Animality

by Janet Mackenzie Smith

Vampires, zombies, and nightmares are good and useful things? Maybe it’s restful for our brains to engage in a world of fight or flight where attention can be paid to large and largely simple fictional forces? We spend so much of our lives parsing and comparing endlessly intricate arguments and experiences, so a frightening world that operates on a simple binary of right vs. wrong provides relief? A sanctuary away from our norm?

Like many people, I have a terrible memory. It’s erasable, changeable, and otherwise unreliable. For instance, I can’t remember vividly any of my birthdays before the age of nine (except when I’ve seen photos and post hoc contrived some approximation of a memory). And, bizarrely, my most flavorful childhood memories are my nightmares.

There are a handful of scenarios that recur in my dreams, and they have populated my sleep from the age of four or five through the present. There is the one where I am on the beach and I watch a rogue wave measuring upwards of thirty feet in height come crashing down on top of me. There is the one where I am navigating the inside of an upside down and sinking cruise ship to locate a friend or family member before engineering our escape just in the nick of time. And there are others, all involving water and the brink of death. While I used to find these dreams terrifying, they are now purely exhilarating.

(For anyone wondering, nature or nurture? My dad was an oceanographer for NOAA in his youth; our vacations almost always involved water; I was only ever truly happy when in a body of water; and my dad might have let me watch many terrifying movies involving danger on the high seas when he thought I was too young to “get it.”)

In my real life, I am not an adrenaline junkie. I wait for the walking man to take over for the red hand before crossing the street. I never intend to sky dive. I refuse to scuba dive because breathing under water freaks me out.

Still, I look forward to these dreams. I always wake up refreshed, my brain flooded with a sense of visceral satisfaction. Nothing in my daily life gives me quite the same sharp and instinctual clarity. And yet, my desire for this kind of satiation does also invade my waking life.

I reserve my morning commute for reading lowbrow science fiction like The Strain Trilogy, which chronicles internecine war between rival vampire factions (highly recommend). This ritual allows me to escape the morally ambiguous details of my life into worlds that quench my thirst to be an animal that aspires only to survive. These tastes compensate for the fact that my daily struggle gives me no sense of animalistic clarity (yes I am making up terms again). There is no choose X and die, choose Y and live. (And, thank god, because my level of anxiety over banal decisions nearly drives me mad.)

I’m not suggesting that you show your toddlers scary movies so that they have nightmares, some of which will recur for decades. That is not great advice. But, it might benefit us not to squelch our urge to opt for the B-rated horror film over the critically acclaimed arty flick applauded for providing conundrums to be contemplated for weeks. I think that often we modern humans (homo technologicus?) need animalistic clarity more than we need existential enlightenment or complicated new knowledge.

When Janet Mackenzie Smith was 15, she thought that she was the next Kant. Now, she is a paralegal with a superfluous master’s degree, $90K in student loans and an excess of bitterness. Her forthcoming book is called Generation Special, unless her agent renames it.