Imagine waking in the middle of the night, frightened and fighting to catch your breath, all due to one image. This was my experience time and time, again, at the young age of five. If you've ever seen the werewolf from Harry Potter (also Professor Lupin in his human form), you have seen the creature from my dream. Hunch-backed, wire-haired and toothy, this was no image fit for a five year old's slumber. I was forced to run from the creature, on its way into my backyard, in order to save myself. But in attempting to save myself, I did the opposite, drawing attention to myself. A friend of my father's would always try to save me, but as he grabbed me, I slipped from his hands and was thrown into the path of the wolf... This is where I would awaken.
For years, until I was thirteen years old, I dreamt of creatures such as this. They all were half wolf, half human, and always held the agenda of terrorizing me or the people around them.
Images such as these were popular in the minds of men and women of the Renaissance era, and brought much attention to the study of lycanthropy. Beliefs in such brought about a scare that anyone was capable of being taken into the custody of another wereman and made into one, himself. A common English belief was that the good who were exposed to evil were more likely to experience the horrors of lycanthropy.
2 comments:
So that's where it came from! I wondered what inspired you to snatch up the werewolf topic so quickly. If there is anything of moderate rationality to tantalize our sense of the supernatural, it has to be dreams.
I love how open you are to the idea of "otherness." Those stories you told at the beginning of class fascinated me from the first. How can one keep one's mind on literature as words alone when there's so much great weirdness out there to discuss?
But this is rambling. I expect I'll comment in a more intellectual fashion at some point that is not 3:00 AM.
Well, I appreciate you and your comments in class, as well. I wish that we were able to do more in the fashion of sheer discussion in these areas. They're so interesting!!! I can't get enough of the supernatural. It's neat!
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