Renne Nunes

I can’t quite remember how old I was when this happened—maybe seven or eight. At that age, the world still feels vast, uncanny, and full of shadows waiting to reveal their secrets. We lived in a small house, one of whose walls backed onto a narrow storage room belonging to a local grocery store. It was the kind of place where gossip and fear traveled faster than the wind, and where a single rumor could electrify an entire neighborhood.

That year, one such rumor spread like wildfire: a dangerous criminal had escaped and was said to be hiding somewhere in the area. For days, conversations at doorsteps and shop counters circled around this figure of dread. He was faceless, nameless, but vividly alive in our imaginations. And because my father often worked away from home, my mother, my eleven-year-old sister, my baby brother, and I were left alone with nothing but the whispers of the street and our own anxious minds.

It was on one of those nights that we first heard it. A sound, faint but persistent, threading its way through the walls. At first it seemed like something dragging, then like someone trying a door, then unmistakably like the scratching of nails or tools against wood. My mother froze. My sister looked at me with eyes wide enough to swallow the dark. My little brother, too young to understand, babbled something that only deepened the strangeness of the moment.

My mother moved quickly, stacking heavy furniture against the doors, a silent ritual of defense. We all ended up huddled in her bedroom, listening to every creak of the floorboards, every gust of wind outside, every pulse of our own breathing. Time slowed, stretched, bent around the sound we could not explain. Somewhere out there—perhaps right on the other side of the wall—the intruder was waiting.

What fascinates me now is not the noise itself, but the way our minds filled in the blanks. Because we knew there was a criminal at large, because fear had already prepared the stage, we could no longer hear an innocent sound. The unknown immediately became threatening. The ordinary was swallowed by the extraordinary.

This is precisely where psychoanalysis becomes illuminating. Freud, in his essay on The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche), describes that peculiar sense of unease when something familiar is made strange. A creaking wall, a fluttering curtain, or the echo of footsteps—all of these belong to the realm of the ordinary, but under the pressure of fear, they shift into something sinister. The noise we heard that night was not just sound; it was the return of the repressed, an eruption of anxiety projected onto the world outside.

The mind is never entirely alone. We are porous beings, constantly absorbing and transmitting emotions, especially within groups. Fear is contagious. My mother’s tension infected my sister, whose widened eyes infected me, until all of us were caught in a loop of mutual reinforcement. In that moment, we had become a small emotional collective, bound not by reason but by shared dread. It was as if we were “colonized” by a narrative that was never entirely ours, but rather one spun by the community, by rumor, by the faceless figure haunting our neighborhood.

Wilfred Bion would add another layer. He often spoke about the human difficulty of tolerating not-knowing, of remaining open to uncertainty. Instead of holding onto the unknown and waiting to see what it might reveal, the mind rushes to fill the void with fantasy. Bion called this capacity to stay with doubt “negative capability,” borrowing the term from the poet John Keats. That night, none of us possessed it. Faced with the ambiguous scratching on the wall, we could not bear uncertainty. We had to imagine a burglar, a violent man, a shadow ready to break in. It was safer, paradoxically, to invent a terrifying narrative than to admit we simply did not know.

And so, our small house became a stage for the theater of fear. My mother, the protector, barricading doors. My sister and I, the vigilant children, straining our ears for proof of intrusion. My baby brother, blissfully unaware, playing the role of comic relief without knowing it. The unseen enemy outside—vague, powerful, threatening—was the central character, though he never appeared in flesh and blood.

Morning, however, has a way of exposing the tricks of the night. With the first light, courage returned. We stepped cautiously outside, braced for signs of forced entry, broken locks, scattered belongings. What we found instead stopped us in our tracks. The door to the grocery store’s storage room bore deep scratches, not from crowbars or knives, but from claws. Inside, the grocer’s dog, accidentally locked in overnight, had spent hours trying to escape. The menacing “intruder” of our imagination had, in reality, been a lonely, restless animal simply asking to be let out.

The relief was immediate, but so was the laughter. All at once, the great drama of our barricaded night collapsed into comedy. The villain of our tale had four legs and a wagging tail. The ferocious bandit of the neighborhood rumor was nothing more than a creature desperate for a bowl of water and a chance to stretch his legs.

Looking back, I cherish that memory not because it was frightening, but because it so perfectly illustrates the way our minds work. We are meaning-making creatures. Faced with gaps, we weave narratives. Faced with silence, we compose soundtracks. Faced with uncertainty, we invent certainty—even if it terrifies us. The noise of the dog was, in itself, nothing. What mattered was the story we told about it, the way we stitched together rumor, fear, and imagination into a tale of danger.

This, perhaps, is the lesson: our greatest enemies are often the ones we manufacture. Reality is noisy, confusing, ambiguous. It rarely announces itself clearly. And because we cannot live indefinitely in that ambiguity, we rush to conclusions. Some of these conclusions protect us. Others, however, mislead us, trapping us in rooms of our own invention, barricaded against shadows that were never there.

That night, fear colonized our imaginations, and only daylight restored perspective. But I still smile when I recall it, because the truth was so wonderfully absurd. After all, the terrifying “criminal” who kept us awake with pounding hearts and barricaded doors turned out to be nothing more than a dog who, quite literally, wanted out.

And maybe that is the most psychoanalytic conclusion of all: behind our most terrifying fantasies often hides something utterly banal, ordinary, even comic. The unconscious, Freud once wrote, knows no negation—it will create meaning at any cost. Sometimes it creates monsters, sometimes bandits, and sometimes, quite simply, barking dogs in the dark.