Anxiety and My Love of the Paranormal

I’m up early this morning, a victim of awful anxiety dreams.  Anxiety dreams are so much worse than nightmares.  With nightmares, you rocket up, heart pounding, body slick with a cold sweat.  But the panic fades as the adrenaline does, and then it’s over.  Unless you happen to fall asleep and land right back in the dream.  It’s been known to happen.  But anxiety dreams.  They’re deeper, insidious.  And when you wake up from the dream, the anxiety stays with you because it’s real.

There is a lot of crap going down at the Evil Day Job.  I can’t really get into it here, as it would be entirely inappropriate, but the take home is that my job and those of the rest of my team are very likely in jeopardy.  So I’m dreaming of debt–my own personal hell.

I’ve realized that this is part of why I so love the paranormal.  It’s the ultimate in escapist fiction because it is completely and totally out of this world.  The problems I read about and the problems that I write about are so not of the norm, and they’re problems that get resolved.  Problems that I have real and total control over, so there’s a resolution there that often doesn’t exist in any tangible way in real life.

I’m down to two scenes left to revise in Forsaken By Shadow. Unfortunately, it’s the expansion of the love scene and the rewrite of the end, which I’m having serious trouble with.  I really just can’t focus right now with everything going on at work.  I had so hoped to finish these revisions and get this thing out to beta readers this weekend, but about all I’m up to mentally is writing the 60 question exam for my Theories of Personality class.  Bleh.

3 thoughts on “Anxiety and My Love of the Paranormal

  1. “I’ve realized that this is part of why I so love the paranormal. It’s the ultimate in escapist fiction because it is completely and totally out of this world.”

    A friend of mine asked me recently why I like to write about things like ghosts and gods and etc. I had a hard time giving her an answer, and ended up saying that it’s because I like going to a place that doesn’t exist when I write, and that ultimately I’m not really sure of WHY. But you have a great point here. The paranormal in literature is something with established boundaries, something that can be grasped and dealt with.

    I’m sorry to hear about your job. It’s rough out there for a lot of people. Good luck.

    1. The upside to the economy being in the toilet and the times being so tough is that this sort of escapist fiction is SELLING like hotcakes.

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