by Paul Bogard
“Take sex, for example. TV and movie portrayal of sex can leave a person feeling very inadequate. ‘My sex life is not like that; what does that say about me?’ And with sleep, if we overidealize sleep and say, ‘If you are not sleeping exactly like this, you must have something very wrong with you,’ it holds the wrong standard up. We have created wrong expectations.”
I sleep pretty well, I tell McCall, although I definitely feel better if I get eight hours. And I have long dreamed of an ideal schedule where I could stay up into the night until about one in the morning, savoring the quiet and solitude of the dark house, lake, or yard… and then get up at five in the morning to enjoy the dawn. I love the late night, I love the early morning, and I wish I could sleep in the afternoon.
“You should move to Spain,” he says.
Exactly. And it’s a great idea, except that the Spanish tradition of the siesta is melting away under the heat of expectations from worldwide capitalism that we all be open for business at all hours, and certainly over lunch and into the early afternoon. What might this world be like, I wonder, if we were moving in the opposite direction, encouraging people everywhere to take a couple of hours in the middle of the day to savor eating, making love, and sleep?
Unfortunately, that’s not the way we’re headed. In fact, the second thing we’ve done to ourselves, says McCall, is to bring electric light into our private nights, into our bedrooms. “Purely from a behavioral standpoint, that light is the apple in the Garden of Eden that leads us down the road of temptation into doing all the sleep-averse behaviors that we don’t need to be involved with, whether it’s watching TV or playing on the Internet. With electric lights we have the option of staying up later and compressing our time in bed. And so, suddenly it becomes abnormal to be awake in the middle of the night.”
McCall suspects this “option” of staying up later because of electric lights contributes as well to serious sleep disorders such as the epidemic of obstructive sleep apnea. “Usually the primary population risk associated with sleep apnea is obesity. So to the extent that we have an obesity epidemic in the United States, we’re going to have a sleep apnea epidemic. Why do we have an obesity epidemic? Lots and lots of reasons. But how does the availability of artificial light impact our eating, what and when we choose to eat? Is this any kind of factor in obesity? If you are living in a log cabin in Minnesota a hundred years ago in pitch-black dark, there’s no refrigerator to raid, there’s no reason to go get an ice cream and sit in front of the TV.”
I’d told McCall about my family’s cabin in northern Minnesota. And he’s right about the connection between LAN and obesity—research on shift workers has found them at a higher risk of obesity, and a recent study on mice showed this same connection. The problem isn’t being awake at night, the problem is being awake at night in the light.
For McCall, this means helping his patients “to be comfortable with being in the dark, not fretting.” Because he believes one of the many solutions to insomnia is to make waking in the middle of the night a normal event, he works with his patients to help them change their thinking. “The question then becomes not so much what does this mean, but what do I do with it. This is an opportunity I’ve been given; what am I going to do with this?”
For the University of Arizona’s Rubin Naiman, the epidemic of sleep disorders is an opportunity to revise our attitudes toward night and darkness. We meet at a restaurant in Tucson, where Naiman makes his home amid the giant saguaro cacti of the surrounding Sonoran Desert. Picture a tall-backed booth with a rustic wood table, two bowls of miso, and two bowls of stir-fry. I know him immediately from his photo—the head of white hair and white goatee give him away.
“What’s interesting about darkness is that people think of darkness as being the absence of light. I think of light as being the absence of darkness,” he tells me. “You can flip it both ways.”
Naiman believes “our habitual use of excessive LAN is the most important overlooked factor in our contemporary sleep and dream disorders epidemic,” with the result that “we suffer today from serious complications of psychospiritual night blindness—a far-reaching failure to understand the significance of night in our lives, health, and spirituality.” In Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening, Naiman describes his work as an attempt to restore “a sense of sacredness to our nights” and to improve our “night consciousness.”
Night consciousness? It’s an idea I will run into again and again: We just don’t think about night that much. For example, David Crawford, founder of the International Dark-Sky Association, told me that in addition to wanting to educate “everybody in the world” about the issue of light pollution, he’d simply wanted to “get people aware again that there is a night, and that night is really beautiful and worthwhile to everybody.” That basic step of encouraging people to once again be conscious of this time and place where we spend half our life has led Rubin Naiman to a career that has included working through dreams of death and dying with cancer patients and helping soldiers who are suffering nightmares after returning from war in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s frustrated, he says, by the traditional field of sleep medicine, which he sees as tightly framing night, sleep, and dreams as strictly objective and scientific phenomena, and draining these experiences of anything personal or subjective, let alone sacred or spiritual.
“On a philosophical level, sleep disorders make sense,” he argues. “We so discriminate against night. We repress it and then push it away. Part of that is a denial that there is anything there worthwhile. For example, a lot of scientists are trying to figure out why we sleep so they can do away with it. It’s pesky. We just have to learn how to recharge those batteries.”
I’m reminded of the character Seven of Nine from one of the old Star Trek series, half-Borg and half-human, and one image of what we imagine sleep could be like in the future: She didn’t sleep—she went to Cargo Bay Two and stood inside an energy pod where this green electrical energy flowed into her neck. “She was recharging her battery.” Naiman laughs. “There was nothing personal about it. It’s a very mechanistic, soulless view of human beings. The presumption is there’s nothing down there in night or in darkness that’s worth seeing.”
The truth, he explains, is that there is dream material; there’s a level of surrendering that we don’t understand. “If you just consider the possibility that there’s something there, then it’s really interesting to let go and to sleep. But most people when they descend into the waters of sleep, instead of aiming at the depth of that, they’ve got their sights set on the morning shore of waking. They really aren’t going to sleep. It’s as if this were an overnight mystery tour, but they are already thinking about where they’re going to be the next day.”
Naiman says that when he talks with people about this, they begin to consider that maybe sleep isn’t just eight hours of being turned off, and to consider instead that they can have a relationship with night, “with all of the demons and angels, all of the qualities that lurk there.”
Some of that can happen if people are willing to be touched by nature, Naiman explains, and cites as one example Thoreau’s fishing by moonlight in Walden. “There’s a great scene where he’s on the pond and the stars are reflected. And he doesn’t know if up is down, if down is up.”
I know the scene. Thoreau has drifted off into philosophical reverie when suddenly a fish tugs at his line:
It was very queer, especially on dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.
“It’s a beautiful scene,” Naiman says, “but it’s also a shift in consciousness. So you can get that from nature, and you can also get that internally, I think, when you are w
illing to consider that there’s something in there.”
I admire Naiman’s insistence that night has its own qualities, that it is distinct from day and not simply day without light.
He nods. “There’s this notion that anything alive is in motion, and that’s not true. I walk up and down this hill near my house every day and the saguaros are always perfectly still. But when you visit this same place over and over, through spring and summer and fall in the morning, winter in the late afternoon, you see the motion in stillness, the animation, because you see it in a dance with the light and the clouds. It’s alive, it moves in a different way. Similarly, I think it’s a question of seeing the life in night itself. To do so you have to meet it on its own terms, and you have to get real still to hear it, to feel it, to sense that it’s alive.”
5
The Ecology of Darkness
Humans are animals as well, and there’s no reason to give ourselves any higher level in the ranking than everything else. And so when light/dark cycles mess up seasonal patterns of trees or breeding cycles of amphibians, which I think is quite well established, there’s no reason to think it’s not doing the same to us.
—STEVEN LOCKLEY (2011)
The Massachusetts woods where Henry David Thoreau lived from mid-1845 to mid-1847, gathering impressions for Walden, were clear cut soon after he left, his one-room cabin sold to farmers who used it for storing grain and then dismantled it for firewood—an inauspicious start for an eventual National Historic Landmark. Thankfully, the woods have long since grown back and the cabin site is preserved within Walden Pond State Reservation. And tonight, I can’t wait to see it after dark. At dusk, I park in a shopping center lot at the edge of town, tuck past a restaurant, hop the railroad fence, and start walking the tracks that lead to the pond.
I think Henry would be proud. “It was very pleasant, when I staid late in town,” he wrote of Concord, “to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room or shopping center parking lot.” That last part isn’t true, but I imagine myself in his footsteps as I walk one tie at a time toward his woods. Certainly there’s a sense of solitude—and he wrote a whole chapter on that. Every house I pass sits turned away from the track, with aluminum and wood fences keeping railway from backyard. Peering down the tracks until they curve away, looking back more often than I need, I’m alone but for the blinking glowing lights of hundreds of green-yellow fireflies, rising from trackside bushes in bobbing, floating flight.
How different “darkness” was in the mid-1840s when Thoreau would have followed similar tracks. Gas lamps had only recently arrived in Boston, twenty long miles away, and wouldn’t have affected night here; Concord had few lamps brighter than those fueled by the oil from harpooned whales. “I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets,” he wrote of his hometown, “when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is.” I know I won’t see what he saw, that I should expect instead the “great yellow sky” looking east toward Boston, and that only now, as I leave the last of the Concord lights, are my eyes beginning to transition to night vision. But though my map and scale assure me I’ll be lucky to find a sky anywhere close to Bortle 5, I wonder if the woods around the pond might tell a different story.
Thoreau had the woods to himself after dark, writing, “at night there was never a traveller passed my house” and “the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood.” The reason? Same as it is today: “I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark,” he explained, “though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.” True, true, and true, but I still have to laugh a little when the hair on the back of my neck rises as I pass under Highway 3 and take a path into the woods without a thought aside from I sure hope this is the way.
The common perception of Thoreau is that he went into the woods, lived in a cabin, and… end of story. But he never entirely left town life, strolling into Concord regularly to dine, pick up supplies, and have his mother do his laundry. Some find that these facts taint his purity as a wilderness saint—that if Thoreau truly wanted to be like Thoreau, he would’ve stomped off into nowhere and survived on his own. But Thoreau wasn’t escaping civilization as much as removing himself in order to gain perspective. He readily admits he always intended to return, and after two years, two months, and two days he did. Walden is as much about living in civilization as it is about living in the woods, maybe even more so.
I have always thought that when Thoreau wrote that he “went to the woods” because he wished “to live deliberately” a big part of that was to live in a way that increased his awareness of and sensitivity to the world—to both the human and nonhuman nature—around him. America in the 1840s was in some ways a lot like it is today: fast and getting faster, loud and getting louder, new technology everywhere changing people’s basic understanding of daily life. And, I would say, no time for living deliberately.
One of the best-worst things about going outside at night to soak up the stars and sounds and scents is that the night has its own time schedule. The moon rises when it rises, shooting stars never announce their shooting—even the sounds and scents come when they want; you can’t just order them up. Thoreau went to the woods to get away from crazy-making speed and noise and new invention in order to have time to gain the awareness and perspective he desired, the fruits of which (“what it had to teach”) he could bring back to Concord. It’s the classic hero myth across cultures, across times: The individual goes on a journey, experiences challenges (which always include a dark place or time), and returns home with wisdom and/or riches.
“It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose,” Thoreau advised, and he’s right—I soon have that Blair Witch sense I’m tromping in circles. On the train tracks there was still enough light—sky glow from Boston and all points east—to see a ways around. But in the woods the dark rushes right up and my headlamp casts a sort of surreal blood-reddish light on the dead leaves at my feet. I am grateful for that light, an accessory Thoreau did not enjoy. He writes that he “frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and… to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn.” So I’ve got him beat there. But he’s got me beat in that I don’t really know where I’m going, and my sense of direction feels skewed. I keep thinking the pond has to be just down the next slope or just around the bend. And when the path starts to drop and curve, I think, Yes! But no. And—here’s the thing—if it were daylight I still wouldn’t know my direction, but I wouldn’t be on edge. I wouldn’t be imagining a stranger suddenly standing at the side of the path. I wouldn’t be feeling myself stumbling, a branch reaching out to claw and scratch. I wouldn’t be covered in sweat, and just on the verge of thinking, Stupid, dumb, why…?
Then I hear the frogs. Singing summer frogs, savoring June dark.
And that is how I find Walden Pond at night, following their sound.
At pond’s edge I crouch by smooth black water. To the east across the pond the only lights are a single “security light” by the visitors center and the occasional car—the hiss-hum of tires on asphalt, the far-off flash of twin white beams—but the Boston-lit sky rising yellow-white behind makes the pond’s night brighter than the night I’ve just come through in the trees. The gurgles, burps, and pops of a summer freshwater pond, a dog’s distant bark, a bat flickering by. I hear an owl and nod. “I rejoice that there are owls,” wrote Thoreau. “They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.”
Thoreau clearly had plenty to say about darkness, about experiencing night in these woods. In his posthumously published essay “Night and Moonlight,” he wrote, “Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it?” He’s said to have been planning a book just before he died in which he
would have done just that. He would have had Class 1 skies at the pond, Class 2 in town, and I wonder what he would have found. I hold my hands up to block the Boston sky, I close my eyes—I wish I could know here the night he knew.
And still—the rush of feeling that was hearing the frogs then sensing the pond then striding down to its edge—to be here at night, alone, knowing that Thoreau spent his nights here alone—I won’t say I sense his ghost, but to stand at pond’s edge and step back up into the woods to his cabin site, its small (ten-by-fifteen-foot) foundation footprint marked by short stone pillars, is to imagine his presence. Over a century and a half this site has seen thousands and thousands of day visitors but has known far, far fewer at night.
To be alone in the dark is to drop back through the years. I imagine him sitting here by himself (as I am now) thinking, “This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.”
Thoreau’s cabin site, marked by stone pillars and facing Walden Pond. (Paul Bogard)
Thoreau’s writings are a font of memorable sayings, perhaps none better known than “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World,” from his essay “Walking.” The aphorism is often mistakenly repeated with “wilderness” in place of “wildness,” much as Paris is often referred to as the City of Lights. And, as with the dueling descriptions of the French capital, we might be tempted to ask the difference. But “wildness” makes the phrase infinitely more powerful. While we usually think of wilderness as a particular place or type of place, wildness is a quality we can find anywhere (as indeed Thoreau found it—or found it lacking—in certain books, animals, and people). It makes sense we would find wildness in wilderness, for example, but we could also find it in cities, in our thoughts and choices, in our daily domestic lives. The history of Western civilization is full of attempts to stamp out wildness—the unknown, the mysterious, the creative, the feminine, the animal, the dark. Thoreau saw an American society hell-bent on fencing in, wiping out, using up, trampling down, or blocking every trace of wildness, and declared it antithetical to sustainable life.
