Last night, I had a nightmare. I was sent home before a performance to retrieve a costume piece. When I exited the train station, I was in the middle of Greenwich Village, but I didn’t recognize a thing. I started walking aimlessly through the dark streets of New York City, often circling the same few blocks. Eventually, I made it to Washington Square Park. Now, given its youthful population, the area tends to be full of people, even in the wee hours of the morning. But in this case, the only people around were the kinds that everyone tells women to avoid, especially in the city at night. I entered the park (which, in real life, is something that I never do after dark) and as soon as I passed under the arch, two seedy-looking men appeared behind me. I picked up my pace. They did the same. Soon, we were all running, but they grabbed my arms and shoulders and tied up my hands. Then, they told me that they were going to get this group of strange people to accuse me of murder so that I’d have to face the death penalty. I woke up with a violent jolt, and my heart felt like it was trying to make a run for it. I also have a tendency to hyperventilate, so throw that into the mix with a sudden irrational fear of my own bedroom, and you’ve got a girl who is too spooked to fall back asleep. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this very piece on borrowed energy, and my eyes are burning just to keep them open.
Now, I’m not the kind of person who dwells on the negative possibilities in life. I’m the one who rolls her eyes when people at home tell me that I’m insane for taking the subway into a certain neighborhood to shoot an indie film or participate in an immersive theatrical piece for a few hours. I have even been told that it simply isn’t a safe idea to live in New York at all. When it comes to fear, my philosophy is this: If the newspaper warns about violence in the subways, should I just no longer ride the train? If I hear about someone getting robbed on Broadway, should I never use Broadway again? If we limit ourselves out of fear, then how can we really live? The Titanic happened, but we still go on cruises. We hear about plane crashes all of the time, yet we don’t cancel our flights. After 9/11, New York continues to have an overwhelming population, plus a literally flood of tourists. As I always say, I’d rather die experiencing the world than to die cooped up in a hiding spot.
So then why was I so haunted by a dream? While I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, I’m not really paranoid about being jumped by two men who want to accuse me of homicide. Still, a creation of my own mind managed to frighten me more so than a lot of things in the real world can. While I would consider myself to be more of a risk-taker than a brave soul, I am not as fearless as I’d like to believe. A psychologist once told me that dreams are often reflections of one’s life. They are a book to one’s fears, desires, anxieties. Now, I don’t know how entirely true this is, given that the psychologist also wanted to interpret my own dreams and got almost everything wrong, but I do buy into the idea to a certain extent. In high school, the nerd I was, I would have nightmares right before each school year about failing a test or forgetting to do my homework. Those dreams were obviously reflections of my end-of-summer worries. So as I am preparing to return to college, having a dream about walking through the Village at night really shook me, because it felt so relevant, so real. And if fear was able to reach me like that through a mere dream, perhaps it is more powerful than we are willing to acknowledge.
Quite a few factors in the world are driven by fear. It can be utilized in practically any setting, from politics to entertainment. On the CNN Money website, I saw a scale that displayed whether the economy was currently being driven by greed or fear. Would it be better to live without such an awful emotion? Yes, of course. But in a world such as ours, to live without any fear at all is to live in blissful ignorance, which can be dangerous.
While we can choose how we react to it and how to live with it, fear is often unavoidable. Why is it then that we tend to correspond a universal emotion with weakness—even when we can become vulnerable at the hands of our own imaginations?
lindnesday 