Unfortunately, by the time I started watching
Doctor Who, I was too old for these kinds of buried memories. But, if you'll permit me to wander off-topic from the good Doctor, there were other shows that left a mark.
As a child, I was plagued by nightmares. I had a relatively good mom and dad and a very stable home life, so I prefer to explain the trouble as having resulted from an over-active imagination. One monster of my dreams tended to recur: The Razor. My poor mother stopped using an electric razor to shave her legs because she thought she was the cause, but I never had any issue with
her tool. The one in my dreams was shaped completely different.
Almost every nightmare played out the same way: I'd be alone and something would get my curiosity going. Perhaps I'd be playing on my bed and then I'd wonder what was under it. Or maybe I'd be out in the back yard and want to see something hidden in the shed. Curiosity was always the trigger. And then, in the distance, I'd hear a rattling buzz grow louder and louder, and I'd know I'd done something to get The Razor to chase me.
It'd rush in along the ground, trailing its cord like a whipping tail, then rise up into the air and come in for the strike; its buzz somehow interpreted as a rebuke for my behavior. I'd wake screaming and my mom would have to cuddle and rock me back to sleep again. I had dozens of nightmares about The Razor. In some, it proved able to catch up to my dad's car and cut its way in through the floor.
Eventually, the problem went away. I learned to cope with nightmares and recognize them while dreaming. At that point, I was able to wake myself whenever things got weird ... or control the dream and bend the monsters to my will. But The Razor remained a mystery long after the nightmares subsided.
Years passed. One night, watching an all-night
Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi channel, "A Thing About Machines" came on. In it, the main character hated machines, and one day they turned on him. The television, his typewriter, even his electric razor.
I was in my twenties ... well past screaming for my mommy in the middle of the night, but that scene clawed away years of "growing up" as a terrible old nemesis revisited me while I was wide awake.
Of course, it didn’t take long to figure things out. Since this was the exact object from my dreams, the episode obviously inspired the monster. But … why was it triggered by curiosity? I must have been very young at the time, and probably put to bed long before episodes of the
Twilight Zone aired, but that probably didn’t stop me. I must have been
curious one night and snuck out of bed to watch TV from the darkened hallway behind my parents, and an accident of timing gave my toddler’s mind something to chew on as a reward for my trouble.
