answer:Welcome to ask-public. For me, it was turkey dinners. When we went to my grandmother’s house for holiday dinners and other events, my brother, sisters and I had a lot more time to explore the books and toys that she had stored for us. I always gravitated toward an illustrated book of poems and stories for kids, and in particular to an illustration in one of them showing a young boy (around my age – and I guess he still is) who was lying on his stomach on the floor, in very obvious fear and distress, with a huge turkey behind him rolling an even bigger pumpkin up his back. The turkey had a look of pure evil in his eyes. The pumpkin had eyes, too, and was a willing agent in the boy’s punishment. The turkey was joined by ranks of other beings: marching asparagus and carrots; squadrons of potatoes marching in close rank behind the pumpkin; squashes and turnips flanking the boy so he couldn’t get away; pies and loaves of bread flying in close formation overhead, etc. And it was illustrated as “just a dream” of a boy in bed after eating too much of a good dinner, a pretty obvious cartoon, all in all. The horror of that cartoon lasted in me for years. I never spoke to anyone about it. And the only way that I ever got over it, because obviously I did – I’ve been over-eating for many years without that particular nightmare still haunting me – was to continue to confront it, visit after visit and meal after meal, until the emotional charge was gone. And that is what you will have to do. It’s what artists and song writers and poets and storytellers and movie makers have always done: paint it, sculpt it, write it, sing it and in any number of ways confront it in whatever ways you can until you “get it out”. Or you could seek therapy, but art is so much more enjoyable, don’t you think? Where do you suppose the idea came from in the first place? It was some other artist’s horror, and this was his way of dealing with it. Now it’s your turn.