But dreams have ways of turning into nightmares.
If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors.
Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.
I'm afraid of the skeletons in my closet. I've got a whole cemetery full of them.
It seems that everyone has their own inexplicable fear to have nightmares about. We need nightmares to keep ourselves entertained, and fend off the contentment that we all fear and abhor so much.
Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.
Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.
Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?
So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.
Most fears are basic: fear of the dark, fear of going down in the basement, fear of weird sounds, fear that somebody is waiting for you in your closet. Those kinds of things stay with you no matter what age.
There's a vast encyclopedia of fears and phobias, and pretty much any object, experience, situation you can think of, there is someone who has a phobia of it.
Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.
The only thing you fear is the unreality that you yourself have invented.
Fears are all psychological. Being afraid of death, loss of a loved one and disfigurement are all powered by your mind, and that's very powerful stuff.
It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour.