Fear of the Dark
Fear of the dark, that is, fear excited by the actual experience or the idea of being in the dark, and especially alone in the dark, and the allied dread of dark places as closets and caves, is no doubt very common among children, and seems indeed to be one of their recognised characteristics. Yet it is by no means certain that it is ‘natural’ in the sense of developing itself in all children.
It is certain that children have no such fear at the beginning of life. A baby of three or four months if accustomed to a light may very likely be disturbed at being deprived of it; but this is some way from a dread of the dark.147
Fear of the dark seems to arise when intelligence has reached a certain stage of development. It apparently assumes a variety of forms. In some children it is a vague uneasiness, in others it takes the shape of a more definite dread. A common variety of this dread is connected with the imaginative filling of the dark with the forms of alarming animals, so that the fear of animals and of the dark are closely connected. Thus, in one case reported to me, a boy between the ages of two and six used at night to see ‘the eyes of lions and tigers glaring as they walked round the room’. The boy C. saw his bête noire the wolf in dark places. Mr. Stevens in his note on his boy’s idea of the supernatural remarks that at the age of one year and ten months, when he began to be haunted by the spectre of ‘Cocky,’ he was temporarily seized with a fear of the dark.148 It is important to add that even children who have been habituated to going to bed in the dark in the first months are liable to acquire the fear.
This mode of fear is, however, not universal among children. One lady, for whose accuracy I can vouch, assures me that her boy, who is now four years old, has never manifested the feeling. A similar statement is made by a careful observer, Dr. Sikorski, with reference to his own children.149 It seems possible to go through childhood without making acquaintance with this terror, and to acquire it in later life. I know a lady who only acquired the fear towards the age of thirty. “Curiously enough (she writes) I was never afraid of the dark as a child; but during the last two years I hate to be left alone in the dark, and if I have to enter a dark room, like my study, beyond the reach of the maids from downstairs, I notice a remarkable acceleration in my heart-beat and hurry to strike a light or rush downstairs as quickly as possible.”
We can faintly conjecture from what Charles Lamb and others have told us about the spectres that haunted their nights what a weighty crushing horror this fear of the dark may become. Hence we need not be surprised that the writer of fiction has sought to give it a vivid and adequate description. Victor Hugo, for example, when in Les Misérables he is painting the feelings of little Cosette, who has been sent out alone at night to fetch water from a spring in a wood, says she “felt herself seized by the black enormity of Nature. It was not only terror which possessed her, it was something more terrible even than terror.”
Different explanations have been offered of this fear. Locke, who when writing on educational matters was rather hard on nurses and servants, puts down the whole of these fears to those wicked persons, “whose usual method is to awe children and keep them in subjection by telling them of Raw Head and Bloody Bones, and such other names as carry with them the idea of something terrible and hurtful, which they have reason to be afraid of when alone, especially in the dark”.150 Rousseau on the other hand urges that there is a natural cause. “Accustomed as I am to perceive objects from a distance, and to anticipate their impressions in advance, how is it possible for me, when I no longer see anything of the objects that surround me, not to imagine a thousand creatures, a thousand movements, which may hurt me, and against which I am unable to protect myself?”151
Rousseau here supplements and corrects Locke. For one thing I have ascertained in the case of my own child, and in that of others, that a fear of the dark has grown up when the influence of the wicked nurse has been carefully eliminated. Locke forgets that children can get terrifying fancies from other children, and from all sorts of suggestions, unwittingly conveyed by the words of respectable grown people. Besides, he leaves untouched the question, why children when left alone in the dark should choose to dwell on these fearful images, rather than on the bright pretty ones which they also acquire. R. L. Stevenson has told us how happy a child can make himself at night with such pleasing fancies. Yet it must be owned that darkness seems rather to favour images of what is weird and terrible. How is this? Rousseau gets some way towards answering the question by saying (as I understand him to say) that darkness breeds a sense of insecurity. I do not, however, think that it is the inconvenience of being in the dark which generates the fear: a child might, I imagine, acquire it without ever having had to explore a dark place.
I strongly suspect that the fear of darkness takes its rise in a sensuous phenomenon, a kind of physical repugnance. All sensations of very low intensity, as very soft vocal sounds, have about them a tinge of melancholy, a tristesse, and this is especially noticeable in the sensations which the eye experiences when confronted with a dark space, or, what is tantamount to this, a black and dull surface. The symbolism of darkness and blackness, as when we talk of ‘gloomy’ thoughts or liken trouble to a ‘black cloud,’ seems to rest on this effect of melancholy.
Along with this gloomy character of the sensation of dark, and not always easy to distinguish from it, there goes the craving of the eye for its customary light, and the interest and the gladness which come with seeing. When the eye and brain are not fatigued, that is when we are wakeful, this eye-ache may become an appreciable pain; and it is probable that children feel the deprivation more acutely than grown persons, owing to the abundance of their visual activity as well as to the comparatively scanty store of their thought-resources. Add to this that darkness, by extinguishing the world of visible things, would give to a timid child tenacious of the familiar home-surroundings a peculiarly keen sense of strangeness and of loneliness, of banishment from all that he knows and loves. The reminiscences of this feeling described in later life show that it is the sense of solitude which oppresses the child in his dark room.152
This, I take it, would be quite enough to make the situation of confinement in a dark room disagreeable and depressing to a wakeful child even when he is in bed and there is no restriction of bodily activity. But even this would not amount to a full passionate dread of darkness. It seems to me to be highly probable that a baby of two or three months might feel this vague depression and even this craving for the wonted scene, especially just after the removal of a light; yet such a baby, as we have seen, gives no clear indications of fear.
Fear of the dark arises from the development of the child’s imagination, and might, I believe, arise without any suggestion from nurse or other children of the notion that there are bogies in the room. Darkness is precisely the situation most favourable to vivid imagination: the screening of the visible world makes the inner world of fancy vivid and distinct by contrast. Are we not all apt to shut our eyes when we try to ‘visualise’ or picture things very distinctly? This fact of a preternatural activity of imagination, taken with the circumstance emphasised by Rousseau that in the darkness the child is no longer distinctly aware of the objects that are actually before him, would help us to understand why children are so much given to projecting into the unseen black spaces the creatures of their imagination. Not only so—and this Rousseau does not appear to have recognised—the dull feeling of depression which accompanies the sensation of darkness might suffice to give a gloomy and weird cast to the images so projected.
But I am disposed to think that there is yet another element in this childish fear. I have said that darkness gives a positive sensation: we see it, and the sensation, apart from any difference of signification which we afterwards learn to give to it, is of the same kind that is obtained by looking at a dull black surface. To the child the difference between a black object and a dark unillumined space is as yet not clear, and I believe it will be found that children tend to materialise or to ‘reify’ darkness. When, for example, a correspondent tells me that darkness was envisaged by her when a child as “a crushing power,” I think I see traces of this childish feeling. I seem able to recall my own childish sense of a big black something on suddenly waking and opening the eyes in a very dark room.
But there is still another thing to be noticed in this sensation of darkness. The black field is not uniform; some parts of it show less black than others, and the indistinct and rude pattern of comparatively light and dark changes from moment to moment; while now and again more definite spots of brightness may focus themselves. The varying activity of the retina would seem to account for this apparent changing of the black scene. What, my reader may not unnaturally ask, has this to do with a child’s fear of the dark? If he will recall what was said about the facility with which a child comes to see faces and animal forms in the lines of a cracked ceiling, or the veining of a piece of marble, he will, I think, recognise the drift of my remarks. These slight and momentary differences in the blackness, these fleeting rudiments of a pattern, may serve as a sensuous base for the projected images; the child with a strongly excited fancy sees in these dim traces of the black formless waste definite forms. These will naturally be the forms with which he is most familiar, and since his fancy is at the moment tinged with melancholy they will be gloomy and disturbing forms. Hence we may expect to hear of children seeing the forms of terrifying living things in the dark.
Here is a particularly instructive case. A boy of four years had for some time been afraid of the dark and indulged by having the candle left burning at night. On hearing that the Crystal Palace had been burned down he asked for the first time to have the light taken away, fear of the dark being now cast out by the bigger fear of fire. Some time after this he volunteered an account of his obsolete terrors to his father. “Do you know,” he said, “what I thought dark was? A great large live thing the colour of black with a mouth and eyes.” Here we have the ‘reifying’ of darkness, and we probably see the influence of the comparatively bright spots in the attribution of eyes to the monster, an influence still more apparent in the instance quoted above, where a child saw the eyes of lions and tigers glaring as they walked round the room. Another suggestive instance here is that given by M. Compayré, in which a child on being asked why he did not like to be in a dark place answered: “I don’t like chimney-sweeps”.153 Here the blackness with its dim suggestions of brighter spots determined the image of the black chimney-sweep with his white flashes of mouth and eyes.154 I should like to observe here parenthetically that we still need to learn from children themselves, by talking to them and inviting their confidence when the fear of the dark is first noticed, how they are apt to envisage it.
When imagination becomes abnormally active, and the child is haunted by alarming images, these by recurring with greatest force in the stillness and darkness of the night will add to the terrifying associations of darkness. This is illustrated in the case of the boy Stevens, who was haunted by the spectre of ‘Cocky’ at night. Dreams, especially of the horrible nightmare kind to which nervous children are subject, may invest the dark with a new terror. A child suddenly waking up and with open eyes seeing the phantom-object of his dream against the black background may be forgiven for acquiring a dread of dark rooms. Possibly this experience gives the clue to the observation already quoted of a boy who did not want to sleep in a particular room because there were so many dreams in it.
If the above explanation of the child’s fear of the dark is a sound one Rousseau’s prescription for curing it is not enough. Children may be encouraged to explore dark rooms, and by touching blind-like their various objects rendered familiar with the fact that things remain unchanged even when enveloped in darkness, that the dark is nothing but our temporary inability to see things; and this may no doubt be helpful in checking the fear when calm reflexion becomes possible. But a radical cure must go farther, must aim at checking the activity of morbid imagination—and here what Locke says about the effects of the terrifying stories of nurses is very much to the point—and in extreme cases must set about strengthening shaky nerves. Mothers would do well to remember that even religious instruction when injudiciously presented may add to the terrors of the dark for these wee tremulous organisms. One observation sent me strongly suggests that a child may take a strong dislike to being shut up in the dark with the terrible all-seeing God.