I once read in a book of medical oddities about a man who had two faces. One was in the normal place, the other (partial) face was growing out of the side of his head. He could even blink both sets of eyes, though of course one set didn’t function.
For some reason, when I read this, I imagined this man bursting into my bedroom, all four of his eyes staring at me. Yiiiiikes…
Other than death or harm to loved ones, I would have to say a replay of pretty much any serious sports injury. I’m talking Theismann level. I’ve never seen Theismann’s broken leg, but it’s used as a punchline enough and enough of a cultural reference I can bet it was horrendous. I’m sure it’s available on the net somewhere, but I’m far too squeamish to want to see it. I’ve seen other disgusting breaks, and that’s enough for me thanks. Or McGahee’s injury in the Fiesta Bowl, you know, where his knee bent at a 90-degree angle … to the side. That’s a lot of disturbing imagery.
Michael Jackson’s face 
But seriously, I can’t think of anythign that scares me a lot, but the scariest thing I can think of is being trapped after being chased by a monster in some place where they can’t get at me, but I can’t get out and knowing that there is little to no hope of help coming.
There are a couple things that linger from my childood that would absolutely freak me out.
I broke my leg the summer before sixth grade, and it hurt so much that I didn’t want to move or be moved. (Mom says I looked up at her from the ground, with tears streaming down my shock-pale face, and said, perhaps overdramatically, “Just bring me a pillow and a blanket and leave me here. I’ll be fine.”) Dad ended up carrying me into my grandparents’ house and laying me on the sofa, after going through three sets of doors. I had nightmares for at least a month afterward of my foot hitting a doorframe, causing my tibia to break through the skin and just jutting there, bloody and white. And also nightmares of never being able to walk again. It was a bad break.
When I was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 4, somehow I got the thought in my head that I was now undesirable, so that my parents wouldn’t love anymore and would want to get rid of me because I was so much trouble. I have no idea why I thought that, as my parents didn’t do anything but love me. I had nightmares about my parents discovering a “cure” for diabetes that would involve me being put into a Saturn type rocket and blasted into space, from which I may or may not have returned. This one always involved me waking up and screaming for my mom, and then being unable to tell her what my nightmare was about, because then she’d get an idea in her head. To this day, a picture of a rocket blasting off gives me a momentary twinge of panic.
I also had nightmares about living in space and having my “space whale” pet being stolen from me and of my family being eaten by Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid after she turned the back porch into a ship.
Well mine couldn’t be about violence since that doesn’t have much of an effect on me. It’s usually just really strange images that come into my mind.
An example:
There are a number of moles spread out on my head. They turn into a brown liquid that shoots radially and forms thin cylinders (with the diameter of the original moles) which solidify upon reaching a length of a few feet. Then they break off, and I imagine that it is excruciatingly painful (while I’m thinking this, a physical chill runs down my spine).
There isn’t really a pattern to these thoughts, but I suspect that they are all somehow antithetical to the way in which I view the world.
That happened to Buffy once, if anyone cares.
This phenomenon is known as sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is your brain’s way of making sure that when you are dreaming you are fighting the Bogeyman, you won’t pummel your fists at your spouse sleeping peacefully beside you, or run blindly into the wall of your bedroom. So it is a very useful adaptation. But the mechanism doesn’t work perfectly, so sometimes when you wake up you are still paralysed for a few minutes more.
I have also been disburbed by thoughts of being alone in a quiet, completely deserted city. racinchikki’s addition of seeing a blank-face person in such a place makes this thought even more unsettling. A variant scenario: There are people in the city, but they’re all dead, every one of them, having instantly dropped to the ground while in the middle of doing whatever. People who were driving cars before dying ran into the object in front of them, so the streets are full of wreckage, smelling of fumes from all the engines running idle before they ran out of gas. A few lights here and there are still on, but most have burned out. Whole city blocks are burned from fires that nobody could put out. Years later the same city’s streets would be overgrown with weeds and all the bodies would be decayed.
Another thought I find disturbing would be to go down what looks like a simple hallway and then turning into another hallway. As I continue on my way I realize that I am in an endless maze of corridors that lead to nowhere, and retracing my steps doesn’t lead me back to where I was before. The corridors become narrower and darker as I keep moving. Eventually I am stuck in the middle of a huge labyrinth with no light and no known way to exit.
I don’t think that would be so bad…provided you couldn’t actually FEEL anything. Laser eye surgury seems like it would be more disturbing.
The “entrails spilling out all over the place” imagery used to be pretty disturbing until you saw it in every war movie since Saving Private Ryan.
You could always go with the spreading puddle of blood imagery. That always creeps me out.
Cave’s with really low ceilings lit by nothing but a candle. Basically, you can’t see very far ahead but you have this crushing weight right above you.
I’ve had that happen countless times … while playing Tomb Raider. Just restore from your last save and you’re free to go. Don’t scare me, no sirree. 
That’s the deal, though!! You CAN feel EVERYTHING, you just can’t move or speak or do anything to tell the doctors!
Off the top of my head…
the scariest image…
my parents doing the nasty. :eek:
13 yrs ago (as a grownup) i saw “jacob’s ladder.” the sight of those vibrating heads on the boogyman or whatever it was struck terror in my heart.
i’ve seen every horror movie, and loved them, but that one permanently f*@ked me up. sometimes if i’m alone in my house at night, & it’s dark, i can almost see that stupid head bobbling in my peripheral vision.
ewwww What was THAT?
i’ve got chills NOW! :eek:
I have this horrible mental imagery from some nightmare when I was younger that includes torture by electrified barbed wire. I have no idea where it came from but a very young me was scared shitless.
The image that freaks me out more than anything else, is (as often seen in horror movies) the hooded and cloaked figure when you can never see their face. Scares the be-Jesus outta me, even though I’m all “growed” up! :eek:
I have always had horrible nightmares where I unintentionally hurt someone and then have to kill them to end their pain. When I was a kid, it was usually animals. I’d dream that I accidentally stepped on a kitten, and then I’d have to pick it up, listening to it crying in pain until I could wring its neck with my bare hands. Now that I’m older, it’s generally people in my dreams. I dreamt I hit a man with my car while driving on the freeway. It made a horrible sound, and his screams were awful. Thank god I woke up before I had to kill him.
Yuk. I don’t even like talking about it.
Jacobs Ladder huh… that movie basically ruined my entire life. I was terrified of everything for like four years after seeing it (I was 14 or something). It wasn’t the shaking head guy that did it for me, though… it was that fella with no eyes… and those piles of severed feet that the fella glimpses as he gets wheeled past on the gurney.
Yurgh.
Anyway, my contribution is this. Just made it up, totally freaky, in my opinion.
Imagine kissing your SO, a proper, open mouthed kiss, eyes closed and all. You notice slowly that their mouth is open pretty damn wide but you keep kissing. Then you open your eyes and see that your SO’s are black, like a horse’s. By the time their upper lip is halfway up your nose bridge, you try to pull away but their fingers are pushing your head from the back. You feel the lower lip slide over your chin and the upper lip passes over your eyes plunging you into darkness. Suffocating with your face pressed against their tongue, the last thing you feel is their incisors piercing the back of your neck.
There are proberly lots of worse things that could happen, but this image has always scared me:
Falling head down into a very narrow hole, your arms lying alongside the body and being unable to move them, because of the lack of room.
I think that one of the ideas that scare me the most is that I don’t know what I’m doing - that what I’m seeing isn’t what is really happening. Because of that, how I am reacting to the situation is wrong.
I get up in the middle of the night to get a drink, and I see a monster-wolf-dog in the living room. When I yell, it growls at me, then approaches threatningly. In panic, I grab the lamp and bring it down on the misshapen head with a crack. The thing drops, no longer moving, and I find myself in the far corner of the room, sitting in the corner. For just a moment, the thing looks like a human form…like my sister. Which is real? What can I do? Did I just hurt her? Is it a trick? If I see another, can I afford to take the chance of not defending myself? What is going on? How do I tell what is real?
**Thanks ** Morgs, for reminding me about parts of the movie that I
had effectively blocked out of my consciousness…I had *completely * forgotten
about those scenes until you reminded me. Now I wonder whether I can
ever be alone in the dark again. :mad:
Damn Gravity, are you on Drugs? …
Your post reminded me…my child was on a drug for about a week
(clonidine)…it made him hallucinate bad, so we discontinued it, but:
One day about 2 weeks after discontinuing it, he mentions something about a ‘scary baby.’ I said, “what scary baby?” He explained that during that week, he woke up one night to pee. As he was walking past the spare bedroom. (I had left the computer monitor on), he looked to see if I was in there. He said at the foot of the bed close to the door, sat a naked baby. I said, “Oh, how cute!”
He said “Well, I guess it was a baby…but it was kinda scary… it was as big as a man, and it had a big bald head. And it’s skin looked real white, but kinda bluish from the computer light. And when I stopped to look at it, v-e-e-e-ry very slowly turned around to look at me. But it was dark in there & it’s eyes just looked like black holes.” :eek:
OMG!!! EEeeewwww!
Are you gettin a visual on this???..
…A naked florescent-blue-skinned, morphed, dwarfed, black-holes-for-eyes **overgrown ** ***DEMON ** * baby!!!.
Eeeewwwwww!!!