“Could you get the light?”
When I was a kid, I’d ask this every night I was tucked in.
I mean, I knew that if I forgot to request it, my mom would turn on the tin teddy bear beaming perforated rays across the room anyway. But I never wanted to risk it. I was that fearful of the dark. Why? Some have suggested overactive imaginations. This sounds like as good an explanache as any. And, as a creative writer, I’m in a good posiche to either confirm or deny it. ‘cause this mind’s doing the slalom course through unreality all day long. My brain’s own imaginative range can span from wondrous J.K. Rowling to horrifying Stephen King (generally at the most inconvenient of times). Just like a kid. And these days… I can’t sleep sans darkness. However, that’s not to dismiss what the experts are saying. ’cause that’s been a more recent update. My aforementioned light-requiring bedtime ritual ran far longer than it should’ve after childhood.
(And long after my maternal maker was there to cohost it.)
There was a point in my life (a break from sanity, I think they call it), when I even believed that alien abductions were occurring during my evening departures from wakefulness. And, interestingly enough, I wasn’t alone. It’s not just children. ‘cause there’re plenty of other grown azz men and women who do the same with their own list of unnamed fears. Wanna know the way they get away with it (and keeping their pride intact unlike myself)? By denying that it’s a fear based thing and turning it into some self-diagnosed insomnia problem instead. They indignantly say stuff like, “Oh, I can’t sleep without the T.V. on.” That way it sounds like they have a problem (insomnia) and their doing something productive about it – like a sorta misguided technology based insomnia prescription. And I’m not finger wagging here. I’m identifying. ’cause that’s pretty much a direct quote from my own history. My chiding is mere retrospective facepalm-ing over what I was subconsciously doing back then. (And probably still am with my late night Instagramming.) What we don’t realize, though, is that this’s even worse than the night lights kids use. Children just get a few, silent, artificial photons. (Or at least they used to, when I was a kid.) Most don’t have the additional television cacophony like we use to block out the goblins tumbling out of our brains after watching “Whispers”, learning another college massacre’s transpired, or wondering just how near we are to that prison with the escaped rapist. You’d think it’d make for a nice distraction, but according to snooze experts, lights – especially anything with blue-light – can just exacerbate your sitch by ruining your circadian rhythm.
Plus, with electronics on, we don’t get true rest.
(Also, we can’t control which conflicting bits get implanted into our subconsciousness.)
I’ve written about the effects of blue-light near bedtime before.
And (though I’m still pretty terrible about phone browsing), I’ve made a lotta headway since the old days.
But why do we grown folk feel a need to sleep ensconced in a technology carnival in the first place?
How do we fix the underlying issue?
Well, I suppose what helped me was when I stopped watching ridiculous shiz like “The Fourth Kind” and began infusing my brain with things that have more relevant-to-life messages. Like “Adventure Time”. (You laugh, but I challenge you to watch without learning some symbolically issued message.) Or “Brain Games”. More online documentaries and less T.V. flipping. More reading and less web browsing. More IRL interaction and less digital interaction. Less gossiping and more lauding. While this’s starting to sound like it’s more about enlightenment than lights, I think there’s a bigger message to be shared here. Because, as illustrated above, adults are actually more scared than children. Why? Because we don’t have anyone we trust to laugh and tell us “It’s alright, darling. Just your imagination. There’s no reason to be afraid.” We try to do it through religion, but when most of those are led by hypocrites, obfuscated by politics, and bastardized by misinterpretation, we throw out the baby with the holy water in which it was christened – eschewing any kinda spirituality at all. Dogma or not. And then we cling to the wrong things. We’re meant to be the ones handling shiz, and when we’re in doubt, we start reaching for the wrong answers. Distractions which just amplify the problem. We take on the weight of them one by one like the junk lady from the Labyrith till night falls and we’re left good and schizophrenically terrified – and reaching for more via the complimentary insanity a T.V. or social media scrolling provides.
So, here’s the truth: We’re all imaginative creatures.
We’re all imaginative in that we manufacture our own reality right from our noggins. We receive life through the filter we create. The trick is to make that stimulus strainer a bit more Disney and a li’l less Tim Burton. That means you want a good, healthy, factory to work with. And a flawlessly running subconscious. ’cause the nature of that is gonna dictate who we are, how we feel, and the net through which we reel in reality. I, as a child-woman, had to come to re-associate the darkness with recharging time. (Meditation helps, seeing as you do a lotta self-calming in nada but darkness.) Yet, I couldn’t comfortably do that till I’d eliminated the stuff – Hollywood and news alike (admittedly tough to distinguish sometimes) that was collectively suspending me in a place of negativity. The final step was replacing all’a that with the things that grounded me serenely in reality – and keeping off technology at sleep time. It took a bit of willingness to perform an insanectomy on my crazed brain. But nowanights, by sunset, the whole cast of creatures from “Cabin in the Woods” could be gathering at the foot of my bed (presumably for the annual “Eat whichever limb’s sticking out from under the covers” conference). And I’d still just ask them the same thing I used to ask my mom – but with the opposite meaning.
“Could you get the light?”
’cause without a good rest, I can’t handle all the other imagination monsters my mind sires.
