Most people are afraid of darkness at some point in their life, other people are afraid of darkness most of their life… and other people are just afraid of the light!
When we’re kids being afraid of the darkness usually just means we don’t want to turn the lights off at night. In the face of the uncertainty darkness represents, since we don’t know what we might run into when it’s dark, we start imagining the worst, making up stories in our minds about monsters or ghosts. Then, eventually, some day, as we grow older, we start realizing our fear is just a product of our imagination, and reality is the worst we might run into in the dark is a piece of furniture, which to be fair can be rather painful when we run into it with our pinky toe or our knee at just the right angle, yikes!
Regardless, once we’ve grown out of our fear of literal darkness, this fear doesn’t just disappear, it evolves. Continue reading