A version of this song has started me thinking about children and fear of the dark.

Kind of odd that one of the best songs from one of the best heavy metal bands is about something as simple and innocent as childhood fears, isn’t it?

But really, it makes sense. Being afraid of the dark is a nearly universal rite of passage, something most of us go through when we are children, and a few of us, the adult nyctophobics, it does not stop there.

So just what is this fear? Why is it so common in children? And how do we get over it?

First, I will share my own personal experience with this fear.

I clearly remember being quite terrified of the dark. It took me a long time to get over it. If it had not been for the gentle pressure of my parents and my siblings, I might not have gotten over it at all.

Early in my childhood, I shared a bedroom with my older brother David, and so it was not exactly up to me whether the light was on or not.

Knowing that my brother is a fairly light sleeper to this day, I can only assume that we both slept with the light off every day. But we are talking myself at maybe three years of age, so my memories of that time are not exactly distinct.

But I do not remember ever being afraid of the dark way back then. I guess with my big brother snoring on the bunk bed above me, I felt safe. Or maybe I was just not old enough to be paranoid and neurotic yet. I remember being lonely sometimes when I would wake up at night and everyone else was asleep, and wishing I had someone to talk to, but no fear.

So it was not until my father build an extension onto our house and suddenly every kid got their own bedroom. which meant that suddenly, I was sleeping alone for the first time.

And that is when the trouble started. I remember, in fact, not being really all that keen on the idea of having a bedroom all to myself if it meant I was all alone, but I was far too young to be able to sufficiently articulate that idea, let alone bold enough to go against what everyone else in the family clearly thought was a great thing.

I think I complained about it to my brother Dave once, and that was it.

So there I was, a wee thing not yet of school age, sleeping alone at night for the first time. But nobody was asking me to sleep in the dark yet, so things were not too bad.

But then my siblings and my parents started pressuring me to learn to sleep in the dark. At the time I could not see the point of this, but what kid could? It just seemed that they were needlessly making life harder for me when the light in my room worked just fine.

The first step was to take away the other lamps in my room, leaving me only with the “night light” attached to the head of my bed.

I put “night light” in quotes because since then, I have discovered what a “night light” normally means. Usually, it is something plugged into an outlet that provides a soft, gentle, reassuring glow for the child. Something to make the darkness less than total, and yet, still not be bright enough to keep the child awake all night.

My “night light” was actually a perfectly normal 60W bulb in a plastic holder. It could easily light my entire room, and because it was literally right over my head, it hardly made any difference that the overhead light and the other lamp did not work any more.

But then came the pressure to turn that off when I wanted to go to sleep. And that was… not cool.

After I resisted that for a while, my parents decided on a compromise : I would turn out my “night light”, and they would close my door most of the way, and leave the light on in the hallway outside my room, and thus give me a sliver of light to cling to in the darkness.

And that lasted for a while. It took me a long time to get used to it, and I spent a lot of scary nights imagining that a ninja-like bogeyman, a human shaped creature completely covered, head to toe, in night-black clothing (not even eyeholes… all black) was tucked into the corner of my room opposite the head of my bed and just waiting for me to go to sleep so it could attack me.

But eventually I adjusted. Then, it was time for the last step : turning out the hall light. This was a move championed by my brother Dave, who had the bedroom next to mine and who was rather sick of the hall light keeping him awake at night.

And that seemed like a big deal at the time, but honestly, I got used to it pretty fast. It helped that my brother had been waiting till I fell asleep and then sneaking out to turn out the hall light anyhow.

Of course, as an adult, I want it to be as dark as possible in my room when I sleep, and I totally understand why my parents and siblings put me through what they did.

But why, exactly, was I afraid of the dark in the first place? What’s the big deal?

I think that, primarily, fear of the dark is fear of the unknown. When you are alone in the dark, you have effectively lost your primary sense, sight. The amount of information you have about your environment plummets to not even a quarter of what it was before.

And when you are a kid, you lack the mental defenses to distinguish between “I don’t know what is there” and “I know something awful is there!!!”

It is easy for your mind to project onto this blank blackness whatever fears and insecurities you have as a kid, and kids have plenty of those, being tiny people in a big scary world that they mostly do not understand at all.

Anytime anyone gets too nostalgic for childhood, I like to remind them of fear of the dark.

It is also possible, though, that our childhood fear of the dark is also influenced by a deep seated and quite sensible instinct for young humans to stay within the light of the fire that was keeping all those predators away at night.

Even us mighty humans are prey animals when we are young, and it would make sense to be scared of the dark when the dark could legitimately be filled with predators eager for a snack called “you”.

I think that might, even, be why we imagine horrible monsters in that darkness. Our instincts are telling us that there are predators out there, and our imaginations plus whatever we have seen that seems very scary combine to create these illusions.

And I don’t think that necessarily stops when we become adults, either. A lot of supposedly grownups seem quite willing to imagine, and believe, that the unknown things that frighten them must be incredibly dangerous, even if any reasonable examination would show them to be harmless and that their fears are wildly exaggerated or even entirely illusory.

Sure, we stop being afraid of the dark.

But some people never stop being afraid of the unknown, and they are quite capable of filling the voids in their knowledge with whatever bogeymen will justify that fear.

So I ask you, readers : were you afraid of the dark?