@@UltimateDrDoomyou must be the fastest reader of all time if you get through berserk in only a couple hours. I would definitely recommend it to anyone, but it would take 2 weeks reading a couple hours a day to get all the way through.
"Long Jaunt" is a favorite of mine because the reality of the scenario where these workers should reasonably have safety checks and methods to make sure someone is actually sedated beforehand, even something like holding the mask on for several minutes would've saved the boy, but when you're so used to a process and it's always gone fine you can get sloppy. Kid hops up on the bed willingly, goes limp once the mask is on, press the button and you're good for the next group, easy! Except it's not, and now this family is forever broken and you have to live with being the one who didn't double check. Maybe after 300 years it's so normalized that this job is routine, like how people will drive vehicles like semi trucks heavily sleep deprived to make quota and be potentially deadly hazards. Or someone in food service mixing up an order somehow and giving someone something they're deathly allergic to, or any number of routine tasks that are actually quite dangerous and should be done with care that get easily overlooked. And I realize that that's not really the intended horror, but that's what sticks out to me.
there will always be stupid kids who do stupid things. Frankly I'm surprised some teenagers hadn't heard the stories of the mice and the seventh volunteer and tried the same thing the kid in the story did. Kids will always be curious, and they'll dare each other to take unnecessary risks. The easiest way to prevent that is to do what you said-- double check. Hold the mask on for longer. It's genuinely shocking that the "longer than you think" scenario didn't happen sooner
And then there's anesthesia awareness. It's very, very rare - think like one chance in ten thousand - but sometimes, people are given general anesthesia, and they don't go to sleep. It just paralyzes them. But they're still aware... It's a real-life horror scenario when it happens in a hospital. Imagine it happening in The Jaunt. There'd be no way to know.
Its a different horror. But I think actually a greatrr one. Eternity, infinity, a mild or presence so great you can't comprehend it. Those are horrors you can simply accept you cant deal with, and thus ignore their existance. But the horror of a person making a mistake, and that in a big enough number of people, doing a big enough number of tasks, no matter your safety precautions, a mistake is mathematically garanteed to happen.... THAT is scary. And to realize, you are part of this equasion. That you are imperfect. That sooner or later you will be the one to make the mistake... That is a mind numbing fear that can rob you of all willpower to do anything. Even if we have to handle something like the Jaunt, mistakes, accidents, and harm WILL happen. And theres nothing we can do about aside of gamble in a loosing game to just stay in it a little bit longer.
tetsuro's brain turning into a crystal rlly shows junji ito's crazy writing chops. dude rlly said his brain underwent the same amount of pressure that a crystal has to go through over millions of years to form. makes me want to write a novel or smth
It's pretty brilliant wordplay. It's "longer than you think". Not as in, oh it's longer than you thought it would be, but literally longer than you can think. More time than the human brain is capable of maintaining itself, trapped in an infinite length of time, so long that your neurons begin to fail, one by one.
@@DRI_CATT technically, but Emesis blue was referencing Steven king, there’s actually a ton of references to his stuff in it, a bit too much if you ask me tbh
@@thespaceman4808 Emesis Blue is a wonderful film, in part because not nearly, but *every* scene is a reference to some form of popular horror media. The masterstroke of it, is that EB's whole theme is the concept of time and physical space being distorted and twisted (making life/death a variable instead of a constant) while references are from media spanning from 1931 to 2004, starting with Fritz Lang's "M" and ending with the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. A film about distorted time, using 73 years of media in under 2 hours. Mostly films and books. I have found 28 separate 'inspirations' or references, if you want a full list.
one of my favorite plays on this concept is done in the game "Library of ruina", it's basically the jaunt but done via train, but everyone is awake throughout the whole ride. At the end, once they've mutilated themselves and gone completely insane from the travel, they're reset to as they were when they got on with no memory of what happened. People go through this hell sometimes daily, unaware of the eternity of torment they're putting themselves through. It's a phenomenal way to twist it to fit a grim, dystopian setting
the horror is being in the train. one ride goes on for multiple millenia, your wounds never healing, you being unable to die. something as simple as a papercut is gonna literally drive you insane. yes, its gonna be over. but you dont know that. ALSO it goes into the "teleporter-paradox" in a way: "YOU" are the original consciousness going into the train, going insane over thousands of years - after the ride, they scrape together the pieces of your body and reset your mind to the way it was before. but... is that still you, or a copy? YOU were the mind broken during the trainride - that new consciousness is possibly just a copy of yours, and you just died from the resetting.@@youthoughtaboutit6946
Don't forget that the giant evil corpo running these trains have dedicated "cleaners" who "clean up" the maddened and mutated passengers so that when the reset occurs, there's no evidence left of the horrors! Except, of course, the mental and physical scars on the cleaners themselves. But they don't count, of course.
I’ve been living with a chronic illness for a while now and have become decently accustomed to the reality that my own death is likely coming sometime in the next few years. Death doesn’t really scare me anymore, but dying still does a bit. I worry sometimes that those final, broken synaptic firings might somehow get stretched and warped in a way that makes them last much longer than they appear to an outside observer. There’s not much to be done about it, but I still worry about it occasionally.
Seconding this. You learn to live with a lot if you've got no other choice. Either you live through it or you don't; I can only hope death isn't any more painful than life happens to be.
@@kmarj8 a lot of people who have had near death experiences all say that they’re no longer afraid to die, from what I’ve heard it’s immensely peaceful, even if your body is broken and in pain, your brain seems to have one final surge that stops it, just for a few seconds. Maybe they’ll feel like years, but they’re warm, gentle ones, from what has been studied
when i was a kid, i almost ended up drowning to death, i remember panicking at first but after realizing that i wasn’t getting any closer to the water’s surface, everything started getting cooler and silent around me, even the ringing in my ears seemed like it was fading away, next thing i know im awake on the dock and coughing. It felt good to be alive, but felt weird to now know what not being alive might be like
i have an autoimmune disorder plus chronic depression...sometimes the only way i can cope is to say how i want to kill myself out loud and maybe realize that it sounds like a stupid idea
I know how you feel, I’m 34 and my chronic illness started at 23. Constant horrible pain with good but mostly bad days, we just found a good med combo that changed things last year. So I am really there with you, the new meds reduce the pain but are causing my body to eat itself, I went from 235 to 128lbs from December to March. I know it feels like it drives people away, but try to be patient when you can, hope they understand when you can’t. The way I made it this far is if you have a bad day just try to tell yourself that you’ve done it this long and you can do it for 24 more hours. I’d just keep doing that until it gets easier. We’re in this together.
It's probably the worst thing I can imagine, but that's the thing about an INFINITE amount of time, it takes even the smallest, most trivial burden and turns it into endless pain
@@Guywithaclub youd think but dude wasnt quite lucid, he searched and never thought about how its been 7 years without peeing, never realising its a dream and just him repeatedly looking for a toilet. Also him studying for 9 years for an exam that never came, just trapped in the stress of 9 years of study. When you are not lucid its just these weird mundane dreams but they last years instead of a moment like ours, with us never reaching lucidity.
I'll be honest, this kind of reminds me of SCP-2951, a limestone quarry that contains entities, a team went in and spent 5 hours down there while it was only 19 minutes on the surface, the entities were just screaming one thing, 'Ten thousand years, ten thousand years in the fire'
I remember reading the Jaunt ages ago but forgetting what it was called. It's always the horror that leaves some vagueness to it, something you can't quite comprehend, that sticks with you. What I like about the Jaunt is it puts you in the same curious mindset of the child, even after seeing what the experience did to the prisoner and to the son personally you can't help but be curious of what they actually saw and experienced.
Yeah for sure. You can forget answers, but it's the lingering questions---the unsatisfied curiousities---that stick with you long after the story is over. Sometimes they stick with you longer than you think... lol
I know this is probably not exactly what you're thinking of, but one time I got high as a kite because I took a massive hit off a THC pen my first time and ended up going to the hospital, and it honestly felt like it'd been an eternity in my own mind.. I imagine it feels somewhat close to that but like, infinitely longer
I love that the creators of Emesis Blue used many different themes (and quotes) from works like the Jaunt. Just the line “It’s eternity in there” gives me chills because of how solemn and haunting it is. Someone experiences billions and billions of lifetimes all in a matter of a mere nanosecond. All they can muster? A single line about the sheer vastness of the infinite. Their mind so thoroughly destroyed that all they can eke out is four words that can barely even summarize the sheer terror and hopelessness that they feel. Well done, Crow!
I don't get that title. "Emesis blue" makes no sense etymologically. Emesis is the medical term for throwing up. It can't be blue, that's like saying "itch green", or "hirsutism purple". It's a sensation, a symptom, not a tangible thing with mass.
@@WobblesandBeanI'm gonna reach like Mr. Fantastic and say that maybe it has more to do with metaphorical "regurgitation" instead of literally throwing up. Blue is often used as symbolic of memory and a distorted view of the past, often skewed to a negative perspective. Perhaps Emesis Blue is a metaphor for the regurgitation of memory stored within the respawn machine, throwing up who the person being brought back was into a new shell. Edit: Yes I'm well aware how stupid that sounds
You left out the most horrific detail of the Jaunt: the anecdote about the man who throws his wife into the portal and shuts it off at the same time so she never comes out the other end.
Uh, if you experience a billion years in a fraction of a nanosecond it takes to pass through normally how many billions of years are you going to experience if you just stay in there? It's basically being condemned to a true eternity in hell.
The horror lies in the difference in choice. The immortality people what is the opportunity to make more choices and not be stopped without their consent, but these forms of immortality drag one through an eternity *without* their consent. That is what truly makes it a nightmare.
And the craziest part (and the thing that makes Long Dream scarier, imo) is that Tetsuro did absolutely nothing to bring it about. He didn't go somewhere he shouldn't have, or do something wrong. It just happened to him. A normal man, singled out of humanity at random, and cursed to an unimaginable fate
@@crowmudgeon honestly, that seems like a trend with Ito’s works. Often, he focuses on people that just so happen to be the protagonists of a junji ito story. There’s very little special about them, and typically it’s indiscriminate - they didn’t do anything to provoke this horror, they’re just the unluckiest person to ever exist
This concept actually goes back quite a while, there's a Judeo-Christian story about "the wandering Jew". Some dude did something to Jesus and God's punishment was an immortal life but not an immortal body, forced to live and decay until the return. Thinking about it, a lot of religious fear-mongering boils down to a threat of infinity, some cosmic warden above all excuses demanding societal order with threats of suffering beyond human comprehension.
And this is why it is so important to alert kids to the danger instead of saying "they didn't feel so good afterwards". A stern: "You need to be asleep or you'll get very badly hurt" could have stopped this tragedy.
I like to think that the dad was so worried about having the daughter be compromised to the anaesthesia (which would regardless be administered one way or the other), he didnt account into the actual dangers of the Jaunt, and how an inquisitive and curious mind like Ricky’s would want to see it.
@@Dalauan_Sparrow This is interesting. From a writer's perspective, the story takes priority and we make characters suffer for it. But from a parent's perspective (which I am not) a child is most important. So is it a wash?
The true horror of the Jaunt isn't the Jaunt itself, but the fact that the parent will not be honest with his children in order to "protect them". He wants to sanitize the version of events about the Jaunt, leaving out crucial details that are lifesaving information in order not to scare his children, but in the end, this redaction ultimately leads to the harm of his son.
if you have no concept of time anymore, it isn't scary. you can't feel worried about time that still comes or being bored in a current state because time just does not exist. you just are. that is what some people experiencing near death experience describe. it's no longer an issue... eternity. because eternity doesn't exist as a feeling.
Honestly even the idea of Heaven worries me. How long can one mindlessly frolic and laugh through the fields or be surrounded by loved ones until it becomes dreadfully monotonous and overbearing? An *eon* of *anything* sounds like it could seriously lose its appeal. Endless repetition could wind up numbing or agonizing. Roll the dice. But now consider fucking *ETERNITY* of repetition? No thanks. I think I'd rather take nonexistence after a while.
I have extremely vivid dreams lasting weeks at a time occasionally, and when I wake it’s difficult to reorient myself; the horrifying unreality of some of my dreams has me waking up afraid to leave my bed. Long dream perfectly encapsulates the horror of sleep and the blurry distinction between experience and reality. Amazing video as always crow , your content is genuinely incredible and you never miss on a vid. Look forward to seeing what you make next!
@@crawler0095 I'm talking only from my experience of a long dream I had but I think it can't become reality because dreams even when they feel quite real have too many "fantasy" elements so they are easily can be put in the dream category but still will take you a good time to reorient yourself, in mine the corridor of my house took hours to walk
It really does make you depressed. I have both long dreams that feel lifelike, where I gain valuable insight about life or even are given a choice to stay or leave, and waking up always feels terrible. I will have dreams where I beg to stay, and I end up waking up anyways. I'll fall in love and then wake up. I have a girlfriend of 8 years, I don't hate her at all. I have no intentions of leaving her at all. Our lives are great and comfortable. But, when you're dreaming it seems so new. I can feel like I spent weeks getting to know someone or saving then from something terrible, gaining superpowers or a great new place to live with new friends, and then I can wake up and nothing mattered. And that's the depressing part. The scary part is being trapped in constant recursive dreams where I'll wake up in my bed over and over for hours or even days, only for the last time to be the "real time" and I just sit in my bed shaking waiting for something to tell me it's not a dream anymore. That's why I don't nap during the day. That ALWAYS happens.
this guy just one day came up in my recommended page and decided to become one of my favorite horror youtubers singlehandedly. now that i think about it... its weird, how something i used to fear as a child being the horror genre, now has become the same thing a fantasy story was when i was a kid, an escape from reality, i enjoy horror as my favorite genre now, your video about the horror genre stopping to inspire fear is one of my favorites. keep going my man, this is some of the best content i've seen. i love how you narrate your stories. ❤❤
I wonder if these stories inspired an SCP doc I used to read, where the foundation killed the concept of death. Thus, humanity could not die. However, because of this, the result was just living and decaying and they would never die. All started because a revived higher up in the foundation told them that there is no afterlife, no void. You are connected to you body for eternity. Even when the bugs and pests eat at your body, you still FEEL. It's no pain, but more so like your soul was being stretched. "THE END OF DEATH" Very good read.
Yknow it actually made me think of the SCP I read recently that's basically the opposite. SCP 2718. The body dies, the consciousness remains. Endless and tormentous... Reread your second paragraph clearer and I think we're thinking of the same one! I didn't read any related ones about killing or ending death though. Just that one on its own
The crazy thing is, I think what the revived guy was talking about was the direct result of another SCP that is actually a cognito hazard and replaces the afterlife or what your concept of an afterlife is with still being connected to your body. So there might actually be an afterlife, but because he told them about it, they are stuck.
@@BuckysKnifeFlip yeah, that's the implication. The O5 recording the document narrowly escaped being amnesticised and either escaping or just forgetting the cognitohazard. It's left kind of vague as to whether it's a document the foundation is hiding to prevent people learning about their inevitable fate or being exposed to the cognitohazard, thereby being subjected to it, but I think it's leaning towards the latter
The Long Dream is one of those stories that struck too close to home, there was a point in my teenage years where I went to sleep one night, and woke up in a dream, not just dropping in the middle of it, I don't remember a lot of the details any more but I fell asleep in the dream and woke up in it, and may have even had a sub-dream. It lasted long enough in my head I had to reacclimate to reality and I wasn't sure for the first few hours that I was actually awake this time and memories of the last few real days came back. I'm missing a lot of details nowadays but it doesn't take much to remember the anxiety I felt both in and outside the dream and wondering which I'd wake up to next time for a few nights after and extrapolate that into what Tetsuro felt.
I can relate too. I remember once I went to sleep and I was so incredibly tired that I thought to myself 'I wish I wouldn't wake up tomorrow' because I was so exhausted. I drifted to sleep almost instantly as I lied in my bed, and I woke up in a nightmare. I don't remember much of it, but I remember the desperate need to wake up. I felt like I was trapped. I remember trying to walk but just getting to make languid movements that seemed to last an eternity. I tried desperately to count the fingers in my hands, to pinch my skin, but somehow I wasn't able to. And then, and that is the weirdest part, I dreamt that I woke up. But I wasn't sure if I was really awake or not, it turned out I wasn't. I just know that I felt an immense amount of anxiety and woke up at 4am in a cold sweat some time later...
i once had the opposite night's sleep, to the same effect. normally when i sleep, i'm still vaguely aware of the passing of time. but this one night, i closed my eyes, and then what felt like immediately i opened them again, and 12 hours had passed. 12 hours where i just disappeared. there was no me, no emotions, no thoughts, no sensations. when i woke up i freaked the fuck out, and was scared to go to bed the next night. luckily it hasn't happened since.
Funny you say that cuz I just woke up from a dream like this. I was in my house in the evening and apparently I said something really bad to my teacher and my friends and family came up to me and started treating me like crap until I woke up and it was just a bad dream, still inside the dream cuz my friends and family acknowledged that I looked like I had a bad dream and then I woke up in real life 😭
@@ItsJustChri5 that's what it's like being sedated for surgery, you're awake and then suddenly you blink and it's hours later, zero sense of time passing, so different from normal sleep, it's disorienting enough when you're prepared for it, but having that happen to you randomly one night? that had to be a trip
I absolutely adore the way you intertwined the two stories. I was familiar with both of them already, but your reading and editing was still thoroughly enjoyable. I hope to see more content like this from you, rather than pure analogue horror. What makes your videos great, to me, is your narration, interjections, interpretation, editing and of course smooth voice 😉 keep it up man, and thanks for the great work!
crow, this is - and i do not say this lightly - your best video to date. seriously on some jacob geller level. i love your other analyses but this one, the way you pulled these stories together, the structure, the narration… chefs kiss my guy. this was amazing. i will be returning to this one a lot, i think.
Isnt part if the background gameplay also „returnal“? I couldnt stop thinking about Jacobs video on it, while watching this. If it is, then thats damn fitting
Yeah both “Longer than you think” and “it’s eternity in there” are direct references to this short story. Emesis Blue also has references to The Shining too, mainly in the second half like the Gallagher’s bar and the bathroom area near the end of the movie.
The first symptom was a weird blue emesis then the blue pustules began to dot the skin first the face then eventually all over. You do not die but you suffer interminably. One of the signs of the End Times after Lilith and Sama-el made love. The worst is yet to come...when the offspring erupt into the world.
i LOVE the jaunt and similar works. Horror that just highlights the fragility of human consciousness. Stuff like the teleporter paradox and a story inspired by the jaunt - "love train" from the game library of ruina have always been interesting to me.
"Highlights"? More like asserts. It's a baseless assertion that living longer and longer is somehow bad. What's the difference between that and many people living in sequence? Are you worse off when you have 1 pentillion ancestors rather than 1 trillion?
"Longer than you think." Not that the Jaunt takes more time than you expect it to. Rather, it takes longer than you have the capacity of thinking. Literally, you will think your last thought several times over before you finish the Jaunt. Longer than you think.
I absolutely adore the use of Returnal as the background visuals for The Jaunt pieces, an infinite limbo of punishment and suffering to display the Jaunt’s infinite and endless cycle. Beautiful choice and beautiful video
@@samohaze i was waiting. MONTHS AND MONTHS. the unsettling reality that i was alone set in, seeing that there is nobody to save me. until... you came, my sunshine, my pride and glory, my light of the end of the tunnel, now i can rest knowing, i can play that game...
honestly i do like the focus on the positives at the end. i'm glad mami got to live fear-free, and that the jaunt helped humanity develop so much. for as much bad as these things do, it seems they can do worlds more good. as is true with most things.
What's that one line? Something like "It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, it could have been years"? I've only heard about it second hand, but I remember there was something like that in there.
@@slimej2202 No, I don't think that was it. I know there's a part where the main character runs off and gets lost and is found an undisclosed amount of time later, which is what I'm thinking of. I really ought to just read the book. 😅
The game version is somehow even more fucked up than the original story. The goal is basically to find a way to get everyone killed to free them from AM. The last one alive gets turned into a slug that can never blink or hurt itself. Can't breathe. Can't eat. Just suffering eternally as it's nerves are exposed and it can only sit there writing on the floor as AM tortures it exclusively.
There's a real life story about a guy who was put under for an operation, but only the drug that paralyzed him worked. The drug that was supposed to knock him out didn't. Halfway through the operation, the presiding doctor noticed that the patient was still conscious and suffering, so he gave the patient a drug that would erase his memory. The operation ended, and the patient woke up, seemingly none the wiser about what had happened. Some time later, the patient committed suicide because he had terrible visions of being operated on that his subconscious had dredged up, even though his conscious mind couldn't remember anything. The patient thought he was going mad, and it was only after his death that people looked up his records and discovered what had happened during his operation. This is the sort of thing that scares me at night.
Reminds me a little bit of my own experience. I had perthes disease as a child, and required a number of intense surgeries on my hip. I have a memory of waking up mid surgery once and seeing parts of my hip on a table next to me. Bone, blood, and metal. I couldn’t move and couldn’t communicate. I remember a dull ache where my hip was being operated on. I was aware for about a minute, then I passed out, only to wake once the surgery was complete.
@@regretfulraccoon3560 Its called midazolam, and its commonly used. Its actually easy to block the conversion of short term to long term memories. Once it gets to long term though there is nothing you can do about it. Rohypnol is another one. Whats really crazy is there is an entire field of meds called amnesic anesthesia that merely blocks your memories of pain, it doesn't stop you from feeling the knife. This is common practice during surgery.
@@regretfulraccoon3560 The story is true, but the memory erasing bit was fabricated later I’m pretty sure. Back when I first read about this man, the memory erasure wasn’t apart of it.
I wonder if Mami will react the same way as Tetsuro Mukoda to the long dreams. With her fear of death, maybe she will see being able to live hundreds, thousands, and possibly infinite number of years as a blessing and not a curse.
both stories gave me so many chills. reminds me of two other things - the first, yet another story about teleportation, I believe it was by Harlan Ellison in a short-story collection, wherein the price of teleportation is the loss of the soul - a person put through a portal survives and functions all fine biologically, but they are no longer "themselves" or anyone at all. and the second - a spoiler for "Long Dream" below the discovery of the crystalline orb amongst Tetsuro's remains immediately made me think of another of Junji Ito's stories, Black Paradox, which centers around similar crystalline orbs which contain/are equivalent to human souls, and thus hold great power.
Dude both of those stories are HORRIFYING, and you relay the horrors of the stories very well. This is my first time stumbling acorss your channel, but im glad i did. Thanks for the great video !!
amazing video as usual. your thoughts on the horror media I enjoy so much are always a joy to listen to. long dream is one of my favorite short stories from my favorite artist and it’d be cool to see you cover more junji Ito!!!
Scariest hell i can think of is a mile wide white hot cube. you are trapped in the middle, the weight of the cube pressing on you and burning you and suffocating you. no hope of escape. no hope of feeling anything but pain, of seeing anything, of breathing. No chance for redemption or to adapt. it scares me, and makes me hope that whatever god or deity there is, isnt cruel enough for that... no one deserves that...
That makes no sense. You're in the middle, but it's pressing on you? How does it matter what causes a burning sensation? The sensation is the same whether it's a "hot cube" or a lake of fire. Anyways, that's precisely what hell is in the most popular religions.
Absolutely amazing content. I truly love all of it. I guess you probably won’t see this, but you have genuinely made my days better when you have uploaded. From Vita Carnis to your back rooms and philosophical videos, they all hit
The Jaunt is one of those stories that sticks with you long after reading it. Long Dream is fascinating to me as someone who practiced lucid dreaming for years. I eventually stopped actively trying for it, but I still have a few every month. My subconscious comes up with fascinating whack shit I don't want to miss out on, heh. I've had a dream that spanned over a year of 'plot' (for lack of a better term) before, but the moment I woke up the feeling of so much time having passed started to get progressively more fuzzy. Now I can't remember feeling it all and the only record remaining is an old entry in my dream journal.
Strangely, Orwells 1984 was actually one of the stories that gave me this kind of dread. In other Dystopian Novels, theres always the possibility of escape through death. Even Brave New World, the main character commits self-deletion. At least the suffering is over for them. Even with real world Authoritarian Regimes, like the N*zis or Soviets, they always ended up killing their victims. Not for the people in 1984 though, they dont get executed. The pain never stops. Winston is tortured into compliance, then released back out into the world for the cycle to repeat itself. It gave me such a sense of dread that not even Death is a luxary that people have in that world anymore.
As someone who does have these thoughts from time to time, mostly before I go to sleep, this story really hit deep for me. The idea that someone can be stuck in a dream for eternity, even after death, sounds incredible but looking at it further is the worst kind of torture that no one should be put through. If something sounds too good to be true, then it definitely is
Infinity doesn't sound bad because i dont want to die either, ceasing to exist is terrifying to me and makes me so scared i can't live an actual life. I get super depressed over it... I would like to live forever until i am ready to die.
My dad is a huge Stephen King fan, and he is also a person who really, really enjoys freaking me out. I never knew the name of the story or the full horror, just the image of my dad, always looking at me with wide eyes and a demonic grin, in a sing song voice saying "It's longer than you think~!" It took me a while into this video to realize this was the same story he talked about. The actual story is so much worse than eight-year-old me ever imagined.
Can’t say I’m stranger to the concept of long dreams. I’ve had dreams that felt as short as a couple seconds to literal years. Not as long as these, but depressingly disconnected. Thankfully I’m not a lucid dreamer. That would be a nightmare.
Man, I just wish that the algorith would pick this up, I love me some horror and other people would sure love it too. You make awesome videos and deserve to be recognised more. Have a great day crow.
this is a FANTASTIC video. I was only half paying attention at the start because, to be honest, I was just looking for background noise but at the end, you had me completely hooked. I think I will have to rewatch the video now with full attention.
I can say with all certainty that this is one of the best channels in this whole platform. In the 45 minutes I didn't get bored or distracted for once. Great job, man!
Senku from Dr. Stone would have enjoyed being awake during The Jaunt. When he was in sensory deprivation for over 3700 years, he occupied his time by counting seconds! He wanted to measure the time spent while he was out, so he did. Yeah, Returnal! Love that game. Seeing it in the grainy black and white is really neat.
What I find terrifying about these stories isn't the thought of being subjected to an eternity that's a fate worse than death: but that as far as we know, *death might still be worse than both of these fates combined.* To call a fate "worse than death" is a figure of speech in the highest sense. In The Jaunt, when the traveller's bodies are sent through the portal, they cease to physically exist for a few nanoseconds, before the information is turned back into atoms, and the brain made up of those atoms perceives the few nanoseconds to be an eternity. When we die, we (to the best of our current understanding) cease to exist physically *forever.* It is entirely plausible, using only natural explanations, for the human brain, in its final death throes, to subconsciously decide to lengthen the final nanoseconds of its existence to feel like a subjective eternity- or, just as plausibly, for the "unpersoned consciousness" to continue existing for every subjective eternity afterward, never even having a chance to return to its physical form. Perhaps it's not right to say that I fear death, because at the very least, if my mind makes it to the other side, I'll find certainty. It is correct and proper to fear *dying*, because for all we know, The Waking Jaunt is what it'll feel like- except with the added bonus of definite pain mixed in with the eternity, uncountable infinities of eternal nanoseconds before my consciousness truly gives out and I lose the ability to fear- or until the last star fizzles out. I genuinely cannot know which would come first.
@@Dther99 There are people who have experienced clinical death and were revived afterwards, they do not tell such stories. Maybe this is proof enough that what you're saying actually isn't the case
fun fact: immortality means you have a 100% chance of ending up, alone, after the sun itself turned off, in the twilight reverie that is space, at the penumbra of reality, where dream and reality meet, where death and living become one, no matter who you are, be immortal, and you will end up in space, where no one will hear you scream... fofr there will be no one to hear you scream while your very body tries to not be obliterated in the heat death of the universe.
This has always been the issue in my mind as well haha. Would be cool to see a story develop an immortal character who is beyond atomized in the heat death, only for their conciousness to live on.
I did enjoy that. Both great stories. Sometimes I have dreams that seem to last for days and I wake up not knowing what day it is. It could almost feel like immortality. The ending of Jaunt, when the kid says “Longer then you think” was used in a UA-cam video”movie” called Emesis Blue. Another great video Crow, Thank you
As ever Crow, CRIMINALLY under rated. I am very glad whenever I see you with a sponsor, as you deserve it for your labours. Liked and shared the moment I sat to watch, an evening of Crowtent doesn't disappoint. Keep doing you, you're going places and we're here for it. Excellent narration, quality sound and presentation, immersive but not word salad and you shared the source content where we the watchers can get access to it too. Exactly how a creator should create as far as I'm concerned. Awesome stuff, a thoroughly wrenching telling of the material.
The concept of infinity has always bugged me. Later it scared me. And then it shocked me to my core when hearing “The Jaunt”. The idea of compressing infinity into something with a finite space in a finite amount of time is just absurd, and doing this to a human mind just completely breaks mine just thinking about it. Imagine how many times a mind breaks only for it to break again, and again, and again, until the self is completely gone only it to break again. And after an inconsivable amount of time, the supertask completes, thrusting the mind into the brain again.
Nice video. I've already knew The Jaunt but didn't know about Long Dream so I first read it as you recommended and then watched the video. Very cool. Also, as some people have pointed out, this concept of infinity in an instant or the effects of isolation on the mind (in particular eternal isolation) have inspired numerous SCPs to some certain extent or degree, some of which have already been mentioned by some in the comments, such as SCP-2718 "What Happens After", SCP-2951 "10,000 Years" or SCP-3001 "Red Reality", but there are also others, such as SCP-2701 "True Solitary" , or even, ehm..., SCP-6969 "the joke is sex". They are usually related to tags such as temporal, loop, sensory, neurological, memory-affecting and even sometimes spatial, paradox and extradimensional. I think some SCPs in the tag abcs-of-death are also related to this topic, but I'm not sure because I still haven't read any of them.
This might be a little long of a paragraph, but i wanted to share my appreciation of your work, content and overall creativity skills. For as long as i can remember i have been indulged in every form of horror, as in terms, i believe explains the world in a way that lets all viewers access the deepest parts of their mind. I am relatively new to your channel but have now grown a deep love for the way you go in depth when explaining your theories and the secrets behind stories. Junji ito by far is one of the most creative horror illustrators the world has to offer and honestly i appreciate the fact that you’ve gone into depth about his work, including Stephen king who is also a brilliant illustrator. Keep doing what you’re doing and i again thank you for sharing your creative talents. All in all, its just amazing :)
Time dialation is the single scariest concept ever My favourite representation is in the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas". If you want a genuinely horrifying psychological horror episode in general, with probably the single worst fate to happen to a person ever, then yeah watch it. The plot and the way it plays out is actually amazing and i massively recommend it if you enjoyed this video
The worst thing to happen to people in sci fi is to be tortured forever, not some finite time. Anyways if you can create artificial consciousness, it's extremely fucked up not to set it up to experience as much pleasure as possible. The usage in the episode is absurd. If you can create so much experience so easily, then it's morally WAY, WAY more important to set up the cookies right than to catch any criminal.
I'm coming back to watch the rest of the video after reading "The Jaunt". I love this channel so much. I've learned about so many horror videos/stories/etc because of Crow.
This is my favorite of his short stories. It resonates with me the most out of all of them because I went through an existential crisis about this exact problem at one point.
I'm stuck with chronic pain, it involve most of my back, sometime its like the pain of a very sensitive bruise, other time its like a large burnt. I'm in pain, every second of every minute of every hour and day, it's been going on for what has recently been 15 years, I'm only in my mid 30s and I know from a few specialists that it's not going to change before my death. People don't know and can't imagine what it is, how terrible days can be, how long they feel, I'm stuck in a state where I try to occupy myself, but the pain is often high enough to stop me from enjoying something as basic as following a movie or play some simple game. Every time someone ask me what I do of my days, I always think but never say, I'm basically waiting to die.
This is brilliant, how you made 2 stories blur into each other ending up in perfect (or gruesome) harmony. My English fails me to describe it, but I'm still wide awake at 3:30 AM and now scared to fall asleep... A lifetime of horror movies and stories made me immune, or so I thought. I'm hooked. Subscribing!
I've only recently discovered your Channel and let me say it some of the most horrifying fictional storytelling I have ever heard and I love it keep up the good work man
Infinity is definitely terrifying but sometimes it's hard to grasp exactly how long an infinite time is. Well one way to 'measure' that is the effect on physical bodies. What happens when a creature who's only meant to live a finite life, is forced to live forever? It's terrifying to see the person or animal's body crumble while their mind continues to live through the billions of years they are subjected to. Long Dream has been one of Junji Ito's most haunting stories for me, and it's awesome how both he and Stephen King have similar ideas on this kind of time horror.
I'm one of many who watched Emesis BLU and didn't specifically know the main inspiration was! Listening to the backstory of The Jaunt was insightful, and I kept going 'haha, wow, this feels sooo much like the respawn machine from Emesis BLU, they were definitely inspired by this!' until the 'it's eternity in there' line knocked me flat and confirmed everything! What a beautiful way to learn about the novel that inspired one of my fave short movies to date. Thank you for your explanation on like, everything!
So I think about Long Dream a lot, even moreso now that my dreams have become more vivd and sometimes nearly indistinguishable from reality. Other than Amigara Fault, it's probably my favorite Junji Ito short story. I haven't read the Jaunt yet, so I only have what's covered in this video as a baseline. However, i think I've finally figured out one of the key differences between these two stories, even though they're both excellent and deserve respect in their own right. The Jaunt seems to be focused on the concept of infinite tormet, or at least infinite isolation. The horror stems from grappling with the concept of infinity compressed into an unfathomably small length of time. The most impactful part of The Jaunt is the little boy who has experienced all of the infinite potential of time and space, who has had to grapple with that infinity in his own underdeveloped mind, and forced to confront the reality in the other side of that eternity. The climactic moment being this impossibly ancient consciousness driven to madness from a thousand eternities of isolation, crammed into the body of a 12-year-old in less than an instant, and how anyone who hasnt experienced that cannot even begin to understand the torment that lies within eternal infinity. Ito's Long Dream is undeniably similar, but - to me - takes a different tone and approach to these same themes. For one, the Long Dream is a chronic condition that Tetsuro suffers from, rather than a unique and single tragedy born from ignorance and poor choices. The child in the Jaunt CHOSE to undergo the Jaunt consciously. Tetsuro has no choice in the matter. The horror stems from the inability to escape the infinite, and how each of us must contend with the possibility of an eternal existence. Additionally, Tetsuro's dreams begin as semi-mundane - if a little odd. He doesn't seek treatment until his dreams begin to feel like year(s) of his life. While his long dreams do grow in time exponentially, there is a sort of *gradient* to that experience of infinity. The climactic moment of this story being the possibly peaceful death of Tetsuro, only for the doctor to begin the process anew on his test subject To coopt your cake slicing example of the supertask, Tetsuro experiences one slice of the cake each night, and eventually reaches the supertask toward the end; whereas the boy from the Jaunt not only experienced all of the individual slices simultaneously, but apparently did so an infinite number of times *at the same time* This is not to say that Tetsuro had it "easier" as their experiences cannot be compared to each other, and also cannot be understood by the human mind at all. However, Tetsuro did have time in the waking world to adjust from his dream, whereas in the Jaunt, there was no reprieve from the opressive eternity until the singularity collapsed. Tetsuro was not (necessarily) a man driven to unending madness by the eternity of his dreams. Did he experience more time and struggle and suffering than any other human could possibly concieve? Absolutely. However, he also spent a thousand years in the bliss of love and companionship. The Jaunt offered no such luxury. Tetsuro's last dream may have been infinite, but at the same time it may have only been, say, two thousand years; until his mind and body both crumbled under the tremendous pressure of millenia of life and experiences. Regardless, the man did still die in his sleep, and never had to grapple with potential infinity collapsing into the event horizon of reality. The Jaunt, however, forces its conscious viewer to reconcile the impossible eternity of infinite lifetimes within the bounds of a limited mind, however brief that may be. Tetsuro was given the mercy of dying within his dream. The boy did not. Both of these ants were given the experience of higher thought; both were insects given the impossibile understanding of human sentience. One was mercifully allowed to die within that experience, while the other was forced to become an ant once again.
wtplay.link/crowmudgeon - Download War Thunder for FREE and get your bonus!
I suppose it DOES fit a video about pain to have War Thunder be the sponsor of all things
@@TrafficPartyHatTest Pain Thunder
yo what's the name of the game on the background of the jaunt story?
@@yaboy7744 I think it's Returnal
Shut up
"man i sure wish i could spend 1 hour hearing about the suffering of human kind"
Boy do I have the video for you
Read Berserk. You’ll have a few hours worth of human suffering.
@@crowmudgeonhe he >:D
@@UltimateDrDoomyou must be the fastest reader of all time if you get through berserk in only a couple hours. I would definitely recommend it to anyone, but it would take 2 weeks reading a couple hours a day to get all the way through.
I pretty much hear about mankind's suffering everyday lol.
"Long Jaunt" is a favorite of mine because the reality of the scenario where these workers should reasonably have safety checks and methods to make sure someone is actually sedated beforehand, even something like holding the mask on for several minutes would've saved the boy, but when you're so used to a process and it's always gone fine you can get sloppy.
Kid hops up on the bed willingly, goes limp once the mask is on, press the button and you're good for the next group, easy! Except it's not, and now this family is forever broken and you have to live with being the one who didn't double check.
Maybe after 300 years it's so normalized that this job is routine, like how people will drive vehicles like semi trucks heavily sleep deprived to make quota and be potentially deadly hazards. Or someone in food service mixing up an order somehow and giving someone something they're deathly allergic to, or any number of routine tasks that are actually quite dangerous and should be done with care that get easily overlooked.
And I realize that that's not really the intended horror, but that's what sticks out to me.
Well, maybe the kid shouldn't have been a stupid little arsehole and listened to his parents.
Well, maybe if the kid hadn't been a little conkwocket and just listened to his parents, he'd have been fine.
there will always be stupid kids who do stupid things. Frankly I'm surprised some teenagers hadn't heard the stories of the mice and the seventh volunteer and tried the same thing the kid in the story did. Kids will always be curious, and they'll dare each other to take unnecessary risks. The easiest way to prevent that is to do what you said-- double check. Hold the mask on for longer. It's genuinely shocking that the "longer than you think" scenario didn't happen sooner
And then there's anesthesia awareness. It's very, very rare - think like one chance in ten thousand - but sometimes, people are given general anesthesia, and they don't go to sleep. It just paralyzes them. But they're still aware...
It's a real-life horror scenario when it happens in a hospital. Imagine it happening in The Jaunt. There'd be no way to know.
Its a different horror.
But I think actually a greatrr one.
Eternity, infinity, a mild or presence so great you can't comprehend it.
Those are horrors you can simply accept you cant deal with, and thus ignore their existance.
But the horror of a person making a mistake, and that in a big enough number of people, doing a big enough number of tasks, no matter your safety precautions, a mistake is mathematically garanteed to happen....
THAT is scary.
And to realize, you are part of this equasion.
That you are imperfect.
That sooner or later you will be the one to make the mistake...
That is a mind numbing fear that can rob you of all willpower to do anything.
Even if we have to handle something like the Jaunt, mistakes, accidents, and harm WILL happen.
And theres nothing we can do about aside of gamble in a loosing game to just stay in it a little bit longer.
tetsuro's brain turning into a crystal rlly shows junji ito's crazy writing chops. dude rlly said his brain underwent the same amount of pressure that a crystal has to go through over millions of years to form. makes me want to write a novel or smth
please please write a novel, we need more junji ito inspired works of all genres
Rupi Kaur for edgy teens
@@GleppaPigg oh here comes loud mouth gleppa pigg king of literature 🙄
@@diegognzalz that made the milk come out my nose but i wasnt drinking any
thats a great theory
“It’s infinity in there!”
“Longer than you think!”
It's pretty brilliant wordplay. It's "longer than you think". Not as in, oh it's longer than you thought it would be, but literally longer than you can think. More time than the human brain is capable of maintaining itself, trapped in an infinite length of time, so long that your neurons begin to fail, one by one.
emesis blue reference1?1/!/1/?1/
@@DRI_CATT technically, but Emesis blue was referencing Steven king, there’s actually a ton of references to his stuff in it, a bit too much if you ask me tbh
@@HuneeBruh needs more
@@thespaceman4808 Emesis Blue is a wonderful film, in part because not nearly, but *every* scene is a reference to some form of popular horror media. The masterstroke of it, is that EB's whole theme is the concept of time and physical space being distorted and twisted (making life/death a variable instead of a constant) while references are from media spanning from 1931 to 2004, starting with Fritz Lang's "M" and ending with the remake of The Manchurian Candidate.
A film about distorted time, using 73 years of media in under 2 hours. Mostly films and books. I have found 28 separate 'inspirations' or references, if you want a full list.
one of my favorite plays on this concept is done in the game "Library of ruina", it's basically the jaunt but done via train, but everyone is awake throughout the whole ride. At the end, once they've mutilated themselves and gone completely insane from the travel, they're reset to as they were when they got on with no memory of what happened. People go through this hell sometimes daily, unaware of the eternity of torment they're putting themselves through. It's a phenomenal way to twist it to fit a grim, dystopian setting
I thought it was called lovetown
Doesn’t the whole concept of eternal suffering kind of lose its point if they don’t remember their suffering though?
the horror is being in the train.
one ride goes on for multiple millenia, your wounds never healing, you being unable to die. something as simple as a papercut is gonna literally drive you insane.
yes, its gonna be over. but you dont know that.
ALSO it goes into the "teleporter-paradox" in a way:
"YOU" are the original consciousness going into the train, going insane over thousands of years - after the ride, they scrape together the pieces of your body and reset your mind to the way it was before. but... is that still you, or a copy? YOU were the mind broken during the trainride - that new consciousness is possibly just a copy of yours, and you just died from the resetting.@@youthoughtaboutit6946
@@EinManU This reminds me of the movie "The Prestige".
Don't forget that the giant evil corpo running these trains have dedicated "cleaners" who "clean up" the maddened and mutated passengers so that when the reset occurs, there's no evidence left of the horrors! Except, of course, the mental and physical scars on the cleaners themselves. But they don't count, of course.
I’ve been living with a chronic illness for a while now and have become decently accustomed to the reality that my own death is likely coming sometime in the next few years. Death doesn’t really scare me anymore, but dying still does a bit. I worry sometimes that those final, broken synaptic firings might somehow get stretched and warped in a way that makes them last much longer than they appear to an outside observer. There’s not much to be done about it, but I still worry about it occasionally.
Seconding this. You learn to live with a lot if you've got no other choice. Either you live through it or you don't; I can only hope death isn't any more painful than life happens to be.
@@kmarj8 a lot of people who have had near death experiences all say that they’re no longer afraid to die, from what I’ve heard it’s immensely peaceful, even if your body is broken and in pain, your brain seems to have one final surge that stops it, just for a few seconds. Maybe they’ll feel like years, but they’re warm, gentle ones, from what has been studied
when i was a kid, i almost ended up drowning to death, i remember panicking at first but after realizing that i wasn’t getting any closer to the water’s surface, everything started getting cooler and silent around me, even the ringing in my ears seemed like it was fading away, next thing i know im awake on the dock and coughing. It felt good to be alive, but felt weird to now know what not being alive might be like
i have an autoimmune disorder plus chronic depression...sometimes the only way i can cope is to say how i want to kill myself out loud and maybe realize that it sounds like a stupid idea
I know how you feel, I’m 34 and my chronic illness started at 23. Constant horrible pain with good but mostly bad days, we just found a good med combo that changed things last year. So I am really there with you, the new meds reduce the pain but are causing my body to eat itself, I went from 235 to 128lbs from December to March. I know it feels like it drives people away, but try to be patient when you can, hope they understand when you can’t. The way I made it this far is if you have a bad day just try to tell yourself that you’ve done it this long and you can do it for 24 more hours. I’d just keep doing that until it gets easier. We’re in this together.
Man I love stories about horrors beyond human comprehension
They're just the best
If they're beyond human comprehension then how come they're so enjoyable, huh?
Horrors beyond human comprehension: 👻👹⬛️
Me not comprehending them: 🗿
@@georgeofhamilton gork not understand scary thing. Gork will hit with rock - first human to encounter a horror beyond comprehension
like The Skinny Guy?
Long Dream sounds like a legitimate _nightmare._
No, that’s not a pun. That’s the only word I can use to describe any of this.
It's probably the worst thing I can imagine, but that's the thing about an INFINITE amount of time, it takes even the smallest, most trivial burden and turns it into endless pain
Dude 7 years looking for a toilet when you need to pee, goddamn
@@randomenvelopeI can’t go a few minutes, like really just find some bushes or go in your pants.
@@Guywithaclub youd think but dude wasnt quite lucid, he searched and never thought about how its been 7 years without peeing, never realising its a dream and just him repeatedly looking for a toilet.
Also him studying for 9 years for an exam that never came, just trapped in the stress of 9 years of study.
When you are not lucid its just these weird mundane dreams but they last years instead of a moment like ours, with us never reaching lucidity.
A hell?
I'll be honest, this kind of reminds me of SCP-2951, a limestone quarry that contains entities, a team went in and spent 5 hours down there while it was only 19 minutes on the surface, the entities were just screaming one thing, 'Ten thousand years, ten thousand years in the fire'
That sounds crazy, I need to research it lol
iirc, weren't the creatures implied to be the miners who "died" in the cave in that caused/exposed the anamoly?
@@crowmudgeon did i also mention that the entities shape shifted into the members of the team just with the identification patch burnt off?
@@crowmudgeonalso Check Out SCP-7179. "E for Eternity"
It's about the after life being a paradise island....that last for eternity.
@@chaosinsurgent931didn’t they all make it out though? Isn’t it a safe entry? It’s basically a spooky mine with ghost miners.
I remember reading the Jaunt ages ago but forgetting what it was called. It's always the horror that leaves some vagueness to it, something you can't quite comprehend, that sticks with you.
What I like about the Jaunt is it puts you in the same curious mindset of the child, even after seeing what the experience did to the prisoner and to the son personally you can't help but be curious of what they actually saw and experienced.
Yeah for sure. You can forget answers, but it's the lingering questions---the unsatisfied curiousities---that stick with you long after the story is over.
Sometimes they stick with you longer than you think... lol
I know this is probably not exactly what you're thinking of, but one time I got high as a kite because I took a massive hit off a THC pen my first time and ended up going to the hospital, and it honestly felt like it'd been an eternity in my own mind.. I imagine it feels somewhat close to that but like, infinitely longer
The kind of questions you want to ask, the things you want to know, even though you are fully aware that you don't want the answer.
I love that the creators of Emesis Blue used many different themes (and quotes) from works like the Jaunt. Just the line “It’s eternity in there” gives me chills because of how solemn and haunting it is. Someone experiences billions and billions of lifetimes all in a matter of a mere nanosecond. All they can muster? A single line about the sheer vastness of the infinite. Their mind so thoroughly destroyed that all they can eke out is four words that can barely even summarize the sheer terror and hopelessness that they feel. Well done, Crow!
I don't get that title. "Emesis blue" makes no sense etymologically. Emesis is the medical term for throwing up. It can't be blue, that's like saying "itch green", or "hirsutism purple". It's a sensation, a symptom, not a tangible thing with mass.
@@WobblesandBeanI'm gonna reach like Mr. Fantastic and say that maybe it has more to do with metaphorical "regurgitation" instead of literally throwing up. Blue is often used as symbolic of memory and a distorted view of the past, often skewed to a negative perspective.
Perhaps Emesis Blue is a metaphor for the regurgitation of memory stored within the respawn machine, throwing up who the person being brought back was into a new shell.
Edit: Yes I'm well aware how stupid that sounds
@@WobblesandBean the medication showed at the end is a vial of emesis diazapan a fictional (i think) antipsychotic drug and its why its called that
@@WobblesandBeanwell since its a tf2 animation, I’m sure the blue team was probably part of the naming
@@hernehaugen6878 I like that interpretation, actually. It's pretty good
A video about endless suffering being sponsored by war thunder is incredibly on brand for them
You left out the most horrific detail of the Jaunt: the anecdote about the man who throws his wife into the portal and shuts it off at the same time so she never comes out the other end.
Considering the fact that peoples brains are melted normally, I don’t think the wife would experience anything much worse
Uh, if you experience a billion years in a fraction of a nanosecond it takes to pass through normally how many billions of years are you going to experience if you just stay in there? It's basically being condemned to a true eternity in hell.
Someone should have told that guy that you can divorce
@@toolatetothestory humans in Stephen King stories can be notoriously cruel and vindictive.
@@airshow406just like in real life
The horror lies in the difference in choice. The immortality people what is the opportunity to make more choices and not be stopped without their consent, but these forms of immortality drag one through an eternity *without* their consent. That is what truly makes it a nightmare.
And the craziest part (and the thing that makes Long Dream scarier, imo) is that Tetsuro did absolutely nothing to bring it about. He didn't go somewhere he shouldn't have, or do something wrong. It just happened to him. A normal man, singled out of humanity at random, and cursed to an unimaginable fate
@@crowmudgeon Mhm.
at least it worked out for mami!
@@crowmudgeon honestly, that seems like a trend with Ito’s works. Often, he focuses on people that just so happen to be the protagonists of a junji ito story. There’s very little special about them, and typically it’s indiscriminate - they didn’t do anything to provoke this horror, they’re just the unluckiest person to ever exist
This concept actually goes back quite a while, there's a Judeo-Christian story about "the wandering Jew". Some dude did something to Jesus and God's punishment was an immortal life but not an immortal body, forced to live and decay until the return. Thinking about it, a lot of religious fear-mongering boils down to a threat of infinity, some cosmic warden above all excuses demanding societal order with threats of suffering beyond human comprehension.
And this is why it is so important to alert kids to the danger instead of saying "they didn't feel so good afterwards". A stern: "You need to be asleep or you'll get very badly hurt" could have stopped this tragedy.
But then we wouldn't have a story.
@@Anon-te6uqI can't decide whether to remind you it's fiction or admonish you for valuing the story more than the kid that died in it.
@@peytongonavy storys more important because the kid isnt real
I like to think that the dad was so worried about having the daughter be compromised to the anaesthesia (which would regardless be administered one way or the other), he didnt account into the actual dangers of the Jaunt, and how an inquisitive and curious mind like Ricky’s would want to see it.
@@Dalauan_Sparrow This is interesting. From a writer's perspective, the story takes priority and we make characters suffer for it.
But from a parent's perspective (which I am not) a child is most important.
So is it a wash?
Thank you for releasing a video right when I was about to start a task. My day of procrastinating can continue as planned.
Haha it'll still be here later if you've got stuff to do 😂
Why not do a super task then.
The true horror of the Jaunt isn't the Jaunt itself, but the fact that the parent will not be honest with his children in order to "protect them". He wants to sanitize the version of events about the Jaunt, leaving out crucial details that are lifesaving information in order not to scare his children, but in the end, this redaction ultimately leads to the harm of his son.
That's what I've always taken from it as well. It's like a little white lie that ended up having massive consequences
To me, the concept of eternity is scarier than ceasing to exist. I can’t grasp it.
if you have no concept of time anymore, it isn't scary. you can't feel worried about time that still comes or being bored in a current state because time just does not exist. you just are. that is what some people experiencing near death experience describe. it's no longer an issue... eternity. because eternity doesn't exist as a feeling.
youll get used to it
Honestly even the idea of Heaven worries me. How long can one mindlessly frolic and laugh through the fields or be surrounded by loved ones until it becomes dreadfully monotonous and overbearing? An *eon* of *anything* sounds like it could seriously lose its appeal. Endless repetition could wind up numbing or agonizing. Roll the dice.
But now consider fucking *ETERNITY* of repetition? No thanks. I think I'd rather take nonexistence after a while.
They're both the same if you think about it.
@@getschwifty5537 no imagination
crow’s videos are genuinely some of the best on this platform, imo. the editing + writing are top tier. absolutely incredible work!!
Thank you so much!
I have extremely vivid dreams lasting weeks at a time occasionally, and when I wake it’s difficult to reorient myself; the horrifying unreality of some of my dreams has me waking up afraid to leave my bed. Long dream perfectly encapsulates the horror of sleep and the blurry distinction between experience and reality. Amazing video as always crow , your content is genuinely incredible and you never miss on a vid. Look forward to seeing what you make next!
at what point does your waking life become the dream?
@@crawler0095 I'm talking only from my experience of a long dream I had but I think it can't become reality because dreams even when they feel quite real have too many "fantasy" elements so they are easily can be put in the dream category but still will take you a good time to reorient yourself, in mine the corridor of my house took hours to walk
I feel you, brother. same here. Sometimes I am like ´hell no I am not going outside today, I was outside for three months last night!´ x,D
It really does make you depressed. I have both long dreams that feel lifelike, where I gain valuable insight about life or even are given a choice to stay or leave, and waking up always feels terrible. I will have dreams where I beg to stay, and I end up waking up anyways. I'll fall in love and then wake up. I have a girlfriend of 8 years, I don't hate her at all. I have no intentions of leaving her at all. Our lives are great and comfortable. But, when you're dreaming it seems so new. I can feel like I spent weeks getting to know someone or saving then from something terrible, gaining superpowers or a great new place to live with new friends, and then I can wake up and nothing mattered.
And that's the depressing part. The scary part is being trapped in constant recursive dreams where I'll wake up in my bed over and over for hours or even days, only for the last time to be the "real time" and I just sit in my bed shaking waiting for something to tell me it's not a dream anymore.
That's why I don't nap during the day. That ALWAYS happens.
This is exactly the main reason I smoke. Makes you stop dreaming.
this guy just one day came up in my recommended page and decided to become one of my favorite horror youtubers singlehandedly.
now that i think about it... its weird, how something i used to fear as a child being the horror genre, now has become the same thing a fantasy story was when i was a kid, an escape from reality, i enjoy horror as my favorite genre now, your video about the horror genre stopping to inspire fear is one of my favorites.
keep going my man, this is some of the best content i've seen. i love how you narrate your stories. ❤❤
That means so much, thank you 😭😭
I wonder if these stories inspired an SCP doc I used to read, where the foundation killed the concept of death. Thus, humanity could not die. However, because of this, the result was just living and decaying and they would never die.
All started because a revived higher up in the foundation told them that there is no afterlife, no void. You are connected to you body for eternity. Even when the bugs and pests eat at your body, you still FEEL. It's no pain, but more so like your soul was being stretched.
"THE END OF DEATH"
Very good read.
Yknow it actually made me think of the SCP I read recently that's basically the opposite. SCP 2718. The body dies, the consciousness remains. Endless and tormentous...
Reread your second paragraph clearer and I think we're thinking of the same one! I didn't read any related ones about killing or ending death though. Just that one on its own
@@slitheen3 that one got me ngl the concept itself is absolutely disturbing
The crazy thing is, I think what the revived guy was talking about was the direct result of another SCP that is actually a cognito hazard and replaces the afterlife or what your concept of an afterlife is with still being connected to your body. So there might actually be an afterlife, but because he told them about it, they are stuck.
@@BuckysKnifeFlip yeah, that's the implication. The O5 recording the document narrowly escaped being amnesticised and either escaping or just forgetting the cognitohazard. It's left kind of vague as to whether it's a document the foundation is hiding to prevent people learning about their inevitable fate or being exposed to the cognitohazard, thereby being subjected to it, but I think it's leaning towards the latter
@@BuckysKnifeFlip What is an SCP? I keep seeing people using the word in the comments.
The Long Dream is one of those stories that struck too close to home, there was a point in my teenage years where I went to sleep one night, and woke up in a dream, not just dropping in the middle of it, I don't remember a lot of the details any more but I fell asleep in the dream and woke up in it, and may have even had a sub-dream. It lasted long enough in my head I had to reacclimate to reality and I wasn't sure for the first few hours that I was actually awake this time and memories of the last few real days came back. I'm missing a lot of details nowadays but it doesn't take much to remember the anxiety I felt both in and outside the dream and wondering which I'd wake up to next time for a few nights after and extrapolate that into what Tetsuro felt.
I can relate too. I remember once I went to sleep and I was so incredibly tired that I thought to myself 'I wish I wouldn't wake up tomorrow' because I was so exhausted. I drifted to sleep almost instantly as I lied in my bed, and I woke up in a nightmare. I don't remember much of it, but I remember the desperate need to wake up. I felt like I was trapped. I remember trying to walk but just getting to make languid movements that seemed to last an eternity. I tried desperately to count the fingers in my hands, to pinch my skin, but somehow I wasn't able to. And then, and that is the weirdest part, I dreamt that I woke up. But I wasn't sure if I was really awake or not, it turned out I wasn't. I just know that I felt an immense amount of anxiety and woke up at 4am in a cold sweat some time later...
i once had the opposite night's sleep, to the same effect. normally when i sleep, i'm still vaguely aware of the passing of time. but this one night, i closed my eyes, and then what felt like immediately i opened them again, and 12 hours had passed. 12 hours where i just disappeared. there was no me, no emotions, no thoughts, no sensations. when i woke up i freaked the fuck out, and was scared to go to bed the next night. luckily it hasn't happened since.
@@ItsJustChri5 that happens to me nearly every night. Once I fall asleep my next conscious moment is opening my eyes the next day. I rarely dream.
Funny you say that cuz I just woke up from a dream like this.
I was in my house in the evening and apparently I said something really bad to my teacher and my friends and family came up to me and started treating me like crap until I woke up and it was just a bad dream, still inside the dream cuz my friends and family acknowledged that I looked like I had a bad dream and then I woke up in real life 😭
@@ItsJustChri5 that's what it's like being sedated for surgery, you're awake and then suddenly you blink and it's hours later, zero sense of time passing, so different from normal sleep, it's disorienting enough when you're prepared for it, but having that happen to you randomly one night? that had to be a trip
I absolutely adore the way you intertwined the two stories. I was familiar with both of them already, but your reading and editing was still thoroughly enjoyable. I hope to see more content like this from you, rather than pure analogue horror. What makes your videos great, to me, is your narration, interjections, interpretation, editing and of course smooth voice 😉 keep it up man, and thanks for the great work!
I'd love to see you cover more of Ito's work! You do a great job conveying the vibes.
crow, this is - and i do not say this lightly - your best video to date. seriously on some jacob geller level. i love your other analyses but this one, the way you pulled these stories together, the structure, the narration… chefs kiss my guy. this was amazing. i will be returning to this one a lot, i think.
jacob geller mentioned
Isnt part if the background gameplay also „returnal“? I couldnt stop thinking about Jacobs video on it, while watching this. If it is, then thats damn fitting
Emesis Blue's Respawn machine...
"Longer than you think."
Definitely inspired by one of the stories here.
It's eternity in there.
Yeah both “Longer than you think” and “it’s eternity in there” are direct references to this short story. Emesis Blue also has references to The Shining too, mainly in the second half like the Gallagher’s bar and the bathroom area near the end of the movie.
The first symptom was a weird blue emesis then the blue pustules began to dot the skin first the face then eventually all over. You do not die but you suffer interminably. One of the signs of the End Times after Lilith and Sama-el made love. The worst is yet to come...when the offspring erupt into the world.
@@Shuffles_Artironically, both lijes are said by a character who builds teleporters.
i LOVE the jaunt and similar works.
Horror that just highlights the fragility of human consciousness. Stuff like the teleporter paradox and a story inspired by the jaunt - "love train" from the game library of ruina have always been interesting to me.
"Highlights"? More like asserts.
It's a baseless assertion that living longer and longer is somehow bad. What's the difference between that and many people living in sequence? Are you worse off when you have 1 pentillion ancestors rather than 1 trillion?
@MrCmon113 I am pretty sure that one very long stream of consciousness wouldnt be well off as opposed to magnitudes of ancestors
"Longer than you think."
Not that the Jaunt takes more time than you expect it to. Rather, it takes longer than you have the capacity of thinking. Literally, you will think your last thought several times over before you finish the Jaunt.
Longer than you think.
I think it's a dual meaning and that's part of what makes me love the story so much. Gah, that line sticks with you for a while
“What kind of doctor would just ‘believe’ their patient” man he was so real for this tho
I absolutely adore the use of Returnal as the background visuals for The Jaunt pieces, an infinite limbo of punishment and suffering to display the Jaunt’s infinite and endless cycle. Beautiful choice and beautiful video
It's such an underrated game. Honestly might be my favorite piece of cosmic horror
I would LOVE to know the background visuals for the long dream chapters. Awesome video btw!
same here@@Darkest4thHour
@@Darkest4thHour World of Horror
@@samohaze i was waiting. MONTHS AND MONTHS. the unsettling reality that i was alone set in, seeing that there is nobody to save me. until... you came, my sunshine, my pride and glory, my light of the end of the tunnel, now i can rest knowing, i can play that game...
honestly i do like the focus on the positives at the end. i'm glad mami got to live fear-free, and that the jaunt helped humanity develop so much. for as much bad as these things do, it seems they can do worlds more good. as is true with most things.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is also a great example of this type of horror.
What's that one line? Something like "It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, it could have been years"? I've only heard about it second hand, but I remember there was something like that in there.
@@Deadflower019 "I will say the word now. Now. It took me ten months to say now."
@@slimej2202 No, I don't think that was it. I know there's a part where the main character runs off and gets lost and is found an undisclosed amount of time later, which is what I'm thinking of. I really ought to just read the book. 😅
The game version is somehow even more fucked up than the original story. The goal is basically to find a way to get everyone killed to free them from AM. The last one alive gets turned into a slug that can never blink or hurt itself. Can't breathe. Can't eat. Just suffering eternally as it's nerves are exposed and it can only sit there writing on the floor as AM tortures it exclusively.
@@Deadflower019 I went away, quickly, and hid.
How many hours it may have been, how many days or even years, they never told me.
I've looked up this channel maybe three times this month searching for a new video to watch.. I have been blessed 🙏
Glad to provide :)
There's a real life story about a guy who was put under for an operation, but only the drug that paralyzed him worked. The drug that was supposed to knock him out didn't. Halfway through the operation, the presiding doctor noticed that the patient was still conscious and suffering, so he gave the patient a drug that would erase his memory. The operation ended, and the patient woke up, seemingly none the wiser about what had happened. Some time later, the patient committed suicide because he had terrible visions of being operated on that his subconscious had dredged up, even though his conscious mind couldn't remember anything. The patient thought he was going mad, and it was only after his death that people looked up his records and discovered what had happened during his operation. This is the sort of thing that scares me at night.
That's one of the craziest stories I've ever heard dang
Reminds me a little bit of my own experience. I had perthes disease as a child, and required a number of intense surgeries on my hip.
I have a memory of waking up mid surgery once and seeing parts of my hip on a table next to me. Bone, blood, and metal.
I couldn’t move and couldn’t communicate. I remember a dull ache where my hip was being operated on.
I was aware for about a minute, then I passed out, only to wake once the surgery was complete.
I'm pretty sceptical of that story, mainly because there isnt a drug that can just.. erase your memory. That's a fantasy concept.
@@regretfulraccoon3560 Its called midazolam, and its commonly used. Its actually easy to block the conversion of short term to long term memories. Once it gets to long term though there is nothing you can do about it. Rohypnol is another one.
Whats really crazy is there is an entire field of meds called amnesic anesthesia that merely blocks your memories of pain, it doesn't stop you from feeling the knife. This is common practice during surgery.
@@regretfulraccoon3560 The story is true, but the memory erasing bit was fabricated later I’m pretty sure. Back when I first read about this man, the memory erasure wasn’t apart of it.
PLEASE talk more about junji I can't get enough hearing about his work and reading it myself, this video is exactly the type of thing I love.
I wonder if Mami will react the same way as Tetsuro Mukoda to the long dreams. With her fear of death, maybe she will see being able to live hundreds, thousands, and possibly infinite number of years as a blessing and not a curse.
I have a copy of Shiver (an anthology which has Long Dream) and I really loved that short story. I really like your analysis
Can we all just talk about how AMAZING Crow is at storytelling and content creating? Brilliant, brilliant work, sir.
Thank you so much for your kindness!
both stories gave me so many chills. reminds me of two other things - the first, yet another story about teleportation, I believe it was by Harlan Ellison in a short-story collection, wherein the price of teleportation is the loss of the soul - a person put through a portal survives and functions all fine biologically, but they are no longer "themselves" or anyone at all.
and the second - a spoiler for "Long Dream" below
the discovery of the crystalline orb amongst Tetsuro's remains immediately made me think of another of Junji Ito's stories, Black Paradox, which centers around similar crystalline orbs which contain/are equivalent to human souls, and thus hold great power.
I think this might be my favorite video you've made so far, please continue making content like this. thanks.
Will do, thank you :)
Dude both of those stories are HORRIFYING, and you relay the horrors of the stories very well. This is my first time stumbling acorss your channel, but im glad i did. Thanks for the great video !!
Back again with another great video, and in such a short time! Crow, you never fail!
Thank you! It was kinda fun making another one so fast haha
Crow you gotta do Emesis Blue, I fucking love Emesis Blue and a narration in your style would make my year
Dude you’re such a good storyteller
That's really the best compliment I can recieve, thank you :)
amazing video as usual. your thoughts on the horror media I enjoy so much are always a joy to listen to. long dream is one of my favorite short stories from my favorite artist and it’d be cool to see you cover more junji Ito!!!
Very underrated video. Good work.
Thanks so much dude! Really, it was just a ruse to talk about two things I enjoy instead of one, and everyone fell for it 🤫
Scariest hell i can think of is a mile wide white hot cube. you are trapped in the middle, the weight of the cube pressing on you and burning you and suffocating you. no hope of escape. no hope of feeling anything but pain, of seeing anything, of breathing. No chance for redemption or to adapt.
it scares me, and makes me hope that whatever god or deity there is, isnt cruel enough for that... no one deserves that...
I'm into that
dw there isnt anything paranormal
and you can never die, consciousness will still live on no matter the pain and suffering for eternity
That makes no sense. You're in the middle, but it's pressing on you?
How does it matter what causes a burning sensation? The sensation is the same whether it's a "hot cube" or a lake of fire.
Anyways, that's precisely what hell is in the most popular religions.
Absolutely amazing content. I truly love all of it. I guess you probably won’t see this, but you have genuinely made my days better when you have uploaded. From Vita Carnis to your back rooms and philosophical videos, they all hit
Thank you so much!
The Jaunt is one of those stories that sticks with you long after reading it.
Long Dream is fascinating to me as someone who practiced lucid dreaming for years. I eventually stopped actively trying for it, but I still have a few every month. My subconscious comes up with fascinating whack shit I don't want to miss out on, heh. I've had a dream that spanned over a year of 'plot' (for lack of a better term) before, but the moment I woke up the feeling of so much time having passed started to get progressively more fuzzy. Now I can't remember feeling it all and the only record remaining is an old entry in my dream journal.
Strangely, Orwells 1984 was actually one of the stories that gave me this kind of dread. In other Dystopian Novels, theres always the possibility of escape through death. Even Brave New World, the main character commits self-deletion. At least the suffering is over for them. Even with real world Authoritarian Regimes, like the N*zis or Soviets, they always ended up killing their victims.
Not for the people in 1984 though, they dont get executed. The pain never stops. Winston is tortured into compliance, then released back out into the world for the cycle to repeat itself. It gave me such a sense of dread that not even Death is a luxary that people have in that world anymore.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is another that comes to mind
@@crowmudgeon That one as well
As someone who does have these thoughts from time to time, mostly before I go to sleep, this story really hit deep for me. The idea that someone can be stuck in a dream for eternity, even after death, sounds incredible but looking at it further is the worst kind of torture that no one should be put through. If something sounds too good to be true, then it definitely is
Infinity doesn't sound bad because i dont want to die either, ceasing to exist is terrifying to me and makes me so scared i can't live an actual life. I get super depressed over it...
I would like to live forever until i am ready to die.
My dad is a huge Stephen King fan, and he is also a person who really, really enjoys freaking me out. I never knew the name of the story or the full horror, just the image of my dad, always looking at me with wide eyes and a demonic grin, in a sing song voice saying "It's longer than you think~!"
It took me a while into this video to realize this was the same story he talked about. The actual story is so much worse than eight-year-old me ever imagined.
I still remember the first time I read Junji Ito. He’s just an amazing author.
The jaunt is my favorite short horror story. So glad you’re covering it
Speaking of the “pain never ends”, war thunder has haunted me for years
Thanks for the free links, really appreciate it
i half expected you to jump into a better help sponsorship with that segue and the war thunder smashcut made me actually wheeze. good job.
WORLD OF HORROR GAMEPLAY LET'S GOOOO
"longer than you think"
"Longer than you think"
Longer than you...can think..
Can’t say I’m stranger to the concept of long dreams. I’ve had dreams that felt as short as a couple seconds to literal years. Not as long as these, but depressingly disconnected. Thankfully I’m not a lucid dreamer. That would be a nightmare.
Man, I just wish that the algorith would pick this up, I love me some horror and other people would sure love it too. You make awesome videos and deserve to be recognised more. Have a great day crow.
If you want another story that is about this idea, check out SCP-2718: What Happens After.
I was going to say the same thing! Absolutely terrifying concept.
Ooooooh that sounds awesome!
that's the cognito hazard that makes you feel every atom in your body as it breaks down post-death right?
@@evanmann3447 Right
you have doomed us all!
Oh, how cool! I love your voice and accent already, but now it’s so neat to get to see what you look like too! Yayy! Love your work, Crow!
Alright time to completely slack off for 45 minutes.
Gotta just throw off your whole day ya know
this is a FANTASTIC video. I was only half paying attention at the start because, to be honest, I was just looking for background noise but at the end, you had me completely hooked. I think I will have to rewatch the video now with full attention.
Me, currently in therapy for crippling thanatophobia and existential crisis, clicking this video: "Haha this is probably fine."
I can say with all certainty that this is one of the best channels in this whole platform. In the 45 minutes I didn't get bored or distracted for once. Great job, man!
Senku from Dr. Stone would have enjoyed being awake during The Jaunt. When he was in sensory deprivation for over 3700 years, he occupied his time by counting seconds! He wanted to measure the time spent while he was out, so he did.
Yeah, Returnal! Love that game. Seeing it in the grainy black and white is really neat.
Not sure even he could do that for millions time longer than he did
HOLY SHIT STEPHEN KING???
Yea buddy
@@crowmudgeon HOLY SHIT CROWMUDGEON???
What I find terrifying about these stories isn't the thought of being subjected to an eternity that's a fate worse than death: but that as far as we know, *death might still be worse than both of these fates combined.* To call a fate "worse than death" is a figure of speech in the highest sense. In The Jaunt, when the traveller's bodies are sent through the portal, they cease to physically exist for a few nanoseconds, before the information is turned back into atoms, and the brain made up of those atoms perceives the few nanoseconds to be an eternity. When we die, we (to the best of our current understanding) cease to exist physically *forever.* It is entirely plausible, using only natural explanations, for the human brain, in its final death throes, to subconsciously decide to lengthen the final nanoseconds of its existence to feel like a subjective eternity- or, just as plausibly, for the "unpersoned consciousness" to continue existing for every subjective eternity afterward, never even having a chance to return to its physical form.
Perhaps it's not right to say that I fear death, because at the very least, if my mind makes it to the other side, I'll find certainty. It is correct and proper to fear *dying*, because for all we know, The Waking Jaunt is what it'll feel like- except with the added bonus of definite pain mixed in with the eternity, uncountable infinities of eternal nanoseconds before my consciousness truly gives out and I lose the ability to fear- or until the last star fizzles out. I genuinely cannot know which would come first.
@@Dther99 There are people who have experienced clinical death and were revived afterwards, they do not tell such stories. Maybe this is proof enough that what you're saying actually isn't the case
fun fact: immortality means you have a 100% chance of ending up, alone, after the sun itself turned off, in the twilight reverie that is space, at the penumbra of reality, where dream and reality meet, where death and living become one, no matter who you are, be immortal, and you will end up in space, where no one will hear you scream... fofr there will be no one to hear you scream while your very body tries to not be obliterated in the heat death of the universe.
This has always been the issue in my mind as well haha. Would be cool to see a story develop an immortal character who is beyond atomized in the heat death, only for their conciousness to live on.
I did enjoy that. Both great stories. Sometimes I have dreams that seem to last for days and I wake up not knowing what day it is. It could almost feel like immortality. The ending of Jaunt, when the kid says “Longer then you think” was used in a UA-cam video”movie” called Emesis Blue. Another great video Crow, Thank you
As ever Crow, CRIMINALLY under rated.
I am very glad whenever I see you with a sponsor, as you deserve it for your labours.
Liked and shared the moment I sat to watch, an evening of Crowtent doesn't disappoint.
Keep doing you, you're going places and we're here for it.
Excellent narration, quality sound and presentation, immersive but not word salad and you shared the source content where we the watchers can get access to it too. Exactly how a creator should create as far as I'm concerned.
Awesome stuff, a thoroughly wrenching telling of the material.
The title made my heart sink into my stomach
Tryna channel the hopelessness of the stories, y'know?
@@crowmudgeon very exceptional my friend.
The concept of infinity has always bugged me. Later it scared me. And then it shocked me to my core when hearing “The Jaunt”.
The idea of compressing infinity into something with a finite space in a finite amount of time is just absurd, and doing this to a human mind just completely breaks mine just thinking about it. Imagine how many times a mind breaks only for it to break again, and again, and again, until the self is completely gone only it to break again. And after an inconsivable amount of time, the supertask completes, thrusting the mind into the brain again.
Nice video. I've already knew The Jaunt but didn't know about Long Dream so I first read it as you recommended and then watched the video. Very cool.
Also, as some people have pointed out, this concept of infinity in an instant or the effects of isolation on the mind (in particular eternal isolation) have inspired numerous SCPs to some certain extent or degree, some of which have already been mentioned by some in the comments, such as SCP-2718 "What Happens After", SCP-2951 "10,000 Years" or SCP-3001 "Red Reality", but there are also others, such as SCP-2701 "True Solitary" , or even, ehm..., SCP-6969 "the joke is sex". They are usually related to tags such as temporal, loop, sensory, neurological, memory-affecting and even sometimes spatial, paradox and extradimensional. I think some SCPs in the tag abcs-of-death are also related to this topic, but I'm not sure because I still haven't read any of them.
This might be a little long of a paragraph, but i wanted to share my appreciation of your work, content and overall creativity skills.
For as long as i can remember i have been indulged in every form of horror, as in terms, i believe explains the world in a way that lets all viewers access the deepest parts of their mind.
I am relatively new to your channel but have now grown a deep love for the way you go in depth when explaining your theories and the secrets behind stories. Junji ito by far is one of the most creative horror illustrators the world has to offer and honestly i appreciate the fact that you’ve gone into depth about his work, including Stephen king who is also a brilliant illustrator.
Keep doing what you’re doing and i again thank you for sharing your creative talents. All in all, its just amazing :)
Time dialation is the single scariest concept ever
My favourite representation is in the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas". If you want a genuinely horrifying psychological horror episode in general, with probably the single worst fate to happen to a person ever, then yeah watch it. The plot and the way it plays out is actually amazing and i massively recommend it if you enjoyed this video
The worst thing to happen to people in sci fi is to be tortured forever, not some finite time.
Anyways if you can create artificial consciousness, it's extremely fucked up not to set it up to experience as much pleasure as possible.
The usage in the episode is absurd. If you can create so much experience so easily, then it's morally WAY, WAY more important to set up the cookies right than to catch any criminal.
I'm coming back to watch the rest of the video after reading "The Jaunt". I love this channel so much. I've learned about so many horror videos/stories/etc because of Crow.
Total death is preferable to partial death... Depending on the details of course.
This is my favorite of his short stories. It resonates with me the most out of all of them because I went through an existential crisis about this exact problem at one point.
Jesus, Crow.
That video title hit me like a fucking truck.
Gotta tap into that existential horror and dread am i right
@@crowmudgeon Nah, my 'clinically depressed'+STPD ass just gets triggered way too easy, lmao
Still a good ass title though
I'm stuck with chronic pain, it involve most of my back, sometime its like the pain of a very sensitive bruise, other time its like a large burnt. I'm in pain, every second of every minute of every hour and day, it's been going on for what has recently been 15 years, I'm only in my mid 30s and I know from a few specialists that it's not going to change before my death.
People don't know and can't imagine what it is, how terrible days can be, how long they feel, I'm stuck in a state where I try to occupy myself, but the pain is often high enough to stop me from enjoying something as basic as following a movie or play some simple game. Every time someone ask me what I do of my days, I always think but never say, I'm basically waiting to die.
Damn, they already got my biography out there
I got goosebumps hearing that last sentence, well done video, loved it
O hell yeah 44 minutes of entertainment. LETS GO
This is brilliant, how you made 2 stories blur into each other ending up in perfect (or gruesome) harmony. My English fails me to describe it, but I'm still wide awake at 3:30 AM and now scared to fall asleep... A lifetime of horror movies and stories made me immune, or so I thought. I'm hooked. Subscribing!
Is this man from the south? your speech is both beautiful and uncommon in your line of work.
Yep, thanks very much :)
OH MY GOD I WAS THINKING ABOUT MICHAEL WHEN YOU BROUGHT UP SUPERTASKS I WAS SO EXCITED WHEN YOU SHOWED HIS CLIPS ON SCREEN
00:21 “One day, you will not be Alive” is scary to think about but hopefully doesn’t happen anytime soon to anybody.
I've only recently discovered your Channel and let me say it some of the most horrifying fictional storytelling I have ever heard and I love it keep up the good work man
1:32 WHAT IS THE TRIMMING DOING HERE ?!? 😭
He's my lil' guy
Infinity is definitely terrifying but sometimes it's hard to grasp exactly how long an infinite time is. Well one way to 'measure' that is the effect on physical bodies. What happens when a creature who's only meant to live a finite life, is forced to live forever? It's terrifying to see the person or animal's body crumble while their mind continues to live through the billions of years they are subjected to. Long Dream has been one of Junji Ito's most haunting stories for me, and it's awesome how both he and Stephen King have similar ideas on this kind of time horror.
Why are there unrelated video games playing in the background?
I'm one of many who watched Emesis BLU and didn't specifically know the main inspiration was! Listening to the backstory of The Jaunt was insightful, and I kept going 'haha, wow, this feels sooo much like the respawn machine from Emesis BLU, they were definitely inspired by this!' until the 'it's eternity in there' line knocked me flat and confirmed everything! What a beautiful way to learn about the novel that inspired one of my fave short movies to date. Thank you for your explanation on like, everything!
Hell yeah, another video to listen to whilst driving
That's go to as well :)
So I think about Long Dream a lot, even moreso now that my dreams have become more vivd and sometimes nearly indistinguishable from reality. Other than Amigara Fault, it's probably my favorite Junji Ito short story. I haven't read the Jaunt yet, so I only have what's covered in this video as a baseline. However, i think I've finally figured out one of the key differences between these two stories, even though they're both excellent and deserve respect in their own right.
The Jaunt seems to be focused on the concept of infinite tormet, or at least infinite isolation. The horror stems from grappling with the concept of infinity compressed into an unfathomably small length of time. The most impactful part of The Jaunt is the little boy who has experienced all of the infinite potential of time and space, who has had to grapple with that infinity in his own underdeveloped mind, and forced to confront the reality in the other side of that eternity. The climactic moment being this impossibly ancient consciousness driven to madness from a thousand eternities of isolation, crammed into the body of a 12-year-old in less than an instant, and how anyone who hasnt experienced that cannot even begin to understand the torment that lies within eternal infinity.
Ito's Long Dream is undeniably similar, but - to me - takes a different tone and approach to these same themes. For one, the Long Dream is a chronic condition that Tetsuro suffers from, rather than a unique and single tragedy born from ignorance and poor choices. The child in the Jaunt CHOSE to undergo the Jaunt consciously. Tetsuro has no choice in the matter. The horror stems from the inability to escape the infinite, and how each of us must contend with the possibility of an eternal existence. Additionally, Tetsuro's dreams begin as semi-mundane - if a little odd. He doesn't seek treatment until his dreams begin to feel like year(s) of his life. While his long dreams do grow in time exponentially, there is a sort of *gradient* to that experience of infinity. The climactic moment of this story being the possibly peaceful death of Tetsuro, only for the doctor to begin the process anew on his test subject
To coopt your cake slicing example of the supertask, Tetsuro experiences one slice of the cake each night, and eventually reaches the supertask toward the end; whereas the boy from the Jaunt not only experienced all of the individual slices simultaneously, but apparently did so an infinite number of times *at the same time*
This is not to say that Tetsuro had it "easier" as their experiences cannot be compared to each other, and also cannot be understood by the human mind at all. However, Tetsuro did have time in the waking world to adjust from his dream, whereas in the Jaunt, there was no reprieve from the opressive eternity until the singularity collapsed.
Tetsuro was not (necessarily) a man driven to unending madness by the eternity of his dreams. Did he experience more time and struggle and suffering than any other human could possibly concieve? Absolutely. However, he also spent a thousand years in the bliss of love and companionship. The Jaunt offered no such luxury.
Tetsuro's last dream may have been infinite, but at the same time it may have only been, say, two thousand years; until his mind and body both crumbled under the tremendous pressure of millenia of life and experiences. Regardless, the man did still die in his sleep, and never had to grapple with potential infinity collapsing into the event horizon of reality. The Jaunt, however, forces its conscious viewer to reconcile the impossible eternity of infinite lifetimes within the bounds of a limited mind, however brief that may be. Tetsuro was given the mercy of dying within his dream. The boy did not.
Both of these ants were given the experience of higher thought; both were insects given the impossibile understanding of human sentience. One was mercifully allowed to die within that experience, while the other was forced to become an ant once again.
Such a good vid. I love the story telling!
Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed!