terrify me.
So much to fear, but also so much to exult in, to draw on, to express. It's now amazing to me, confusing and baffling, how what terrified, repelled or disturbed began to exercise its own fascination and obsession, which now consumes and defines me utterly, as an early middle-aged adult, that is the primary focus of my imaginative output, what I seek to consume through literature and art, film and video games.
The fears of childhood have become the welcome nightmares of my adult imagination. Long, long may they continue to swell.
Born in Blood: Volume One by George Daniel Lea
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HIGH HEAVEN AND LOW HELL
Born in blood . . . the first breath and all that follow, tainted by original trauma, echoing throughout every thought, every heartbeat; blossoming into more profound pain, until breath and thought both cease . . .
What we grow accustomed to...what we can endure:
The days bleed into one another, as we do; hurt defining every moment.
No more. Now, all instants are one; pulsing brilliant, ecstasy and agony, rendered down; experienced in a heartbeat.
Every shame. Every sorrow. Humanity, history. This is what we are; the God we gave birth to.
Better? Yes. Yes. Now, we all suffer the same; no more division; no privilege or powerlessness. We are the same; sexless, skinless, ex sanguine.
And we celebrate, content in our disgrace.
Born in blood . . . the first breath and all that follow, tainted by original trauma, echoing throughout every thought, every heartbeat; blossoming into more profound pain, until breath and thought both cease . . .
What we grow accustomed to...what we can endure:
The days bleed into one another, as we do; hurt defining every moment.
No more. Now, all instants are one; pulsing brilliant, ecstasy and agony, rendered down; experienced in a heartbeat.
Every shame. Every sorrow. Humanity, history. This is what we are; the God we gave birth to.
Better? Yes. Yes. Now, we all suffer the same; no more division; no privilege or powerlessness. We are the same; sexless, skinless, ex sanguine.
And we celebrate, content in our disgrace.
