Yeah, but if it’s not completely dark, they can see you.
I was reminded by a couple mentions of night lights–having a little light used to help me when I was little (a night light or light spilling from the hall kept the skeletons living under the bed from coming out and eating me), but now light in small quantities makes the dark worse–especially when I’ve just woken up from a nightmare. I can’t stop looking at the light, or seeing all the exaggerated shadows, or imagining it highlighting the contours of some horrible Thing standing over my bed…shudder
(One odd exception: the little electric “candles” my family puts in the windows at Christmas are still comforting. Go figure.)
They can smell brain.
I sometimes sleep with the light on out of fear of breaking a toe, or tripping and slicing my scalp open on the metal frame of the storage shelves in my bedroom. If the bedroom floor is actually clean and free of obstructions, I sleep in the dark.
I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of the dark. Vaguely uneasy might be a better description. If I weren’t so strongly rational, and if I hadn’t managed to convince myself that there are no giant spiders or vampires or testicle-biting aliens or whatever, I might very well be fully afraid.
Of course, it manifests in strange ways. Here’s an example: My washer and dryer are in the basement. I do most of my laundry at night. The lights in the basement are rather inadequate; when I hit the switch at the top of the stairs, there’s still total darkness in the far corner of the basement, and the laundry room, with its own lights, is also totally dark.
So when I walk into the laundry room and pull the string by the dryer to click on the light, there’s some small part of me that expects that this will startle some nasty beast sitting in the dark next to the water heater on the opposite wall. (The thing in my head sort of resembles the toothy vermin in Critters, but bigger.) Now, the reason I’m thinking about this, I tell myself, is totally rational: I know there isn’t going to be something there, but just in case there is, I want to be prepared to react. So I look into the darkness and I turn on the light, and I’m not surprised when there’s nothing there, but at the same time I am making a deliberate point of getting ready and checking.
I’m not proud… :o
One of the things I like about being a grown-up is that at about 25 I suddenly stopped being afraid to be by myself at night. I’ve never really been afraid of the dark, but I didn’t like being the only one in the house when it was time to go to bed. Now I don’t mind at all. I’m not sure exactly when it happened.
When I was really little, like around 3 or so, I would go to sleep with my light on, then when I fell asleep my parents would come in and turn it off. It was a nice system. Nowadays, if I’m the first one asleep in my house, I will have no problem with the dark. If I’m the last one asleep, I will have every Stephen King novel I have read running through my head. Such as, “Don’t look outside, Chrstine will be there!” And, “Pennywise will get you!!!” I also cannot fall asleep when I’m facing the wall. I have images of some axe murder standing over my bed, just waiting for me to turn over so he can attack me. When my back is facing the wall and I’m looking out at my room I feel in control. Oh, and the upstairs of my house is built like the house in the 6th Sense. There is my room, the bathroom, then the kitchen with the sink in the same place. Because of that movie I will never go pee at night.
Monsters Inc.? Or am I being whooshed?
I’m a big scaredy poo. I don’t like dark or quiet. I sleep with the tv on because the sound masks those “eeeeek what was that!” sounds outside (the same damn bush frightens me all the time) and provides enough light to be able to have a lay-of-the-land.
I can’t flush the loo after bedtime either. The toilet monster waits for that! 
Yes I am a doofus.
I just like sleep. I can sleep in a pitch black room that is so quiet I can hear my blood circulating (I prefer this option). I can sleep with a bright light on and the stereo playing. I love sleeping on trains and planes. (motor vehicles not so much).
The dark itself is no problem, but now that I’ve got a six year old boy who is scared of the dark, it is tempting to give him a gruff “oh, snap out of it and don’t be so silly”, but then I rewind back to when I was that age, and I remember how terrifying even tiny things could be - for example, a completely dark outside view from a window might be scary for him, but not half as scary as the same window with a closed vertical blind - but that blind has a couple of little gaps. Evil black stripes of darkness inhabited by monsters from the id. I usually indulge him and try my best to make his sleeping quarters as kid friendly as I can. For Simpsons fans, this of course means NO CLOWNS!
I’m afraid of the dark. I never was when I was a kid, and I need darkness to sleep, but I can’t go outside alone at night and when I go to bed I turn the lights off starting with the one furthest from my bedroom door and ending with the desk lamp just outside my room. I can’t cross a threshold from one dark room to another; I have to keep my eyes closed until I find a light switch and turn it on.
This all came about after I was held up at knifepoint. Twice. Which is weird, considering it was perfectly bright under the flourescent lights in the gas station. It’s gotten a little better over the years (it’ll be 5 in February), but it’s still annoying.
Not really the dark that’s so much a problem for me… but I’ll second getting disquieted by too much quiet.
I guess it’s because I can’t imagine faceless figures dressed all in white creeping noiselessly out of the shadows when a baseball game is on, or even when the air conditioner’s blowing air.
Yikes, just creeped myself out.
[turns the baseball game on - Boston’s ahead 4 to nothing at the bottom of the first - that’s scary too]
Not scared of the dark in my bedroom that much, it’s just that I have this fear of going to the bathroom when no one else is up and the entire house is dark.
This is partly because of Silent Hill 3, that evil, evil game, and partly because of an incident once.
I heard this weird noise and went out to check, but figured that no one was up and while I was, I might as well use the bathroom. So I opened the bathroom door and found someone with long black hair covering her face, wearing a white nightdress staring at the mirror and combing her hair.
In pitch darkness.
I have no idea why my sister was combing her hair in the bathroom without any lights on at 3 am. She still insists that she was doing the right thing by saving electricity, and has kept up this trend on random nights at ungodly hours.
And besides possibly encountering her in the bathroom, there is always the risk of stepping on lizards.
Whoa, this is great. I’m not alone.
I’m 26 and I still sleep with the light on. As other poster’s have mentioned, it’s more my imagination that frightens me. I see odd shapes and such, and my mind gives them fearsome attributes. So, since the light doesn’t bother me, I sleep with it on. I have a lamp on my night table, and another one that I keep on across the room.
Also, due to nameless threats, I sleep on my back. That way I’m more prepared to face whatever is going to attack me. Nothing has yet, but when it does I’ll be able to see it and properly defend myself from a laying down position. Or so the theory goes.
I’m such a wuss and I know it. I really think it all comes down to having seen “Poltergeist” at too early an age. I was scared of my closet (which has never closed all the way), the space under my bed, and the tree not far from my window didn’t help either. For a few years I slept with the light on, though I’m not sure when I gave up on that. I can’t deal with pitch black. I need some sort of light, even from a crack in a window. I just get spooked too easily.
Like others, it’s more my imagination that gets carried away. My computer is downstairs so late at night I’ll go up the steps to my room in a dark hall and I’ll suddenly be convinced there’s something behind me. Last summer I had a panic attack one night because for some reason, just as I’d turned off the light to go to bed, I thought something was going to reach out from under the bed and grab my legs. I was a mess that night. A few months ago I got spooked out again, feeling like there were hands just beside my back. Once my mind gets the idea, it just locks on and I can’t shake it.
Two words: Not Fun.