The only spell we are aware of which is able to repel these creatures, is called the Patronus charm. You'll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life," as Professor Lupin tells Harry. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself. Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can't see them. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. They "are among the foulest creature that walk this earth. Its only known ability, besides the happiness drain, is the ability to perform the "Dementor's Kiss", which is the act of extracting the human soul through the mouth, leaving nothing more than a living body, without any memory, feelings, or sense of self. This creature has the property that only wizards can see it. Because of their power to drain happiness and hope from humans, they have been set the duty of being guards at Azkaban, where they prevent the prisoners from having the will or ability to escape. "Its face was completely hidden beneath its hood." When we first see it, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, we do see a part of it: there was "a hand protruding from the cloak and it was glistening, greyish, slimy-looking, and scabbed, like something dead that had decayed in water the thing beneath the hood, whatever it was, drew a long, slow, rattling breath, as though it were trying to suck something more than air from its surroundings."ĭementors are dark creatures that consume human happiness, creating an ambiance of coldness, darkness, misery and despair. Rowling w/ Simon Armitage on The Poet Laureate.Beginner warning: Details follow which you may not wish to read at your current level.Īt its first appearance, a Dementor is described as a "cloaked figure". Now I'd remembered the dream and I obviously knew exactly what the dementors looked like, but it was- I don't even remember how long it was but it might have been a couple of years before it suddenly clicked and I thought "that's that dream that's why the dementors look the way they look." And I had a dream when I was a child that I was hiding from a creature that looked just like a dementor, the empty black cloak and the withered hand and it was sort of drifting towards me it didn't seem to have feet and I was terrified and I woke up. At the same time I realized subsequently, that their appearance owed everything to a dream I'd had when I was a child that suddenly came back to me. But at the same time it is cathartic to take those things and turn them into fiction - you know I wasn't talking about someone being literally depressed, I was turning depression into a creature. But because we do draw on our own experiences and my experience of depression was was a very bad one as it is for everyone who suffers from it. Not because I was trying to write biography. Not because I was trying to tell the world that I was depressed. I consciously set out to embody depression. Rowling: Well it's interesting you say the dementors because the answer is 50/50. Literary commentators are always keen to read biography into fiction, so when it's said for example that the dementors are a metaphor for depression, is that something that you accept? Were you deliberately trying to engineer plots that at some level would discuss you in your life or did that come as a revelation afterwards? Simon Armitage: Like everybody else in this world you've had a life of ups and downs and you know as writers we know that life brings sorrows as as well as joys. Their form is very similar to any number of generic things - ghosts, wraiths, that thing from Scream - but if you want to tie them to a classical cause, you have to step outside classical creatures and take them as an allegory for Depression.ĭementors are written as an embodiment of depression, with their appearance taken from a dream that Rowling had as a child ( Interview here quote is from the end of section 4) That cold absence of feeling – that really hollowed-out feeling. Never been there because it’s not sadness. And it’s so difficult to describe to someone who’s That absence of feeling – and it’s even the absence of hope that youĬan feel better. When I was sort of twenty-five to twenty-eight was a dark time. Tendencies toward depression from quite young. Rowling: Yes, but I think it was a kind of delayed – I think I had Winfrey: So you became depressed after your mother died? Out-of-universe, Dementors were an avatar for Depression:
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