Fear

I have two types of dreams: boring, bordering-on-reality dreams, and nightmares. My most recent nightmares have been about the actor Alexander Skarsgård. Whether he’s in Succession or Big Little Lies or Infinity Pool, he is terrifying. The characters he plays scare me and his acting personas infiltrate my dreams and mess with my sleep. In my latest Skarsgård nightmare, I woke up after he had stabbed me in the side of the head. Is that dream death? Also, I watch far scarier movies and TV shows than the ones that Mr. Skarsgård is featured in, so this subconscious fixation baffles me. Coming off the first episodes of The Idol, I’m sure I’ll start having nightmares about The Weeknd, but at least that feels like a more rational fear.

Aside from Skarsgård, I don’t have any traditional phobias—heights, the ocean, spiders. Of course, I’ll scream and react at a creepy crawly or some seaweed grazing my foot in the sea, but it is not debilitating. I’m just generally a jumpy and anxious person and it’s written all over my face. At the haunted houses I’m the friend that gets targeted by the masked “murderers” because they can tell I’m the most likely to pee their pants. Why is a 16-year-old with a fake chainsaw scarier than the clowns that threatened schools and terrorized cities in 2016? There’s just one more thing and then I swear to god I’ll shut up about this forever, nothing scares me more than AI (this is not a joke, I am terrified of what the computers will do).