it's like the eye of a duck

Damn, but this was a story out of my own childhood! Like the author, I had a fear of getting Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever as a kid, and for a similar reason (a distant cousin got it and I was told that it was "bad"). Totally ridiculous, since we were nowhere near the Rocky Mountains (hey, I was a very literal child), but I had sleepless nights worrying that some tick was going to travel cross country and climb into my sheets at night :P

Such was the first of many consuming irrational fears that I wasted many brain cycles on :P To this day I have spells where I can't even look at pictures of spiders (though the Podcast I heard about a woman who overcame her arachnophobia so fully that she now keeps the things as pets was.. er... inspiring[?] - I'd link but I can't find it), and let's face it, I'm unlikely to ever be trolling around in the Amazon where the really scary bastards live.

So - what's your favorite [snerk!] phobia, or phobia story?

Another cracked out one to fling to the masses.....

I dreamt I was a little girl and absolutely, blindingly terrified by a huge spider that had taken up residence in a window frame in my house. Think of a black widow the size of a tarantula. Nothing new there - anyone who knows me IRL knows that I fear and loathe spiders beyond reason.

My sister, however, was fascinated and spent more and more time looking at it. I kept screaming at her to leave it alone (indeed, I screamed through most of this dream - it's a wonder I wasn't doing it in my sleep). Then I found out it had given her ice cream made with it's venom and she was addicted.

I tried to get her off the ice cream, but then I tried it and got addicted too. All the while the spider kept getting bigger, until it was the size of a serving platter.

Too late I realized it was fattening us up to feed us to it's egg sac, and the scene shifted from me being one of the children to being outside the scene, watching this huge spider weave a web around the girls and lay it's eggs on them....

I woke up in a cold sweat this morning. I fscking hate spiders - HATE THEM!

And what do I see on TV tonight? Huge honkin' spiders, in "Guns Germs and Steel" demonstrating one of the few sources of dietary protein for Papua New Guineans (I'd rather starve, thank you)....