Monsters and the Heart of Darkness

There was a time when the dark was a truly terrifying place.

Beyond the boundaries of the campfire lurked wild things, monsters that saw our ancestors as prey.  To survive, people learned to be afraid.

With time, technology, innovation and knowledge, the dark corners of our world have slowly been painted in; what once were monsters are now curios, or resources.  There's really no creature waiting in the shadows for us any more; if anything, we've replaced the monsters.

Yet fear remains.

My eldest son has been having occasional night terrors; it's something I can relate to, having suffered through similar fears when I was his age.  He's a bright, inquisitive, creative boy, capable of populating the darkness with bone-chilling nightmare creatures that would freeze your very soul - which is exactly what he's doing.

To help him through these, I've been employing a combination of neuro-psychological tricks; making funny, discussing his successes to build confidence, letting him snuggle for the oxytocin boost it gives him.  Call it pandering or committing sociology if you want - I know what works, I know why it does, and the results prove themselves.  He's sleeping calmly now.

One of the key things he and I have discussed is that which we fear - the monsters in the dark.  I asked him to go through and tell me about all the monsters he knows - ghosts and goblins and orcs and vampires and zombies and werewolves.  We have explored each of these creatures, slowly coming to the conclusion that hey, none of them are real.  They are all fiction.

So what does that mean, I asked him?  That the monsters we feel aren't in our closets or under our beds, he said, but in our minds.

In our minds - we create the monsters we fear or, more accurately, we take latent fear and give it form. That's the deep dark secret of humanity - we feel first; it's our feelings, not reality, that we rationalize.  Such is the hidden truth of any stigma or human conflict in the world.

My son and I talked about the individual monsters we were familiar with - characters in stories, villains in movies, etc.  The reality is that more often than not, some good guy gets the bad guy in the end or, in other cases, the villain is funny, or misunderstood, or comes to see the light (punny, perhaps, but equally telling).

Monsters, I told my son, are products of our own fear.  They have power in numbers that is stripped from then when we understand them as individuals. The way to fight a monster isn't with a stake, a gun or a sacred book, but with two things - light and ownership.

When we cast a light on the dark places in the world, the snake in the path often turns out to be little more than a curved stick.  Understanding takes us out of the shadow world of The Cave; it kills mystery, perhaps, but fear also - and replaces both with wonder.

That's one.  Two is ownership.

When we give our monsters names, backstories, motivations, personality traits, they cease to be unknowable fears and instead become products of our imagination.  When we breathe life into a character, they become part of our story - as in, a story that we author with ending we right ourselves.

We need not dread the dark, nor fear or welcome death.  There is no universal unknowable; there's just what we don't know, yet.  When we take ownership of the creatures that lurk in the dark, they hold no power over us - instead, we consciously control them.

This is true of the darkness within, as well.