Why Do I Obsess Over These Things?

Lately I've been wondering why I get obsessed with random, strange things. When I say obsessed, I mean my brain will latch onto something odd and specific for weeks at a time, so it's all I can think about or focus on. It happens with events or people, tragedies or pieces of art or historical periods.

I know everybody has obsessions, and its normal to latch onto certain things or run into mental stumbling blocks, but I wonder about it a lot.

So, here's a list of things I've gone through obsessions with:

The Titanic:

I feel like a lot of people can relate, but I've spent hours and hours researching the Titanic, reading about it. I think one reason certain tragedies/events like this stand out in my mind because I have a really big fear of being trapped. The idea of being on the ship as it sank and knowing what was happening with no way off, I can't get out of my mind what that must have felt like or what those people must've been going through.

Grimes:

Yes, the singer. Not, like, her, as a person, but more her work and her creative process. I get really fascinated by the way certain artists work, and it doesn't matter if they're a producer or a painter or a writer - watching artists work and seeing them talk about their work, it's oddly something really fascinating for me. I've read like, 19 Grimes interviews. Interviews are a big thing for me for this reason.

Blythe Dolls:

This one was years ago. I don't know why I was so fascinated/fixated by them, but I was. They're kind of creepy, looking back on it.

9/11:

This one is similar to the Titanic. Knowing people were trapped in those buildings, and seeing images of them falling. The falling really, really gets me, because I have a fear of heights, too. It's a tragedy, and it's something that's hard to let go of, for some reason it's something I think of a lot.

Animorphs:

Another strange one, but there's something about fictional worlds. I'll spend hours reading through wikis, and this past few weeks it's been Animorphs summaries and wiki pages, but before it's been Game of Thrones or Vampire Academy. I get really fascinated by fictional worlds, particularly high-concept ones, for some reason. It's another thing my brain can't let go of.

Cleopatra Selene:

She was the only child of Cleopatra to reach adulthood. She saw her parents and siblings die, her home was torn from her. What did that feel like? How did she reflect on it later life, as a powerful leader herself? What was her story like, when history remembers so very, very little of it?

I don't know. Some of these things actively give me anxiety or bring on bouts of depression, but I can't let go of them. Others are just, random fascination, I guess? I don't know. It's just a small fraction of the stuff my brain gets stuck on.

Maybe I'm defective.

The Blogging Bug

I've posted like 3 times already today, and I'll probably post a few more before the day is done, but do you guys remember when I posted like, 2 blogs a month? Now I post like 2 an hour. Ah, the good old days, before I realized I could use blogging as a form of procrastination.

The Scariest Thing is a Double

A few weeks back I had the scariest dream of my life. I regularly dream about serial killers and monsters coming after me, cruise ships sinking while I'm on them, and snakes strangling me - but this dream was scarier than any of them, because the monster was human.

I don't know if I'm the only human this afraid of doppelgängers, but I am. I don't mind clones - use science to explain my exact double and I'm cool with it. I don't mind long lost twins, clones, people who look similair, et cet. But doppelgängers? Spooky exact copies of people that turn up without explanation?

I wasn't the one with a doppelgänger in this dream, though. It was a random guy I've never met before.

The dream started out line any random one: I was at the movies with my dad, and we were seeing a Superman movie. Well, in this movie Superman had a male love interest, and on the way home my dad kept complaining about it. We got in a fight, as you do over gay superheroes, and he kicked me out of the car to make me walk home. He's only done that in real life once, late at night, over 2 miles from home. I won't say I deserved it, but I do understand why he did it, since I was in a bad mood and taking it out on him for no fair reason. He wouldn't do it for something as stupid as an argument over a movie in real life, but in my dream we were really passionate about this movie. So while I was walking home after he drove off, I walked by a really hot black boy, a few years older than me - so maybe 21, 22? And that was it. For me. I kept walking after checking him out as I went by and went on with my day and my walk home.

But the dream didn't care about me anymore - after that it followed this young black guy. And I had been reading a lot about police brutality before I went to sleep, so it seeped into my dreams, all these stories of racist cops and brutality and conspiracies. Because the police do get away with a lot. Dirty cops get away with a lot. And cops need to stop killing black kids, teens, and adult. Cops need to stop killing black people. Tamir Rice was 12 and was shot instantly and remorselessly, all for playing with an obviously fake toy gun. So I was outraged by this, and it bled into my dreams, as things tend to do with me.

So this guy walked past me without noticing me, he was focused on getting home - but when he got there the door was open, and his mother had been shot in the living room, and there was a gun there, and a cop had done it, and he knew it - in the way you just know things in dreams - that a cop had done it, and in that same way he knew they were going to frame him. So he closed the door, called his aunt and grandma to help him clean it out, and set out to prove the cop who had done it (the police chief, as it were) and things went from bad to worse.

Because that's when the dream turned scary. And I mean, I was shaken for the rest of the day when I woke up scary. The boy followed the cops to the woods to check out what they were up to, and long story short they were killing people and ditching the bodies in the woods, there was a pile of corpses in a short ravine and a pipe/slide/chute thing they pushed them down, and it was disgusting, and scary - but the scariest part came when the copy showed up.

The scene flashed to this boy walking through a dirt road in the woods, and something rustled in the trees - and when he turned to look he saw himself coming out of the trees.

And in knowing things just because you know them, as dreams work, I knew without having to wonder that this clone was a normal human. He wasn't a scientific clone or a magic monster or a demon. He was just a person who looked a lot like another person. He had the skills to easily kill the main character, and he was going to do that and take over his life, and no one would ever know or be able to stop him or know what had really happened to the main character. He would vanish and be replaced and no one would know and this stranger who looked like him would take over his life until it was time for him to take the fall for the death of the mother. And it wasn't a big deal to the copy - he would feel no remorse and he wouldn't hesitate. It was no big deal to him.

And that was horrifying to me. The idea of someone killing you where no one will ever find you and taking over your life, it was so fucking awful, so scary to me, that I woke up frozen in the dark. I couldn't breathe for a minute. I was shaken for the entire day, looking over my shoulder.

So that's what scares me: cops, and random doppelgängers. Just, all doppelgänger in general. It's scary, and weird, and it creeps me out. I have a lot of issues with mirrors, too, and I have dreams about my reflection moving without me or turning on me, too, which always fuck me up for days on end afterwards.

I don't know why I'm writing about this here. Food for thought, maybe? Or maybe I just like talking about dreams. Or the things that scare me. Or both.

All I know is, doppelgängers are creepy, cops both scare and enrage me, and I should stop focusing on stuff I hate before I go to sleep, or I'll be doomed to have nightmares for all time. And now, I'm gonna get back to work.