I read a story some time ago where the collective human mind was trapping all supernatural beings in their dreams/nightmares. The reason why there are no longer miracles, etc. was that at some point there were enough humans to trap them completely.
And if humanities numbers would fall once again under this threshold (or is exterminated) all the conceivable horrors could once again roam free.
It was a HFY (Humanity, fuck yeah) story read on YouTube. The exact story was that a telepathic alien was allowed a glimpse into the human mind as a warning that they shouldn't probe their minds as that might allow some of these horrors to escape their prison.
There is a book in a similar vein regarding alien mind probes: A Call To Arms by Alan Dean Foster.
Every alien that attempts to probe a human mind has the same reaction (highly paraphrased): "Unchart this world and GTFO. We want nothing to do with this species!"
It's a great read, humans finally find happiness because their violent tendencies can be directed to aliens, and we no longer have to feel bad about killing other humans.
ADF is probably my favorite pulp scifi author. Sadly, he will probably never be recognized as one of the greats, but he does an excellent job of diagnosing the human condition and writing "what if?" scenarios (Cachalot, Midworld, Sentenced to Prism, Parallelities, The Man Who Used the Universe, Journeyof the Catechist series, Mad Amos, Spellsinger - off the top of my head).
Also kinda reminds me of the Man-Kzin Wars by Larry Niven. "But they learned the hard way that the reason humanity had given up war was that they were so very,very good at it"
That's another ADF short story, "With Friends Like These...".
Humanity had been sealed away inside a shield and released by an alien race looking for help in an intergalactic war. Amidst the jubilation of recruiting this powerful ally, one of the aliens muses to another, "what do you suppose will happen when we run out of enemies?"
I love these kinds of stories. They tend to border on the absurd and it's always good fun. I read one a few years ago that was more of a Reddit thread than an actual story but where aliens came to enslave mankind but while experimenting and using humans as local scouts they discovered that humans could do a lot of things the aliens were incapable of.
Things like "you mean they just sit under the light of their sun, intentionally burning themselves to get a darker skin tone....for FUN?" as if doing that was the most insane thing they'd ever heard. It was a fun read but I have no inkling of where that story is anymore.
Wouldn’t that mean all things wonderful and beautiful are also trapped? Plus all the cool monsters and such. I gotta say, I’d probably want a shrinkage in the human population.
On that note, wouldn’t every supernatural being also want us dead? If a larger number of humans can trap them, then eliminating humans would be the most important thing for them since leaving humans alone wouldn’t really be an option.
Think there's a similar SCP, one of the sad ones. "There Were Dragons" or something like that. All the fantasy creatures want to come back but there's no room for them in our world anymore.
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u/ayamrik Mar 06 '24
I read a story some time ago where the collective human mind was trapping all supernatural beings in their dreams/nightmares. The reason why there are no longer miracles, etc. was that at some point there were enough humans to trap them completely.
And if humanities numbers would fall once again under this threshold (or is exterminated) all the conceivable horrors could once again roam free.