I saw a movie, based on a true story, where a young healthy man suddenly dies of a brain aneurism. Now that I know that's a thing that can happen, even though it's extremely rare, I'm paranoid about dying at an any moment without warning. The good news is, you greatly reduce your chances of a brain aneurism by being healthy.
I have no mouth yet I must scream.
Introduction to Java...
Still have nightmares
There was this one story that lives rent free in my head, which is terrifying when you realise. And this comment might pass it on, so read on at your peril.
It might be a Steven Baxter story. I know I read it in an anthology, but it could have been a different author.
The story is about a person who lives in a world where it's illegal to not use augmented reality devices every moment of every day, to ensure that you're seeing enough ads and behaving like a law-abiding citizen.
The protagonist is in charge of an investigation into people who deliberately live outside this system and seek to disrupt it. One of these people may or may not be the protagonist's son.
The story meanders for a bit but the investigation is hampered by the very technology it seeks to enforce, so the protagonist insists that their augmented reality device temporarily disable everything.
It claims to have done so, but it soon becomes clear that augmentation is still going on.
So the protagonist invokes an override to turn it all off.
And then...
The story f**king ends with "And then..."
My fear, intended or otherwise is therefore:
The story ending is the device turning off. If protagonist still exists, they are now witnessing the reader's reality through their eyes. There's a protagonist stuck in my head unable to get back into their own world.
Not really, though occasionally a book will give me very vivid thoughts and dreams.
For instance, I read 'Incidents Around the House' last year, and it made me think of all the things I was scared of when I was a kid in a very visceral way. I occasionally had to remind myself out loud that it's just a book.
That was a great read though.
Agreed. I tore right through it in two days.
The Haunter of the Dark by HP Lovecraft made me scared of windows at night for at least a couple of years. Didn't help that, when I first read it, my room had a huge window and we lived in a very rural area at the edge of a tiny village so there were literally zero (0) lights outside at night. I still occasionally get a bit nervous when I'm next to a window at night and I can't see outside.
I've never read that book and I probably shouldn't because I had that fear as a teenager. I didn't like to sit up in my room at night because of an irrational fear (I fully knew it was irrational but still couldn't shake it) that some sort of alien, ghost, or monster woukd see me and grab me. Even now, the fear creeps up occasionally at night that if I look out the window, a person's face will be there. And I live on a high floor of an apartment building
I used to have that similar sort of fear, but for different reasons. And when I was like younger than 10. For me it was actually vampires for some reason. But then a new commercial channel opened, they started showing Buffy the Vampire Slayer and with her, Spike, Drusilla and especially Angel, my fears went... right out the window.

So my anecdote was more about losing fears with stories I guess.
That there might be huge monsters in the world or even monsters in the room with me right now. I see them, I'm aware of them and then I forget all about them before I can act on them.
I'd wish we would have some kind of Antimemetics division in our government to handle it. But I don't think such a thing exists.
That's an interesting concept, which book did you read about it?
What book? I don't remember reading anything like that in a book.
The title of this post is "Have you gained any fears from reading books?" so I assumed that was the case.
Sorry, I thought you were making a joke since the book is about memory loss.
This is the book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Antimemetics_Division
I would highly recommend, one of the best books I've read in a while.
Thanks, I'll give it a try! The concept sounds fascinating.
I was afraid of ghosts, demons, evil spirits etc while growing up (crazy religious family). I just got fed up with it and became a bigger scarier monster than the monsters that scared me.
my father told me once I was an adult that I was a psychopath because I didn't react or respond to his punishments at some point.
I told him what changed and that he was incredibly lucky I didn't kill him in his sleep when I was younger, because the thought had crossed my mind many many times. so his sense of danger was spot on. this change happened around the same time he stopped being such an abusive shithead.
moral of the story? IDK become a psychopath or something?
c/im14andthisisdeep
well since I was around 12-14 when I did this...yeah?
All I can see when someone describes themselves as a psychopath:

I didn't describe myself as a psychopath. I was called one. probably had something to do with me not screaming or crying when I was beaten with a belt or cowering in fear when I was screamed at.
am I a psychopath? couldn't tell you, never been diagnosed. do I have psychopathic traits? doesn't everybody?
trauma is one hell of a drug and can fuck you up as a kid, that's all I know.
No long lasting fear. But at the age of 10 I read the second Harry Potter book, and I was so afraid during the second half of the book I read through it in a single session, in bed at night.
At the time it was the longest and most intense reading session ever.
I did not know 1984 was non fiction.
All Quiet on the Western Front gave me a ton of medical anxiety. I already knew war is hell, but the hospital somehow seemed worse. Being killed sucks, sure, but being wounded is something you have to live with. Not to mention most people are more likely to end up in the hospital than on the the front.
There's a bit I thought was amusing though. The protagonist is a volunteer soldier, and I think by the time he's been wounded he's already had to kill someone and moved on from it. Anyway, he's on the hospital train and he's got to go to the bathroom but he can't get up. He's completely mortified to ask the nurse for help, who incidentally thinks it's no big deal. The killer was too embarrassed to go pee-pee, and that's somehow extremely relatable.
That I might not be able to tell when an author is just AI.
Not books, but there have been a few creepypastas that had me on edge for weeks after reading them. There was one about a murderous doppelganger that disguised itself as a household pet that had me nervous around one of my cats.
I saw her napping in my living room and then a few seconds later sitting patiently by the bathroom. She must have slipped by me without me noticing, but I was a bit afraid of her for a while after.
I developed hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
This isn’t a book, and it didn’t keep me up all night, but hot damn it sure made me think: https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/facultyresearchandpublications/52383/items/1.0437324
If the Strait of hormuz stays closed for a while longer we can expect a major correction even this decade
Gerald's Game made me fear degloving. I couldn't finish the book and have no interest in going back to it or watching the TV show.
I also wear my wedding ring much less now
I read a book that took place in Haida Gwaii, an island off of the coast is British Columbia, Canada. At one point in the story a the dad of the protagonist, who is a fisherman,
Tap for spoiler
gets eaten by a sea lion.
This has been a fear whenever I'm on the water or otherwise near sea lions ever since.
There was beach in Southern California that got take over by sea lions. The community got all worked up with one side wanting to evict the sea lions somehow and the other wanting to protect or leave them alone.
One guy on the leave-them-alone side thought he could prove they aren’t a nuisance by going to the beach to camp out with them. He got the shit kicked out him so bad by the sea lions he was hospitalized.
Don’t fuck with sea lions. They are huge and aggressive. There’s a reason they’re called sea lions. Sea also: leopard seals.
That's interesting, I'm going to Haida Gwaii this summer!
What's the book called?
For years I have been afraid of quicksand, alligators, and piranhas.
I live in central Europe.
How about the Bermuda triangle?
So scary 🤣
I'm afraid of papercuts.
I read The Sum of All Fears in high school and it had a weak president being advised by a bunch of stupid advisors working from faulty data and bad assumptions in a way that was leading us step by step to a nuclear World War 3, so that gave me nightmares for a while.
Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence is where my worry for AI induced human extinction originates from.
Running across the street behind a bus so you're invisible to oncoming traffic (or in front of it, if there are multiple lanes in the same direction).
Only fear I ever got from reading was a fear of paper cuts from turning the pages on a super new book.
Fear of society, "the man jn the streat" and what they are capable od.
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