Here’s a prediction for the next few years (possibly the only prediction not best expressed by a melting smiley emoji and a guttural wail): dark will become the new luxury. For once, I’ll be ahead of the curve. I love the dark, it’s one of my fussy mid-life obsessions. I’m moderately insomniac and obsessed with eliminating every sliver of light from the bedroom. My curtains have thicker linings than a radiographer’s apron, so heavy they regularly fall off the rail. I want to spend my nights like a troll in a hole; a bear in a burrow. Unfortunately, my husband is intent on filling our house with home-optimising gadgetry; you could night-land a 737 in our hallway with all the flashing and blinking digital displays. I’ve banned them from the bedroom, but they bleed in through the gap under the door, disturbing me: I’m the princess and the pea, but for pea read LED. I might have to resort to a rolled-up towel under the door: I already use that hack in hotels, and travel with Blu Tack to cover up impossible to extinguish TV, AC or fire alarm lights, red, white and blue pinpricks of irritation. Don’t suggest a sleep mask: I’d need a Vantablack balaclava.
It’s not, traditionally, seen as a Good Thing, the dark. Scripture and literature have told us for centuries that light is what we’re after: “the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light”, the Enlightenment, “Juliet is the sun” and all that. There are solid evolutionary reasons. Light has been fairly useful for our survival as a species – photosynthesis served us well for not starving to death, for a start – and we associate it with warmth. Then in the dark we were vulnerable: bad things happened there, so fearing it was rational and useful. Women still feel vulnerable in the dark as we walk towards the safety of brighter, busier places. Figures from 2016 suggested half of women felt unsafe in the dark on quiet streets.
There’s also an irrational element to fearing the dark; a lingering, childlike dread of things that go bump. That’s the hook for a new Channel 4 series, called, imaginatively, Scared of the Dark. In it, eight celebrities including Paul Gascoigne, Scarlett Moffatt and Chris Eubank will enter “a pitch-black reality space for eight days” to face their primal fears. I assume it’s not 24/7. I know we like to be mean to celebs on telly but that sounds sort of … Guantanamo-y? The press release is unclear: “Throw in a bunch of celebs and make them do things with the lights off – it’s proper good telly,” host Danny Dyer is quoted saying. I imagine a lot of screaming.
So if it still inspires atavistic, televisually appealing terror, why do I think the dark will be the new must-have for the 1%? Because there’s so little of it. There’s something more frightening than the dark, and that’s a world without it. Have you read about the MSG Sphere in east London, an entertainment venue so bright, its Las Vegas counterpart has been described as “like a sun on Earth”? At the London Sphere, “an advertising display covered with more than one million light-emitting diodes… will show videos and adverts from dawn until late.” It sounds completely chilling. Already light pollution is everywhere, obscuring the stars, bewildering bats and contributing to our catastrophic insect decline. With signage and street lights, security lights clicking on every time the local fox slinks past, when are you ever completely in the dark now? “Our love of electric light is leaching some of the wonder from the world,” as Katherine May says in her new book, Enchantment. It’s an account of her attempts to grasp moments of wonder back from burnout and exhaustion; they include making a 10-hour round trip to somewhere dark enough to see a meteor shower (the moon ends up being too bright, ironically). In the dark we’re tiny, vulnerable, open to awe.
May is on to something: I think darkness is becoming experiential and aspirational. In the new age of endarkenment, guided Antarctic darkness retreats will be described with hushed reverence in the pages of watch and yacht magazines and helicopters will deposit billionaires in the remotest corners of Bhutan, untroubled by electricity. Already, national parks offer “dark skies” festivals to reintroduce us to the pleasures of stargazing and moonlit (or torchlit) walks and there are “dark-sky communities”, which eschew outdoor lighting. I’ve been to one – the Hebridean island of Coll – and stared happily into the inky mystery where sky meets water. I’ve taken a women’s “Twilight to Moonlight” walk too – a group of us stumbling around in the mud and enjoying the rare, almost transgressive joy of feeling safe in the dark.
Darkness already feels luxurious to me: it’s velvety and enveloping, whispering of peace and slow-wave sleep. As the days lengthen and we get those first evenings where it’s warm enough to sit outside, my favourite part isn’t the lingering light so much as watching it leave: the sky deepening to navy as the blackbirds sing, colours fading, then darkness. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Let me be your darkfluencer: come over to the dark side.
