Sometimes, our brain likes to play tricks. It has the ability to wake us, but hold us in place as our dreams break into reality. It also has the ability to create things in our day-to-day lives. Figures, creatures; even noises can spawn from a back of our minds. Sleep deprivation, drugs, they’re all factors, but little do people know about other times our brains decide to hallucinate. The Ganzfeld effect is a fabulous example.
The principle is simple. If you distance yourself from everything. From sound, from sight, from stimulus; you start to see. You start to see shapes. You start to hear noises. Just as much as you would if you were doped up on some hallucinogenic chemical. Creatures coming from full-blooded boredom. On the surface it sounds just like a pleasant bit of trivia, and the common man, when hearing this, usually shrugs, and walks on with his day-to-day existence, but you’re still reading this, aren’t you? So I figure you want to know the eternal question.
Why?
Even scientists are baffled. They say that the brain requires stimulus, and as a result it creates shapes to quell the boredom, but it still doesn’t explain dreams, as to why when we try and rest, our brain creates scenarios, creatures. It certainly doesn’t explain the horrific ones. Dreams of illness, of fear, of pain.
Nightmares.
I have a theory.
Our brains, being as intelligently built as they are, have a subconscious knowledge. The shadow from the corner of your eye, when you feel that someone is following you. You can't see them, but you know they’re there. Surely it would make sense for it to prepare us for when the feeling comes to close? When the feeling is real? To test us with shadows, with figments, to keep us on our toes, but this raises another question.
Another unpleasant question.
If our brain creates monsters and figures to prepare us, then what is out there? What are we going to find when it’s not just paranoia, when there is a man following you? When there is a figure?
When the shadow is not alone, but cast from something very, very real.
Written by GentlemanWalrus
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