29/30: writing in and about the dark

Inspired by Layla O’Mara’s early morning sitting in the dark live session, some thoughts on different kinds of darkness: Christmas dark, fear of the dark, camping dark, lying awake in the dark

My sleep has been all over the place for the last few months. Either I’m finding it hard to fall asleep or I’m waking up very early. I suspect it might be a symptom of impending perimenopause, and I’m not quite sure whether to start practising better sleep hygiene or to revel in the unexpected additional childfree time it gives me. This morning I decided to use my extra hour(s) of wakefulness to participate in Layla O’Mara’s sitting in the dark sessions (running 6-7am GMT every Friday morning until the 20th of December). I planned to use the time for writing - by hand and by candlelight, rather than directly into a Google Doc - but I wasn’t sure what to write about. What came out was a series of loose but connected thoughts about the dark and about my experiences of and in darkness. I’ve used them as the starting point for today’s 1000 words.

Come sit with me in the dark

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Christmas Dark

It felt special being awake before everyone else this morning. It’s not unusual for me to be the first one up, but this felt like a more purposeful early rising. I hadn’t just happened to wake up early but I had collected the materials I’d need the night before and deliberately set my alarm for 5:45am, ready to join the session at 6am. It felt like a Christmas morning darkness. There was a sense of anticipation and a few butterflies fluttering around behind my ribs. The same anticipation that I felt as a child, lying in bed in the dark and craning my neck to try and tell if the stocking on my bedroom floor was full yet. And later, usually when the darkness was fading into the deep velvet blue of twilight, taking my stocking with its intriguing lumps and bumps and padding through to my parents’ bedroom with my brother, to show them what Father Christmas had brought us.

Darkness at Christmas time is also the twinkling fairy lights on the houses, or strung between lamp posts along the main road of the village. Christmas trees covered with lights and baubles glimpsed through house windows as I drive home after work. The midwinter darkness that arrives by mid-afternoon and lasts until after my eldest son has left for school the following morning. The joy of mornings in Advent as an adult, stumbling my way downstairs, still half asleep, to turn on the tree lights and the Ikea star decoration that hangs in the front window. Everything looks more magical when lit by Christmas lights on a frosty December morning, even the pile of washing up we didn’t do the night before.

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Scared of the Dark

I was scared of the dark when I was a child. Terrified. I would lie awake in bed after my story had finished and the main light had been turned off, watching the shadows on the ceiling and in the darkest corners of the room. Learning the shadows, committing them to memory so that I would instantly know if any of them changed. I had a night light that had to be switched on before Mum or Dad left the room, and a very precise angle that my bedroom door needed to be left open at, so that some of the light from the landing could seep in. I learned to recognise the different sounds of Mum and Dad’s footsteps on the stairs.

Waking up needing the toilet in the middle of the night, after Mum and Dad had gone to bed and the landing light had been switched off, was an ordeal. I set myself all kinds of rules about how many steps I was allowed to take to get there and back again, telling myself that as long as I kept within that limit nothing bad could happen. I made multiple trips to the toilet before my light was turned off at bedtime, often turning back when I was halfway along the landing to go back to the bathroom for another pee “just in case”. If I had a bad dream I would screw my courage to the sticking point and dash through to my parent’s bedroom, throwing myself into Mum’s side of the bed and often waking her with an unintended knee to the stomach. After a short cuddle she’d walk me back to my own bed and tuck me in or, when I got older, send me back there on my own. I always hated that.

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Camping Dark

We went camping for two weeks every summer of my childhood. Camping was a different kind of darkness somehow. A deeper, more complete darkness but also softer. I found it less scary, despite the lack of street lights or night lights, and the fact that only two thin pieces of canvas lay between me and the nighttime world. I loved lying curled up in my sleeping bag, thrilling to the strange and slightly alarming noises of cows in the field next door shifting in their sleep or sheep bleating in the distance. A tawny owl hooting in the trees behind the campsite or the almost human scream of a fox. The indeterminate rustling of a small animal in the undergrowth very close to where my head lay.

Perhaps it was the completeness of the darkness that meant that I was less scared in a tent than in my own bed at home. No artificial lights meant no shadows, unless the moon was full. Besides, moon shadows were magical and otherworldly, not scary. And oh, the stars. I loved lying with my head sticking out of the doorway of the tent, looking up at the stars. Spotting constellations and naming them out loud: the Great Bear, Cassiopeia, Pegasus, Cygnus, Aquila. Watching for the shooting stars of the Perseid meteor shower and making a wish. Gazing up at the shadowy smear of the Milky Way directly overhead during my inevitable trip to the toilet block in the middle of the night.

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Waking in the Dark

When I was around 11 or 12 years old, I went through an intense period of insomnia. It suddenly became impossible to fall asleep. I would like awake for hours, tired and sleepy but unable to fall asleep, slowly getting more and more frustrated and cross about it. Which of course is not an emotional state that lends itself to falling asleep! I sometimes ended up sleeping on a folding camp bed in my parents’ bedroom after they came up to bed around 11:30pm, counting the rhythmic sound of my dad’s snores in the hope that it would help me to finally drop off. My parents tried to get to the bottom of why I was struggling to sleep, endlessly asking me if I’d been scared by something I’d read or watched on TV, if someone or something was bothering me at school. I wracked my brains for explanations and always came up empty. There was no reason I could think of. It just was.

It passed eventually, or I grew out of it. Thirty years later, I’m having similar issues with sleep. It’s either hard to find or it spits me out early, when it’s still fully dark outside. It’s not a busy, anxious brain kind of insomnia, I can just sense that I’m not going to fall asleep any time soon, or I’m going to be unable to get back to sleep once I’ve woken up. Now I wonder if the cause of both periods of insomnia might have been hormonal? I know that difficulty sleeping is something many women experience in perimenopause and after menopause. It’s thought to be linked to the declining levels of the hormones oestrogen and progesterone. Last time I experienced this kind of insomnia I was entering adolescence; maybe the rapid increases in levels of oestrogen and progesterone at that age can also cause issues with sleep? Like many questions to do with women’s bodies and bodily experiences, I suspect the answer may be unknown, because limited research has been done.

1170 words