“Is it real?” “I don’t think so.”

Some trick-or-treaters just plain avoided the house. One boy decided to hit the grim reaper, and hit and hit and hit him. The mother was ashamed, but as Heidi remarked to me, it is interesting to see what reactions kids have to being scared.

Fight or flight: that’s how we react. Some run, some hit. Freezing, playing possum is a form of flight.

This fight-or-flight response, also called hyperarousal or acute stress response, was first described by Walter Cannon in 1915. His theory states that animals react to threats “with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system, priming the animal for fighting or fleeing.” [Wikipedia, Fight or Flight]

Say hello to Bob. I made him. His long name is Evolution of Medusa. Medusa is the woman of Greek myth with hair of snakes; if you take one look at her you turn to stone. Bob also has hair of snakes. His snakes are made out of extension cords with the plugs aiming outward, waving through the air looking for a place to “plug in”. He’s looking for juice.

What feeds Bob?

Fear. It’s his food. Fear has a lot of energy in it. Just remember a time that you were really scared. It was hard to turn it off, right? I remember as a teen watching a Twilight Zone in the back room of our house. You may remember this one: aboard a ship they kept hearing a banging noise coming from the water below them. It was the ghosts in a sunken ship under them banging on the shell of their ship. I was so freaked out when I walked through my house, turning on lights as I went, that I was hallucinating images of the ghosts. I have not been a real fan of horror movies since, although The Shining and Poltergeist are movies I thoroughly respect.

People crave being scared. It’s an overwhelming emotion, and we’re guaranteed to feel it. Sometimes that’s a rush after not feeling much in our everyday world. There is a lot of energy in fear. Enough to make me hallucinate. Enough to cause people to take flight or fight. Notice there is more energy in it than say, boredom, enthusiasm and anger. What is the emotion that gets us to take movement out of fear?

Think about what you did when you found a nasty spider in your bathtub. Did you calmly pick it up and walk it outside? Hell no; you KILLED it. Yeah, I’m sure you justified it too, but you killed it. You were scared of it and because you are so much bigger and could find a shoe or something you killed it.

Find a boyfriend/girlfriend going out on you? Want to kill one of them? Or just slink away and kill yourself?

A child does something terribly wrong, and you smacked it. Thought later than you could have handled that better but instinctively you “killed” it. When you’re in that much anger, or rage, you do something violent that you wouldn’t normally do. The power behind it? FEAR. Fear of being squished or hurt and fear of losing control (over offspring who represent us/they are our “products” so we think). We also suffer from fear of abandonment. We are afraid that no one will like us.

A person has to be doing very well to actually admit to themselves that they have fear. A person not truly competent or confident could never admit that they have fear. A person not doing well does not ask for help with such things; a person who is able to be honest with themselves is doing much better and can sometimes seek help. Having fear and never dealing with it or confronting it, does not solve it. To survive in society we squelch it and try to look like we’ve got it all together but it will always pop up when we are intoxicated or undernourished, suffering lack of sleep or from stress. It’s always right under the surface.

Some things are too overwhelming to fight; abusive parents, alcoholic parents, abusive siblings, abusive leaders, governments, etc. Flight may be our choice. Then we deal with it later in our lives. Anger, when we allow ourselves to feel it, can get us back into the driver’s seat of our life. Besides the non-thinking energy of rage which is totally controlled by fear, there is positive anger.

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, says:

ANGER IS FUEL. We feel it and we want to do something. Hit someone, break something, throw a fit, smash a fist into the wall, tell those bastards. But we are “nice” people, and what we do with our anger is stuff it, deny it, bury it, block it, hide it, lie about it, medicate it, muffle it, ignore it. We do everything but “listen” to it. Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out. Anger points the direction. We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us. With a little thought, we can usually translate the message that our anger is sending us.

When we feel anger, we are often very angry that we feel anger. Damn anger!! It tells us we can’t get away with our old life any longer. It tells us that old life is dying. It tells us we are being reborn, and birthing hurts. The hurt makes us angry.

Anger is meant to be tapped into and drawn upon. Used properly, anger is use-full. Sloth, apathy, and despair are the enemy. Anger is not. Anger is our friend. Not a nice friend. Not a gentle friend. But a very, very loyal friend. It will always tell us when we have been betrayed. It will always tell us when we have betrayed ourselves. It will always tell us that it is time to act in our own best interests.

Anger is not the action itself, it is action’s invitation. … anger is a “map”.

In this book, Cameron points out that our anger urges us to use creativity in our lives. Creativity is our voice. Our voice needs to be used. Sometimes our anger is saying that we could do better. It’s a call to turn off the TV and do something for our creative selves.

Fear is not bad. Anger is not bad. They are emotions that all people in bodies feel. It’s what we do with them that counts “or is interesting,” as Heidi said. Both emotions are packed with energy and we can make the choice to either squander or use them for ourselves.

Bob’s lesson: Bob is showing us that he wants to “eat” our fear, so he wants us to “be” in fear. Be in fear and get other people to be in fear. Then we will feed him and he will be very happy. Bob holds a newspaper as part of his original display. The paper is full of headlines using words that send fear messages. The advertisements tell us that buying things will make us feel good (solve our fear).

When we’re in fear, when we’re enraged, when we want to “kill” something, we need to check out who is getting a feeding out of all that fear. Is it Bob? Is it our government? Is it the people behind FOX news? Our church? Our boss? Teacher? Sure as heck, we’re not getting all that juicy energy. It’s running out of us as in an open fire hose.

When fear turns us to stone, we remain victims to our intimidators. But fighting the wrong target can be dangerous and deadly. Both fight and flight responses can benefit someone who knows how to use them to control us. Angry mob killings are people in terrible fear pointed into fighting the wrong target.

We can get angry and do something about the right source. We can do something to improve ourselves or understand the situation. We don’t need to run, angry mob style, and invade a country because we are in fear of them. We don’t need to decide that all Muslims are bad and need to die, treating them like bad spiders in our bathtubs. We don’t need to hate and incur violence against Mexicans because they hung an American flag in a wrong order. Messages of this kind spread on the internet. Democrats and Republicans are not our targets. We need both of them. We are a country divided swinging around a baseball bat at wrong targets. Who’s getting the benefit of us spewing fear and hate? Who’s eating U.S.?

Political leaders are well aware of the power of stories. They manipulate people by trying to control the story, to force the narrative into the channel they desire. Through modern techniques of psychological manipulation and mind control they have become very good at managing the populace. That has never been more true than today, when the American people seem to have turned over their fate to the Bush regime in Washington.

What is the story used by Bush and his minions to lull the people into mindless obedience? It is the strong daddy protector. In this story, we are innocent, helpless children who are threatened by an evil being that want to destroy us. But the strong daddy protector will not allow this to happen. Where the evil being is all darkness and malevolence, the strong daddy protector is all light and good.

The motivating force in the strong daddy story is fear. As innocent, helpless children, we cannot defend ourselves against the malevolent evil. We can only flee to the beneficent strong daddy for protection. We must choose between the good and the evil, which is portrayed in absolute terms: the evil is all evil and the good is completely good. To doubt the strong daddy in any way is a betrayal of the good and a triumph for evil.

I believe that this is the current story being played out in America today. It helps explain the vitriol poured upon those who dare question the motives or policies of the president. It explains also the seeming paralysis of people, who know something is very wrong, but can’t seem to do anything about it (helpless children). It explains the need for periodic fixes of fear designed to insure continued addiction.

A darker vision, a more sinister tale, has come to haunt me. I feel as though I were living through some of those 50’s and 60′ s sci-fi movies that used to scare and thrill me. The movies where everyone and everything seemed to be normal�, but there was a sense of underlying dread and unreality. I think of Invasion of the Body Snatchers� as alien invaders insidiously usurp the bodies and minds of people. They still look and act the same, but not quite. Or, again, The Village of the Damned�, where the children of the village have been transformed by an unknown, malevolent force into unfeeling automatons.

The sci-fi movies of that era are generally regarded as symbolic representations of the communist menace, which, it was claimed, subverted men’s (and women’s) souls to the will of the party. The individual ceased to exist and the state became all. I remember that era well. Remember reading about how horrible the Soviet Union was, were there was no individual freedom. Where the state spied upon its citizens. Where you were not allowed to speak out against the state. Where people would be taken in the middle of the night and thrown into secret prisons. And tortured. And killed. I remember thinking how terrible this was. I remember being grateful that I lived in a country that celebrated human freedom and expression.

But in the past few years I increasingly feel as if I am trapped in some kind of time warp, where fiction has become reality. People continue to act as though everything is normal, despite some really weird things happening. They talk about freedom, even as the president and the congress shreds the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Gone is the right to security of your own home: the FBI can search your home anytime it wants without having to notify you. Gone is your right to privacy: the president claims the right to wiretap you anytime and any where he pleases. Gone are your legal rights: habeus corpus, bedrock of the law for centuries, is no longer. Gone are your rights of citizenship: the president can declare you an enemy combatant and snatch you off the streets and disappear you, apparently forever. Can someone please tell me when we became the Soviet Union?

Of course, if the picture of present reality as I have painted it is true, I am left with explaining why so few people get it�. This is where we return to the strong daddy story. Most people have bought so strongly into that narrative that they must ignore evidence to the contrary. They want so much to believe in it that they are unable to allow that evidence to penetrate awareness. They mutter the mantra USA! USA! USA!� while continuing to believe in the goodness of their leaders.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I hear the theme music and Rod Sterling’s voice: You are entering the Twilight Zone!

With writers Rad Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and the prolific Rod Serling spinning their tales of mystery, magic, horror, humanity and intrigue, the Twilight Zone dominated the early years of television with stories that probed the human spirit and challenged our perceptions of the dimensions in which we live. Serling bent the time/space continuum and invaded the deepest parts of the human mind, and took all of us along for the ride.

Serling, creator of the acclaimed CBS show that ran from 1959-64, wrote 92 of the 156 stories that aired on this acclaimed series. The series drew not only the best writers but many acclaimed actors — those well established and those on the precipice of fame — newcomers including Robert Redford, William Shatner, Burt Reynolds, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Carol Burnett, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, and Peter Falk as well as such established stars as silent-film giant Buster Keaton, Art Carney, Mickey Rooney, Ida Lupino and John Carradine.

Here are some of the Twilight Zone stories that are one our favorites list:

Judgement Night has a former U-Boat captain turned eternal passenger wandering the decks of a ship he sank, condemned to cruise on the Queen of Glasgow with his victims for eternity.

The Escape Clause puts us into the mind of hypochondriac who makes a deal with the Devil to live forever. But forever takes on a whole new meaning when he in sentenced to life in prison.

The Midnight Sun takes us into a future in which our displaced sun is moving closer and destined to broil the earth — or is it? We watched as humanity in the form of two woman, one young, one old, struggle to survive the blazing heat and unrelenting thirst. In typical Serling fashion, there’s a punch line that turns even this upside down world upside down.

The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street (a personal favorite) explores our deepest and most primal fears when one small community is cut off from the world and left to sort out the loss power and communication on their own. It’s really an alien experiment, a test that unleashes prejudice, primal fears and suspicions — all manifested as neighbor turns on neighbor, proving that what we are our own worst enemies.
Odyssey of Flight 33 takes us on a journey through time when an otherwise non-eventful flight suddenly passes through time. Without communication, and suddenly flying over a landscape of vegetation and dinosaurs, the pilots realize they cannot land, and must try to find the hole in time that will bring them back to the 20th century. But where in the 20th century?

A Stop At Willoughby is a manifestation of one man’s desire for the peaceful life of yesterday, an escape from the bustle of modern life and a chance at love in a less complicated time. This train ride home has an unexpected stop in that alternate dimension of the Twilight Zone.

Third From the Sun, like all twilight Zone scripts, seems amazingly normal in the beginning. Here we watch as a panicked family steal a spaceship and make their escape from a dying planet — heading — Earth.

To Serve Man (which redefined “serve”). A close encounter with alien life in the form of a high-browed giant alien garbed in long white robes isn’t all that it seems, and even as his his peaceful and conciliatory appeals to a United Nations is put forth, scientists struggle to decipher an alien book that unlocks a deadly secret about serving man — as dinner.

Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric features a robotic grandmother created to take care of two children who have lost their own mother. This story was a predecessor to Maureen Stapleton’s marvelous portrayal of the lifelike robot The Electric Grandmother).

Richard Donner’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet has a young as a nervous passenger imagining a creature clinging to the wing of a plane ouside his window. William Shatner is the man on the edge of sanity, trying to save the plane and its passengers from disaster.

The Eye of the Beholder has a beautiful woman seeking endless surgery change her appearance; but in this society, beauty comes of the form of pig-faced people. The surgery is unsuccessful and relegated to a leper-like colony of other people like herself, considered too “ugly” to mix with normal people.

Time Enough At Last has a book-wormy bank teller (Burgess Meredith) with heavy-lensed glasses sneaking into the bank vault to read. He’s there when the worst happens – a nuclear holocaust. As he roams the rubble, he finds the remnants of a library and all the books he could ever want to read. In the ultimate irony, his glasses break.

During that era of early TV, the screen was filled with an abundance of good story-telling through shows that included The Outer Limits, Boris Karloff and his classic tales of horror, Alfred Hitchcock’s collection of mysteries, One Step Beyond and the British sci-fi/fantasy series Dr. Who (now a new sci-series for the 21st century) and that vintage time-traveling phone booth . Many of these shows are now available on DVD as collections, and they are worth watching, and as entertaining as they were when television was new.