This is my guess. You never know what might have happened. Anything from accidentally being locked in a dark basement to being raped could cause someone to want light on all the time.
Another possibility is that her parents wanted to make sure she stayed in her room all night. Keeping the light on makes it easier to do that. I knew someone whose Dad took the bedroom door off her sister’s room after she sneaked off at night. And I’ve heard others tell the same story about their parents doing the same thing when they were teenagers, both guys and girls.
Sometimes when I’m really stressed, I leave the TV on with no sound and cover my eyes. Though I can’t see it, Just knowing the TV is on helps the stress. It has nothing to do with being afraid of the dark. I keep the room in my old house so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I can’t do that in my new place because it’s smaller and I have too many electronics with leds, including my PC on 24/7
I’m another one suggesting trauma or anxiety. I usually sleep in the dark unless I’ve had extreme stress like cancer or my DH dying. Then I need to leave the light on and sometimes even the TV. I eventually return to sleeping in the dark with no TV. But I can understand someone leaving a light on all night.
I can sleep comfortably in anything from full dark and silence to hospital hallway at midday - sitting sort of upright with a slight lean against a wall or flat. I used to be able to sleep on a floor [in airports I would sort of roll myself in a woobie, use a backpack as a pillow and roll under a row of seats to get out of the way, but I can’t lever my lame ass up off a floor any longer, but I could sleep on a dining table, never liked my beds to be too soft, they tend to kill my back. ]
Put me down as thinking the girl had issues with darkness, the most plausible explanation IMHO
While I’ve had issues with darkness over the years due to anxiety, I didn’t leave the overhead light on. I used a lamp or nightlight. However, lamps can be quite bright. Are you sure it was an overhead light that was on?
When I was little I also liked to sleep with the lights on. I knew for a fact aliens were among us and they always became active at night so I developed two theories: (1) they would not enter a brightly lit room and/or (2) they would ignore any humans that were completely covered by a blanket or a bed sheet. Adequate behavior ensued. I can still use the second trick to thwart mosquitoes when I travel to places where nocturnal winged insects seem to roam uncontrollably.
Anyone else now earworming The Smiths?
I’m Tom Bodett for Motel 6, and we’ll leave the light on for you.
About 75% sure.
Perhaps relevant: There was a deck on the side of their house next to her bedroom. I don’t think she had a window facing the deck, but maybe she did. And her parents kept an outdoor light on all night that was freaking BRIGHT. So bright my parents bought me blackout shades because it disturbed my sleep so much.
FWIW, I’m one of those people who sleeps with her eyes covered at night (I wrap my blanket around my head). Almost certainly as a result of having to try to sleep in rooms with lots of light coming through the window. And even though I cover my eyes, a dark room is still more conducive to sleep than a room with “light noise.”
Eh, I’d track her down and ask her. There’s no possible way we could know with any certainty.
Simplest explanation is she was afraid of the dark.
I think at the time, I suggested to my parents that we ask our neighbors, and they told me it wasn’t an appropriate thing to ask. I can’t imagine it would be any more appropriate to ask now. I definitely remember suggesting that we tell them that their excessive light sources were making it hard for me to sleep, and they definitely told me that was an inappropriate thing to do.
I’m 34 and I don’t sleep in complete darkness. The reason is because of insects and I want to be able to see the area before I go to sleep, if I wake up to go to the bathroom and when I wake up.
… bolding mine.
Methinks, this is the simplest answer.
Or that she simply prefers sleeping with the light on. This doesn’t seem like such a deep mystery to me. Everybody’s a bit different, and it doesn’t seem all that weird to me that somebody could get used to and prefer to sleep with the light on. I, for example, prefer to sleep with constant chattering of some sort going on. I don’t like total silence; I don’t like white noise; I like the sounds of people talking. It’s not a stretch for me to think somebody might prefer to fall asleep with a light on. I myself don’t prefer total darkness.
I was in my 40s before I finally stopped sleeping with the lights on (albeit partially dimmed). I’m still uncomfortable in complete darkness so I have a few NE-2 nightlights as well as some light from the electronics and coming around the blinds, enough light I can make out large shapes in the room.
Yeah, I don’t see why that’s completely out of the question as an explanation. It’s not super common, but it’s not so rare that the question of ‘why did someone always have a light on’ is a great mystery. For example, I used to live with someone who would read herself to sleep each night, so, I’d cut off her light when I went to bed. If, as is normal in high school, she was sleeping alone, she would have had a light on all night every night like the OP’s neighbor and might not even have realized that was a habit of hers.
My impression, from observing how universal the tradition is to turn the lights off before bed (across cultures, etc.), is that sleeping in darkness is something biologically ingrained in humans. So the reason it seemed like such a mystery to me is that I wondered what caused an urge intense enough to overcome biology. It’s like if you see a person not eating. Maybe they have an eating disorder, maybe they’re sick, but the explanation isn’t usually as similar as “she just didn’t like eating.” Maybe I’m wrong, but that was my reasoning for seeing it as such a mystery.
Perhaps, but plenty of folks sleep with at least a light on. I can’t find the source right now, but yesterday I was reading online in a poll by the National Sleep Foundation that 11% of Americans sleep with a light on in the room. Now, “a light” doesn’t necessarily mean full-blast overhead light, I assume, but I’m guessing some subset of that is what you would consider a bedroom light being on. So, while is still a relatively small minority of people who do so, it’s still a significant number. If you just google “sleeping with the lights on” you’ll see a number of articles about it, so it can’t be all that rare.
ETA: Ah, here’s the survey from 2011, slide #19
Like I said, it is just “a light” but to sleep with some light in the room is not terribly uncommon (and up to 21% of Gen Zers).
You seem to believe that the neighbor must have had a desire to sleep with the light on - and that’s not necessarily true. To some extent, the conditions we are accustomed to matter - I have difficulty sleeping in complete silence or darkness. But there’s also another factor - some people fall asleep more quickly than others. I almost always have time to turn off the lights before I fall asleep. My husband, on the other hand falls asleep very quickly - often on the couch, with the TV and all the lights on, ten seconds after speaking to me. If he ever turned the bedroom lights on, they would be on all night. The TV sure is.
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It’s nowhere near universal though, there’s a decent sized minority of people that do sleep with a light on. People have pulled up the stats that something like 1/9 of people sleep with the light on, it’s not so uncommon that encountering it counts as a great mystery; in a class of 30 kids you’d expect to find 2-4 of them who sleep with a light on.
Also I think the ‘not eating’ comparison is grossly exaggerated - nothing indicates that the girl wasn’t sleeping at all, just that she had a light on. It’s more like ‘eating in bed instead of at the table’ or ‘eating alone instead of with people’, which is unusual but not so weird that it generally works as a long-term mystery.