Fears.
We all have them, but not all fears are the same.
There are things that make us a little uncomfortable, but then there are things that completely terrify us.
Reddit user, Immediate-Salary-736, wanted to know what makes your hairs stand up on the back of your neck when they asked:
"What terrifies the sh*t out of you?"
Trapped
"Locked in syndrome."
"Cannot move your body, speak, do anything but think."
"I think you can move your eyes?"
"Maybe?"
"Otherwise you're completely at the mercy of your surroundings."
"If I ever get it, just kill me."
Brachiozord
Losing Control
"Alzheimer's disease"
Dapper-Way-1114·
"On a similar note, Parkinson's. My grandfather was lucid to the end; but physically he was just completely helpless."
mossadspydolphin
"Yup. I don't fear death, but the prospect of losing my personality and sense of self little by little terrifies me. If I ever get diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia I'm going to go out on my own terms."
Northerleyfire
In An Instant
"A brain aneurysm. One killed my mother when I was 23, instantly. I rang her 4 days before and she didn't even have a runny nose then bam, dead. Late fifties."
"Supposedly I'm more likely to have one on a hereditary level. F**king terrifying"
[user deleted]
Clots
"Blood clots, aneurysms anything that you cant really detect happening in Your body until it’s too late. Like WTF."
Deus_Ex_Machiavelli
"In a 5 year stretch I knew 12 people who died of blood clots in their legs. 3 of them were related a dad and his two daughters. They all started out with a weird pain in their leg. Then dead. I’m petrified of this. Whenever I get a leg cramp I freak out."
klsprinkle
Late Discoveries
"Finally discovering very late in life, what I was supposed to have been doing the entire time."
MeToolMovement
"This one definitely resonates very strongly with me. I just turned 40 and I've failed to achieve much of anything for myself... after college I was totally lost and directionless- and I never stopped being that. I often lie awake at night wondering if any hypothetical positive that might occur at this point in life could make up for all of the wasted years already behind me."
DonktorDonkenstein
Thought not everything has to do with the body. Some people had real world fears and phobias.
Seaworthy
"The thought of Being in the middle of the ocean stranded"
crackonwednesdays
"Ooof, Open Water. That film would’ve stayed with me for years even if I hadn’t known it was based on a true story, but knowing that those two people were just abandoned in the open sea (and that no one realized they were gone for TWO DAYS) just ruined me."
Elvis_Take_The_Wheel
"The last scene in The Perfect Storm where the guy is alone in the water during the storm and the camera pulls away until he disappears."
Pest Control
"Cockroaches when they start flying."
"I went to South America for a summer in my teens. I stayed with a very poor family and slept on the floor. I will always remember being woken up by these strange noises. I turned on the light and the room was absolutely teeming in giant flying cockroaches. When I turned on the light half of them started flying around. I've never been more grossed out and horrified in my life. It still haunts my dreams."
'We have a saying here in Mexico: Todos son muy machos hasta que vuela la cucaracha 'everyone is too tough until a cockroach flies.'"
Open Road
"Driving. Especially out of town. I do it every day in my own town, and have very few issues, although I do get a little nervous sometimes. But man. Put me on a road trip even just 2 hours away and I'm a nervous wreck. Unfamiliar traffic and driving conditions will never not scare the shit out of me."
"Oh, and heights. F**k heights."
[user deleted]
Wreckage
"Getting into a serious car crash."
"So, here's how mine went if anyone's interested. Moral of the story is don't drive tired. Might be a little long, but it's here if anyone wants to read it."
"I fell asleep driving once. When the car went off the road, that's exactly when I woke up. So opened my eyes to going downhill in the grass, at about 100kmh/55mph. My reaction was just steer away from the trees and mash the brakes. I avoided the trees, but hit the end of a steel culvert sticking out from under a driveway."
"The culvert caught the car just below the steel bumper support, ripping the bottom half of the rad and condenser off, the oil and transmission pans, and part of the floor, as the wheels straddled it, and the car went up and jumped the side of driveway, becoming airborne. Landed completely sideways in the driveway on all 4 wheels."
"The scariest part was when it stopped, my glasses were gone (found them in the rear window deck) from the airbag, and I put my hand on my face and felt lots of warm liquid running down my skin. I figured it was blood, and when I pulled my hand away, it was brown?... looked down, my coffee was still in the cup holder, no lid, half full. It was coffee."
We all face our fears daily.
Hopefully we never have to face the ones that truly terrify us.
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When we go to sleep, we slip into one of the most vulnerable positions we can possibly embody. And we do that every single day.
So it's hardly surprising that, at least a few times throughout our lives--maybe more than a few--we find ourselves snatched from slumber, and left sitting started and defenseless against a threat we can barely make out in those first few seconds.
But for all the vagueness of those first few sensations, we sure do remember those horrible awakenings rather vividly.
And recently, some folks on the internet shared their most memorable experiences.
Redditor ScoopySnacks829 asked:
"What's the worst thing you woke up to?"
Many Redditors encountered animals in the dead of night. The creepy crawling hands and mouths were enough to make their skin crawl.
Pests Everywhere
"My grandmother had a filthy house and made me and my brother sleep on the floor whenever we were over."
"Once I woke up with a rat tangled in my waist length hair. I was 8"
"Another time I woke up to see a giant roach crawl. Out of my brother's mouth as he was sleeping. (I never told him as I figured he would rather live in blissful ignorance.) I was 9."
"To this day have a fear of Rats, roaches, and sleeping on floors."
Double Whammy
"A dog's paw in my mouth and getting stepped on the balls at the same time" -- Lower_Environment774
Only Thin Nylon Between You and It
"The sound of a bear outside my tent. Got my heart racing." -- SingLikeTinaTurner
"Oh fu** okay, so I once was woken up by a bear paw to the head. It was just fu**ing around with our tarp but I'm tall so the top of my head stuck out just a tad. It felt like being brained with a sandbag."
"It was a black bear and ran off when we made a bunch of noise, but I'll never forget the few moments of sheer terror, head reeling and seeing that bear paw slide next to my face." -- Cthulhu_sneeze
Fresh Kill
"Blood all over the bed that I was in. Then I saw the flyscreen had been torn open. Then I heard a crunching noise. And then I saw the cat with the remains of a magpie."
-- ArtisFarkus
Others shared the times they encountered a personal tragedy immediately upon waking up in the morning.
Gruesome Details
"woke up to the news one of my best friends family had been murdered in an arson attack and that he had tried to save them and had 3rd degree burns over 70% of his body..."
The Best Questions To Ask During A Job Interview | George Takei’s Oh Myyy
Devastating News
"I woke up to my dad telling me my mom had a brain tumor."
"It was during a sleepover with my best friend at the time. I knew they were going to get her an MRI because she had been having really bad chronic headaches, but none of us expected brain cancer."
"When they removed the tumor two weeks later they removed a baseball and a half sized mass of tumor from her right frontal lobe. She's alive and well now 15 years later, thank god, but that was an awful time for everyone in our family."
-- fishycaitlin
The Worst Reason to Get Up and Go
"My uncle calling me in the middle of the night to tell me my mom was in the hospital, and that I should fly out as soon as possible if I wanted to be able to say goodbye."
Finally, some people discussed the times they felt threatened by other human beings that clearly did not have their best interests at heart.
Just What Did They Want
"Someone jiggling the handle on my door, trying to get in to my apartment. Scary as fu**. I don't know if he was drunk and thought it was a different apartment, or if he was just going door to door, seeing if any were unlocked."
-- jeeub
Remember Goodfellas?
"My ex-girlfriend pointing an unloaded gun (I thought it was loaded) at me. She pulled the trigger and she wanted to scare me, she thought I was cheating on her with a friend of mine (a female)."
-- DayMack8006
It Gets Worse and Worse
"When I was like 16, the landlord and a couple of other men (LEOs of some sort, presumably, but I didn't get a good look at them) came in to physically evict my mother and I from the duplex we lived in at the time, something I had no idea was in at all."
"Like, we apparently went through the entire eviction process without me getting even a slight sniff of it. I slept naked even back then, so basically, I was awakened by two or three strange men coming into my bedroom."
"I threw on a cream-colored dress and got the fu** out of there, having no other option obviously, and went to my mother's workplace in a panic...where one of her coworkers gently pointed out that I had started my period, which was obvious from a distance, apparently."
-- Grave_Girl
Here's hoping this list won't give you trouble falling to sleep tonight.
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Full confession, my closest friends often tell me I'm the dumbest genius they know. I breezed through school, handle advanced concepts with ease - and I spent ten minutes looking for my phone in the dark by using the flashlight app on my phone. The saddest part is I didn't even realize how dumb I was being on my own. I tried to recruit my ten-year-old to help me and she just stood there staring at the phone in my hand with the sort of silent pre-teen judgy face you see in sitcoms.
She didn't even have to say out loud how ashamed she was of me. She just stared until I finally got it and went "oh... wait... the phone is in my hand." Then she sighed and walked silently back to her room.
One Reddit user asked:
What's the strangest thing your brain made you do on "autopilot"?
Since I do that sort of stupidly silly thoughtless stuff on a daily basis, I felt like maybe this would be the thread for me. I wasn't wrong. I'm taking comfort in the fact that I've never forgotten that I quit a habit or just showed up on my ex's porch by accident... yet.
H/T: Reddit
Life is full of surprises and this is something we can all relate to. The wrong place and the wrong time! If you have ever been so unfortunate to be in this position, these stories will resonate with you.
u/Scrubbex asks: