We all need a little darkness in our lives. Here's why

I have a distinct memory of first encountering the proper dark. I was about seven or eight years old and on holiday with my parents. We were staying in an isolated farmhouse in the Lake District and I was put to bed in a small back room. The light was switched off, the door closed, Mum and Dad went away, and there was nothing. For the first time, nothing. I held my hand in front of my face and it wasn’t there. Swish, wave, fist, nothing. This was my first memorable experience of what darkness could be. It was now real to me.

As I grew older, I began to enjoy night-time walks. I liked to lie on my back and study the stars. But
darkness remained a kind of aside. It didn’t really matter. 

Then a couple of years ago, my dad became ill with dementia. When he arrived home after a stay in hospital, his relationship to the dark, as to much else, had changed. He had become attuned to darkness, newly alert to shadow. The boundaries between light and dark perplexed and disorientated him. And watching Dad had an effect on me too, taking me back to the farmhouse bedroom. 

For him now, as for me then, this was a raw, demanding dark, strange and tangible. Seeing his fascination and fear, I became newly aware of darkness and what it might be. I had questions: What does it mean to experience the dark? What even is the dark? Writing Into the Dark was an attempt to find some answers.

I began by considering how our eyes perceive darkness and how our brains process it. I explored experiments in outer space, tracking dark matter and dark energy, and reading accounts of being deep underground in cave systems which showed how our bodies respond when they’re forced to exist without light.

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Much of this science suggests that darkness is just an absence, a state of non-light, a deficiency. But most of us would say we know what darkness looks like. We feel it like a presence and know, in turn, how it makes us feel. Which creates a puzzle that has intrigued philosophers for centuries and been a source of fascination to poets, writers, artists and filmmakers.

With this in mind, the book delves into the cultural history of the dark, too, and considers why it’s been such an inspiration and why it remains a powerful motif. I research the familiar language of darkness – think about how we talk of a miserable ‘dark mood’, or the evil of ‘black magic’ or how religions warn us about the ‘darkness of sin’. 

I argue that it’s important to consider darkness in relation to light and look at the language of dark and light ingrained in our speech and writing, asking how this affects the ways we think about crime and race, life and death.

But to get a real sense of the dark, we need to look back too, to historical periods before artificial light when we spent a lot more time in darkness. So the book takes us from medieval curfews to 18th-century pageants, from long peasant winters to the sanctuary of caves. 

And it wouldn’t be a real exploration of the dark if it didn’t consider the natural life that teems in darkness – from bats and moths to turtles and sandhoppers – and how current levels of light pollution are destroying this unique habitat. Our exposure to artificial light is unprecedented in human history. Have you ever seen the magnificent sweep of the Milky Way? If so, you’re lucky: the spectacle is invisible to 80% of the world’s population.

Darkness is an everyday thing, common to all of us, although we rarely pay any attention to it. But when we stop to think, we realise that it has a powerful emotional impact. Children are hardwired to be afraid of the dark, but why? Why do we get such pleasure from a glorious sunset, or feel nostalgia as darkness approaches? Why have shadows inspired painters but prompted disturbing stories of ghouls and ghosts? Is darkness outside us or within, physical or psychological, real or imagined?

Following the dark through the cycle of the moon and into cities, mountains, woods and valleys, the book answers some of these questions. It’s helped me experience darkness in a new way and understand a little more about Dad’s preoccupation.

We’re often conditioned to view darkness as a state to be avoided, an impairment to be fixed. We turn on a light or close the curtains. But the ongoing battle to eradicate it overlooks its importance to our wellbeing and ignores its many textures and moods. This research ventures a close look at the dark and discovers why it matters to all of us.

Into the Dark by Jacqueline Yallop is out in paperback on 24 October (Icon Books, £9.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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