Into The Unknown

You attract what you fear, a saying we were all told, but is it true? Do we? Imagination - a word
that simultaneously means multiple meanings. We vision for various reasons: to escape reality or
predict several outcomes for an issue, and the list goes on. But what is fear in the eye of the
destined, and does it prevail over reasoning and sanity, making imagination the only way your
mind thinks and functions? Imagination overcomes logic when we lose our sanity and become
unstable and when we fear the unknown.

When you become unhinged, you lose your logic. Your mind deliberately plays vicious tricks on
you, making you hallucinate and become trapped in the paradox of differentiating between
reality and imagination. In the excerpt "The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.", we
are presented with our main character Rodrick Usher who suffers from a mental disorder. Usher
cannot differentiate between fake and real, all his senses are heightened, and he hears voices. "He
suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses." ("The Fall of the House of Usher," pg.18)
Usher unknowingly buried his sister alive. Although he hears her screams and suffering voices,
he doesn't check on her. what can motivate a person to such a state? His brain drove him crazy.
Roderick's mental instability caused him to merge between his imagination and real life.

Fear is also one of the triggering factors for the imagination to overcome reason. When you fear
something, your subconscious mind makes you believe that something terrible is about to
happen. In other words, you become agitated and jumpy. Let's say you had a nightmare that you
accidentally killed a friend, the whole day, you will be considering the dimension of the problem,
and you will stay away from that person until it reaches an obsessive level of crazy. In the story
"House taken Over by Julio Cortazar.", we are presented with two main characters, the narrator
and his sibling, Irene. They both are the last living souls in their families and decided that the
house goes to their cousins when both die. They live in an inherited house that has two partitions
divided by an oak door. One day something, they called it "They" took over one side of the
house. So they had to leave their belongings and live on the side they were already on. They
didn't want to go and try to take it back because they were scared of who or what might be
lurking on the other side. Eventually, "They" takes over the whole house. The narrator and Irene
felt manipulated and feared their deaths, so they instinctively ran outside the home, losing all
their plans, throwing the key away, and escaping.

Imagination overcomes reason when the desire or need for something to be true or the fear that
something is true is stronger than the persuasive power of logic and observation (A
psychological quote by Martin Reto). In my perspective, I firmly believe this quote explains it
all. Even though both excerpts are of different genres, they share a lot of similarities. In these
two stories, the characters weren't thinking straight because they were overthinking or imagining
too much. Inevitably, letting their thoughts control them.