Does anyone have this fear?
I have always been nervous around certain huge manmade things. The main things that make me extremely uncomfortable are ships and large dams. I was fishing with my dad and he went next to the saddle dam of a lake in a boat. This happened when I was teenager. This isn’t the main dam and boats are permitted next to it. It was an embankment (earthen) dam that had rip rap (rocks to prevent erosion) going all the way up the the entire side of the dam facing the lake. It was enormous. well over 200 feet high and it overtook my entire feild of vision. It didn’t look as big from afar but that close it was so huge that I felt extremely uncomfortable and scared. It was silly because I was reletively safe as long as I didn’t fall into the water. Why was I so scared of an inanimate yet enormouse object. I still go to that lake. I can drive on top of dams the same size and not be scared at all but in the boat on the water I felt extremely intimidated. Is this normal
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8 Answers
My family went to the Railroad museum in Sacramento, and my wife was quite afraid of the huge train engine they had on display.
You are normal. I guess the reason we have this fear is because anything manmade is capable of breaking down. an automobile is a good example.
Have no fear, you are not alone.
You know those huge electric pylons? those things have always creeped me out, they’re too tall and loom over me. I don’t even like driving past them <shudder> I’ve always thought that its a natural reaction though because well think of the power running along those lines, and I mean that would be a little more than a weeny shock really wouldn’t it? rather than their size. Not sure. I wouldn’t worry about it though, you’re normal honey.
I don’t have this fear but it’s fine that you do – all fears are ‘normal’ in a sense even if irrational.
I spent every summer on a lake in Massachusetts. I was in or on the water all the time, swimming, snorkeling, fishing from shore or a boat, water skiing, and eventually sailing.
But always, for my entire life, and even now, I’m spooked by the shoal bottoms that I have fished and sailed over my entire life. The sight of rocks barely in vision fills me with real dread sometimes, and the mud on the bottom of the lake isn’t just something that I don’t like because of texture, either. I have a very strong aversion to it.
One time when I was six years old and hadn’t completed my swimming lessons some of my cousins and I were on a raft that we made to float along the shoreline. We got to horsing around and capsized it. Rather than stand up where I was, since the water was only up to my chest where we were, I swam about fifty yards to get “out of the guck”. Impressed the hell out of all the adults watching us, but I was ashamed to tell them why I had made such an ‘epic’ swim.
One of the reasons I’m a ‘pretty fair’ sailor is that I never wanted to chance capsizing over the shoals, in the weeds, or in mud. So I could fight that boat upright from having nearly gone over, many times. The Laser is teaching me that I ain’t really that good. Or that afraid any more, either.
Trains freak me out. So does standing next to a semi truck.
@Mikewlf337
If I was right next to the waterline of that dam in a relatively tiny craft, I might have been afraid of the million tons of boulders looming above me, so I think I can at least partially understand why you felt that way in that situation.
I don’t think it was strange at all…...you just recognized potential danger.
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