I have an irrational fear of falling...

It happens, rarely but often enough that even I, thoughtless wretch that I am, have noticed, over the years; there seem to be no specific antecedents or triggers but, as it were out of the blue, this particular half flight of stairs (and I secretly dread the report of possible ice storms) can cause a momentary flash of panic. In any event, this item-- a man fell a thousand feet and landed upright and more or less unharmed-- is what caught my eye as I looked at the newspapers this morning; good heavens.

Comments

[17shadesofgreen]

So this is the kind of post I'm responding to. Sort of tells you where I am.

I'll leave the interpretation to a highly skilled therapist, but along with the one about flunking finals or having never attended that one class I needed to graduate, my only recurring dream (nightmare?) involves falling downstairs. And what tends to happen in these dreams is that I "fly" down the stairs and then wake up. I never actually get hurt. In the real world, I always tend to see stairs as a calamity waiting to happen. But exactly why the thought of falling headlong down a stairwell has to occur to me every time I'm at the top of one is a total mystery. Stairs and I have always gotten along--except for my first visit to St. Paul's, when I froze halfway up the spiral staircase leading to the dome...

[Marc]

Spiral staircases are worse than any other artefact having to do with going up and down; they tire you out (teeter-totters don't), make you dizzy (planes don't), foster spatial disorientation (escalators are arrow-straight) etc... just shouldn't exist. They're delightful on drafting paper and aesthetically happy for an observer (and I guess they save space) but for getting from the first floor to where you want to be, no way.

Gosh, if I dreamed about falling I would be dosing with laudanum every single night.