Hey, don’t snicker. You had your recurring themes in your childhood nightmares and I had mine. I didn’t need sharks, vampires, ventriloquist dummies, werewolves or Godzilla to scare the living shit out of me - I had mannequins!
I’ve never been able to find someone who was able to intelligently analyze those awful dreams or decipher their meaning. To this day, whenever I see a dream book in the ‘pop psychology’ section of B&N, I can’t help but to go to the index and see if there’s a mention of my nightmares under M. I’ve lost count of how many analysis books I’ve skimmed - and to date have yet to find even one that mentions my specific childhood nemesis. Manes: A few. Mantises: Millions. Mannequins: Zip, nada, zero.
Fortunately (or unfortunately - as the case may be), I’ve never needed a therapist to dig deep into my psyche and discover the root cause of those terrifying nightmares. I know they preceded that campy Night Stalker episode by at least 3 years and that stupid movie with the awful Starship soundtrack by well over a decade. If forced to analyze my own recurring nightmares, I suppose they were the result of having a very vain mother who made me wear a bowtie to church and shoes (as opposed to Keds) to school on non-gym days.
Now that I’m all ‘grown-up’ (in a physical sense of the word, at least) - I’ve pretty much gotten over my fear of oversized plastic dolls. I can go to H&M, JC Penny or the local Army-Navy store and not break into a sweat if I happen to get too close to a Levis display. To put it another way, I’m not mannequin-phobic …but still get a little uncomfortable if asked to do practice CPR on that rubber chick with bad wig and balloon lungs.
But enough blabbering. I’m posting this message as a warning to every retailer in the USA:
If you dare use these Japanese Robotic Mannequins on your sales floor without warning me, be prepared to both
(1) Mop up a puddle of my piss
and
(2) Lose a customer.