The Greatest Fear

This series of blogs has been a blast and I've said some interesting things I think and asked some good questions. Like all good things it must come to an end. However I think I've left the best for last. There is always one thing that will forever cause more fear than anything else. It may be trite, but it definitely nails things right on the head. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Another one is, "Fear is the Mind Killer". Perhaps a great example of that is the anecdotally backed belief that if you were to dream that you died, by whatever means, that you would indeed die. In story terms this is a wonderful idea. The idea goes that the brain cannot tell the difference between reality and a dream, and that when it thinks the body should be dead it sends out the signal, stop everything, we're dead. Then real death comes when the brain no longer gets enough oxygen.

In a similar vein there is the idea that indeed fear can kill you. If you fell from a cliff and panicked all the way down the "story" goes that you could give yourself a coronary and die. Mind you, for people with definite heart conditions it's not hard to imagine that emotion can lead to a full failure. The idea that someone in good health with a strong heart can die in such a manner needs a little something more added to make scared to death work, something like a supernatural effect.

Lastly we come to maybe the best part in fiction about death caused by fear. We have the wonderful tales of actual physical manifestations or incarnations of fear as a being. As strange as this may sound my favourite example of such a thing has to be a pseudo incarnation, and it comes from a fairly unlikely source. My favourite comes from Star Trek: Voyager where Captain Janeway faced off against a computer program/entity that believed itself to be Fear incarnate. It all came down to, "What does Fear fear?" The answer? Fear fears being conquered, it fears when the fear is passed. Fear fears no one to push around. Fear fears the end.

Mood: down.
Music: Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together) by Queen and Big Man With a Gun by Nine Inch Nails.

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