Tunnel Vision

I reallized with fresh horror that new doors of perception were opening up inside.  New?  Not so.  Old doors of perception.  The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself be developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe.  Children see everything their eyes happen upon, hear everything in their ear's range.  But if life is the rise of consciousness, then it is also the reduction of input.
     -Stephen King,  The Mist

There are powers out there that we do not understand, powers so complex and inexplicably vast that we have no choice but to shut them out.  The shutting out isn't an instinct, though; we as human beings are far too smart for that.  No, we have to learn to shut these things out.
     I've read a theory explaining children's fascination with dinosaurs, saying that as a rule, children love that which is A) big and scary and B) unable to hurt them.  My personal opinion is that the author of said theory doesn't quite remember childhood.  Because dinosaurs can hurt you, because when the doorknob turns you know it's the velociraptor, and you don't dare to draw the curtain up, even on the second floor, out of fear of staring into the eyes of a brontosaurus or pterodactyl.  The reason these things don't send you screaming is because with childhood monsters come childhood magic, the talismanic blanket or teddy bear, the ancient seal of your mother's kiss or hug.
     As we grow up, the magic goes away.  It's a sad, sobering process, but perhaps a necessary one; by necessity, the world of childhood fantasy is ill-suited to prepare you for the real world.  So the magic goes away, and gets replaced by fact, by theories and rules and laws.  And sure, maybe you keep teddy on a high shelf and when the shadows start to get long, you feel safer tucked in, but for the most part those are nostalgic acts, throwbacks.  For the most part, the magic is gone.
     But here's the thing: the monsters aren't gone.  Oh, sure, maybe they've gotten a little more mature, a little older, maybe the bogeyman becomes the looming threat of global climate change, the dinosaurs become the slow decay of forces hanging around out there in space, forces that twist mass and gravity in strange cycles we can't see and are powerless against, but the monsters are still there, all the same.  So what do we do?  We shut them out.  Life is the reduction of input.  We cast our gaze to the heavens, and saw too much.  It's the curse of humanity, that we see more than we can live with.  Because who can survive, who has the will to do so, in the face of demons?  And yet.
     We never stop looking.  And when we see, when the stars align and for just one second the veil of human misconception is thrown back, we scream, we cry and back away, and we try to forget what we saw because how could we?  We didn't know what was out there.  We didn't know that, while we're so invulnerable to the monsters of our children, our monsters never lose their power.  And in the end, just as every child will grow up and learn that their parents aren't so invincible after all, every adult must learn, someday, that the monsters are never gone.  We just choose to ignore them.
     And some things don't like to be ignored.