People seem fascinated by what other people fear the most. This is a fairly common theme in psycho-drama, and it’s been picked-up lately by some of the reality TV shows, e.g. “The Fear Factor”.

Our world definitely has a sadistic side to it. There are thousands and thousands of awful things that can happen to a person; sometimes death is involved, and sometimes death is spared, just to prolong the torture. And on top of that, there’s a market for Gothic fiction writers who think of tortures and torments that don’t even exist yet. Low-budget science fiction has taken this into new realms, e.g. people being eaten by huge insects or being turned into huge insects. Yea, the human race definitely has a fetish for the torture and degradation of our fellow man, and a corresponding fear that such fetish will be unleashed on ones’ self.

So where do I stand with this? What torment am I most afraid of? Well, I remember a reading assignment back in college regarding Gothic fiction. I had to slog through some crummy story about old backwoods Europe; I’m not sure if it was written by Poe or Baudelaire or whoever. The author started talking about people who have been accidentally buried alive. Not the landslide kind of burial where a person is covered by a huge wave of dirt or rubble, but the proper funeral kind. I.e., the person who wakes up in a buried coffin.

Under modern conditions, this couldn’t happen. But go back a hundred years or so, before medical science had rigorous ways to determine death, and before the custom of embalming a corpse became universal even in the backwoods, it wasn’t impossible that someone could appear dead and be put in a coffin. They could then theoretically wake up and regain their senses in the dark, claustrophobic silence of that coffin, deep underground. The novelist I was reading claimed that there were various cases in France where a grave digger was putting the last shovelfuls over a coffin after a funeral ceremony, and stopped when he thought he heard muffled cries coming from down below. Those were the lucky ones. The Gothic novelist then kicked it up a notch, telling of instances where coffins had to be disinterred and opened years later, only to reveal that the cloth lining inside the box had been torn to shreds.

Not a pleasant thought. Quite Euro-Gothic.

Anyway, I was reminded of this recently while reading a book about the neurological foundations of human consciousness (The Feeling of What Happens, by Dr. Anthony Damasio). Dr. Damasio was discussing something called “locked-in syndrome”, which I have seen in other books referred to as Guillain-Barre syndrome. It’s actually not that much different from being buried alive. Under “lock-in/G-B”, a person remains conscious, and can still see, hear and feel things. However, they lose just about all control over their body. They can’t move a muscle (with one exception, to be discussed). To doctors and anyone else, they seem to be in a deep coma or a permanent vegetative state. But they are still quite aware of their circumstances. Obviously there is much fear and angst; probably even terror. Your body becomes a coffin, and no body knows you’re in there.

But actually, that’s not 100% true. The only reason we know about this condition is that there usually is one last way for these unfortunate people to communicate with the world. They can still move their eyeballs, just a bit. So you can ask them questions, and they can say yes or no by moving their eyes. That’s if you know enough to look for a meaningful flinch of the eye.

Obviously there have been locked-in people who never got thru to the outside world, and had to live in total isolation for however long their bodies last. And even for those who do manage to get thru, it’s not much of a consolation prize. You’d think that such people would still suffer greatly in terms of angst and depression. And yet, Dr. Damasio says that they probably don’t. He says that somehow, the angst factor in their brains and minds is turned off. They find a kind of inner peace. Zen meditation, without even trying.

Well, I hope never to wake up in a buried coffin, or in a body that’s for all practical purposes dead. But it’s nice to know, at least in the second case, that nature isn’t quite the sadist that human beings are.