Daniel Fortune

With Halloween here, I thought it would be fitting to share an experience I had several years back.

Back in 2017, I started watching the popular zombie apocalypse show, The Walking Dead. In it’s first episode there’s a scene where a zombie that had been chopped in half is crawling towards the main character, Rick Grimes in a park. When I watched it, it didn’t seem horror-inducing, at all.

A few days after I watched that episode of the walking dead, I was taking the backs roads to get to a job site that required me to go passed a land-fill.

When passing the land fill, the smell reminded me of the way that the large burn-pits smelt when I was deployed to Iraq. Thankfully, I was riding with my father-in-law to the job-site, because the combination of the smell and the zombie on The Walking Dead trigged a memory, and I zoned out.

According to my father-in-law, I checked out for a good 45 seconds, or so. There was a time when I was deployed to Iraq that we were in close proximity to a burn-pit and as we were transferring MSR’s, we rounded a corner and there was a body sawed in half on the side of the road as we passed.

After having that falsh-back, I began having horrible recurring dreams re-living that event.

This was troubling for me, because, at the time, I usually never remembered my dreams when I slept. For some reason, this one broke through. During this season, I had to take a break from watching The Walking Dead, and we had to talk an alternative route to work.

For many of us combat veterans who have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), we need to be careful with what we watch/see. Watching war movies, horror/death, participating in certain holidays, like 4th of July, or in my case, maybe even Halloween.

After that experience, I started doing more research about PTSD and the way that media and movies impacts our brains.

In my research, I learned that our unconcious or subconscious mind doesn’t differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined. This is when I started taking what I allow myself to see and hear more seriously.

It’s also possible to induce faux illnesses via social media and other popular media. Therefore, we should be more discerning when deciding to focus on certain things.

Let me know in the comments below how your halloween went. We celebrated ours in our new home/neighborhood. It seems that fewer people are celebrating Halloween than I remember growing up.

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