The way we played Light as a Feather when I was a girl was, one giggling pre-pubescent female would lie flat on her back on the floor, surrounded by however many other giggling females had been invited to the party. Everyone would place two fingers underneath the prone giggler, and whoever was sitting at the person’s head would begin to intone a story; something banal and relaxing about walking through woods and floating on air, blahblahblah. Periodically during the story the teller would use the phrase, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” One by one, everyone else in the group would repeat the phrase, and the storyteller would continue until the phrase had been used either three or seven times, I forget which. Then everyone would attempt to lift the victim (who, if she’d been paying attention, should have been light as a feather and stiff as a board by this time) using only the first two fingers on their hands.
It works pretty well if you can get 10 people around a skinny 12 year old girl. Until someone screams and makes everyone lose their grip; I’ve dropped more of my friends that way. It invariably ends up with one of the girls breathlessly telling everyone else about how one time, at this other slumber party she was at, they’d been playing “Light as a Feather” and the girl they were doing it on went into convulsions, and they all started screaming, and then the lights went out and someone looked out the window and saw red eyes staring back in at her, and they all got scared because the Devil was outside, and they screamed some more…
I don’t get creeped out easily when awake, but when I was living in a slightly noisier complex, there was one person who worked on his car at around 3am on multiple occasions, all in an attempt, apparently, to fix the same problem. I can’t know for sure, since all I could tell about the problem was the noise. When this person revved the engine there was this metal-on-metal sound akin to the worst aspects of both nails on a chalkboard and squealing brakes. That sound waking me up in the middle of the night sometimes brought me into a state of absolute horror and despair. It happened just enough that I wasn’t desperate enough to see what the heck he was doing at 3am.
Man, religious guilt and fear suck. I had this exact problem, except that in my case, it was the whole “denying the Holy Spirit is the only unforgivable sin” thing. What do you think was the ONLY thing I was capable of thinking of from that moment on?
Add to that the whole “the thought is the same as the action” dogma, and man, I was SO going to hell.
I get creeped out by medical horrors - when I first heard about the Ebola Virus and what it does to humans, I didn’t sleep that night. If I was born in the Middle Ages I’d be a raving loony by now. All those buboes and things.
Same here, but for me its always been the idea of something not human looking back (aliens, bigfoot, demon - take your pick).
I do a lot of camping and those noises you hear outside your tent at 3am can get the imagination running wild. 98% of the time I’m fine - one day I decided to watch The Blair Witch Project the afternoon that some friends & I went on a 3 day hike :eek: