Dec 06 2002
Love/hate: The Dark
Love/hate for Friday, December 6, 2002
The Dark
Despite my advanced age, I’m scared of the dark. My parents always told me I’d grow out of it, but I’m still waiting. I don’t know why I ever believed my father, anyway. He spent his formative years in London during WWII, and was so used to blackout conditions that he could only sleep in total darkness. He required the very thing that I feared. He was also the lightest sleeper I ever met. When I had nightmares (rendered that much more horrifying by waking up in the dreaded dark), I’d go to my parents’ room and as soon as I put my hand on the doorknob, Dad would bolt awake, calling out, “Who’s there?”
He was no help at all with the dark fear, either. He’d just tell me to go back to sleep and think of nice things. As if. Like you can lie there in the dark and not imagine monsters under the bed, or in the closet. Is that the rustling of leaves outside your window, or something more sinister? What’s that strange shadow reflected in the moonlight? And is that the beating of your own heart, or someone else’s? What on earth was I thinking, reading that Stephen King novel so close to bedtime? And why did I go and see The Ring? Now the imaginations of others are added to my own, making my tiny mind a horrorfest.
When you are a kid, everything is so weird, including the inexplicable behavior of most adults, that anything seems possible. Which means that there can be really scary things in the dark as easily as nothing being there. Also you are more likely to believe in the scary or the strange because things pretty much are. Add in not being able to see more than three inches in front of you sans glasses and you have all the makings for being scared of the dark.
I am now pretty much resigned to never getting over it, but there are ways to handle it. I have a small lamp on my bedside table which I leave on at night to chase away the shadows. I keep my glasses in the same place so I can find them readily and see if it’s monsters or just Jack, the demon cat, up to no good. Jack I can handle. OK, maybe not. But she’s still better than the dark and its unknown horrors.