Saturday, August 15, 2020

There Is A Reason Why Some People Are Considered To Be Cranks

 Indeed:

“Gradually I became more and more aware of this horror outside,” says Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. “At first it seemed like a war or riot or some conflict between people, but then it settled into being like the Black Death, like the plague in Europe.”

Barrett makes art from her dreams and when she woke the next morning she made an image of a Medieval plague doctor wandering through a landscape of abstracted COVID-19 particles. It’s the cover of Pandemic Dreams, her new book about what our “supercharged dream lives” are telling us about our unconscious responses to the COVID-19 calamity.

Barrett has been collecting pandemic dreams through an online survey since March. Nearly 4,000 dreamers worldwide have submitted more than 9,000 dream reports. SARS-CoV-2, the unromantic pathogen that causes COVID-19, is the star of many, “literally, or in one of its metaphorical guises,” Barrett writes. Invisible monsters. Morgues and evil morticians. Tarantulas crawling through mail slots. Giant grasshoppers with vampire fangs and bugs, lots of bugs. Swarms of bees and hornets, armies of cockroaches, masses of wriggling worms. “Lots of tiny entities that cumulatively could harm or kill you makes a perfect metaphor for COVID-19,” she writes.

 

I knew a woman who was a teacher during the Blitz. She would relate stories of leading students away to shelters during bombing raids, of fine shards of glass embedded in people's faces and bombs creating vacuums that would suck air out of children's lungs.

A lot of stress then yet people still managed to carry on.

Now, we have professional fear-mongers and stupid parents instilling fear into their little marriage-savers instead of reviewing the facts and calmly explaining to their children what they have to do and why.

Kids freak out because their elders do.

People rely on incompetent governments to feed and clothe them and make all the decisions for them.

This is why we have fearful, panicky idiots and self-righteous Karens who explode in often violent anger over the angle or presence of a mask.

It's awful to know that there is a market for this fear.


 

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