A spin-off from the dreams thread, where it turns out several of us suffer from vertigo.

Vertigo is a weird one (as Hitchcock knew well), since it is absolutely irrational and seems to stem from a variety of things. For me, looking up is almost as bad as looking down (although these may be two different phobias?). I've been up plenty of tall buildings in my life (including the Empire State and the CN Tower, no slouches heightwise), and at the top I generally feel pretty comfortable. Unless I look directly down (and in the CN Tower they have windows around the central column that look straight down to the ground - I tried that and my legs literally collapsed), I'm OK at the top of a building, as long as I'm not too close to the edge. But looking up, or travelling up is horrible. I loved being up the Empire State, for example, but queuing for the lift, and counting those 80+ floors on the way up was very scary.

Even worse was walking down stairs a few flights on the way out (from the very top to the 80th floor). At times like that I lose all confidence in the building, physics, my legs, and my psychological ability not to throw myself over the bannisters just for the hell of it.

Vertigo: That's well described, Tim. It certainly is irrational. For example, although I detest flying for all kinds of other reasons, I never get any vertigo on a plane - and, in fact, feel calmer if I'm in a window seat and can look out.

But it's very dibilitating. The 'looking up' thing can be particularly bad for me in large cavernous buildings. RAH? Ok if I'm near ground level and force myself not to look up, but hopeless if I'm further up and cannot but be aware of the magnitude of the place. Ditto cathedrals etc. - nearly fainted in St. Paul's recently. So that's a large chunk of historical (and other) architecture off limits. Bah.  

Ho!  I suffered from vertigo when I was young but grew out of it in my thirties.  Nowadays, my phobias seem to be involved with sound.  I have ceased to watch BBC News 24 because the "beeping and percussive" background intro drove me mad.  It's now worse as the "percussive" background now continues as the presenters deliver details of the headlines.  To me that, in particular, is discourteous not only to to the presenters but to the viewers as well.  All electric guitars and pop percussion are my main hate phobias together with unnecessarily loud "background" music.
Cheers

Blimey Jan, you`ve reminded me of my Dentist Phobia. S-H-R-I-E-K!!!

*Shudder*

Anyone else suffer from what I'd call 'sympathetic' vertigo? The best example I can think of is those wonderful photographs of construction workers having a lunch break, sitting on a metal joist being dangled by a crane during the building of the Empire State Building - with nothing at all beneath them for hundreds and hundreds of feet!!!! I just can't look at those photos anymore without feeling extreme panic.

I used to live quite close to a major military air base, and sometimes laying in bed at night listening to low-flying aircraft passing overhead was quite unnerving. Statistically they may be safer than houses, but nobody wants to be a statistic.

Ho! One should of course from time to time make the distinction between irrational phobias and entirely reasonable and well-founded dislikes. And indeed abhorrences.