hallucinogens and horror movies

It's October, which means horror movies are in a lot more available programming. Too, living with fairyhead (who loves horror movies), they're never really out of reach. I feel kind of ... guilty? weak, maybe?, but horror movies (particularly supernatural horror movies) freak me right the fuck out. Movies which explore the area between "the world we know" and "the world just out of reach that means you ill" get into my head, and sometimes it takes months or more to get them out. For years I wouldn't talk about this; I had too real memories of being dismissed by adults as a child who was terrified of the dark, of the things past the walls that watched me. "It's just your imagination. It's not real. Nothing is going to hurt you." To me, this wasn't consoling. What it told me was that I was on my own, could not rely on others, that I had to face this overlap with the frightening unknown and the world everyone else pretended or thought was the only "real" on my own.

This feeling of the expansive, permeable edge of reality is a relative constant in my life. My grasp on what is "real" often feels tenuous. It's not that I don't recognize objects, people, causality, etc; I do. But that's often not the only things I experience. Since I was about eight or nine, I've had... episodes in which things in my brain feel like they're melting, that everything becomes mixed, indistinct, bordering on synaesthetic; memory and sensory impressions will bleed into my present, I'll "see" (usually in my mind's eye, but not always) and occasionally hear things (words in bird song, images fraught with intensely packed meaning) and lose the ability to speak in a linear, communicable way. I used to hate these episodes (past a point, they were called "migraines", but I think the pain was from me fighting them and freaking out), and would fight them with all I had. There were times it felt like I was clinging to reality by my fingernails, and slowly slipping into a pit. I think at least part of the fear of those experience connected to the fear of alienation in the face of the extra-real, which too many horror movies play upon.

When I came to finally try hallucinogens, it was that same dissolving/slipping/clinging by the fingernails experience. I remember thinking, "Oh shit, what if I don't come back?" which is a thought I'd usually have in my more intense episodes, and I couldn't believe that people willingly did it for fun. Things would dissolve and it felt again like I was alone on the edge of new territory in which I didn't know the rules or the inhabitants, afraid they knew and/or would notice me (and it often seemed like they did, and would). When I could find a shred of my own intent, I'd try to link myself to the world I knew through direct sensory experience (natural smells, sounds, the feel of outside air) and hang on for what felt like my life. Much like horror movies, I feel embarrassed, weak, and maybe uncool for reacting like this.

Horror movies and hallucinogens brush up against the same sets of experiences for me, often making me feel alienated from my peers even as I'm aware of the irony (I feel alienated in my resistance/fear of things that leave me feeling existentially alone and alienated). I wonder some times if things aren't wired so very differently in me that I'll never have the relative ease, the seeming certainty others have in "real" versus "imaginary" and the presumption of safety that comes from that. I worry that if I were to get that, it would be at the price of losing the root of both my sense of wonder in the world and the root of terror. I tend not to think of fear as fun, or a release; it triggers fight or flight in me, to the point that I police myself (I won't go to haunted houses for fear of freaking out and punching an actor, or running away and being mocked).

I don't live in fear, though I used to. I'm still very, very wary about a lot of this (for instance, this piece was triggered by J watching "The Last Excorcism" in the next room; I see potentially too much of myself in possessed/haunted people, and it feels way too real), but I don't fear the dark, the woods, or windows at night (most of the time, anyway). I've come to a degree of terms with my take on the world. I don't believe in a heaven and hell, world in opposites kind of reality*, and even if I sometimes feel powerless in the liminal meta/physical space it often seems like I inhabit, I do feel like I have help and support available if I want or need it. That's gone a long way, but I'm still very wary of triggering my limbic system for entertainment (even though I love a good ghost story). I don't know, maybe this is irresolvable, maybe it doesn't matter. At any rate, that's what's on my mind this morning.


*yeah, I quoted a song; it was actually an important developmental seed for me on all of this