What are some childhood memories of the dark?

Ooo this is an excellent question!

My memories of the dark were exciting and exhilarating! Playing flashlight tag in the dark…you see the the tagger in the distance and you’re in a tree, cloaked in the blackness. My neck hairs were at end. Running about and using the dark for shelter/hiding felt so invigorating and almost primal. I felt like I was a wild animal! rawr :)

Wow, I don’t have anything that comes to mind, which I find surprising. Great Question though, can’t wait to read the answers.

Sardines! I never played that till I was in college.

None of my childhood memories of the dark are good ones. Honestly I barely have any actual memories of the dark because I was so afraid of it I avoided it like the plague. I slept with a lamp on (a nightlight was not enough light for me) until I went away to college. I was terrified of the very idea of the dark, and still feel uncomfortable when I go to sleep at night and walk through the apartment from the bathroom to my bedroom after brushing my teeth, turning off all the lights as I go… When I’m alone in my apartment and do this, sometimes my fear rises as I walk along until it’s so great that I panic and slam and lock my bedroom door after I arrive there.

A great uncle of mine used to make my little cousin and I go into the cellar and “challenge the HAH”. He go up the stairs, turn off the light and we were to keep our wits and not cry out or else “The HAH” would come attack us. My uncle would slip underneath a big bear skin, come back down the stairs and feel for us in the dark, grunting, growling and shouting out. We never knew it was him, we never knew it was a bear skin, we had no idea what “THE HAH” looked like but we did spend an awful lot of time back to back, scolding each other to not breathe so loud or scrape our feet on the floor to make noise. Gah, it was awful.

Good: I can’t think of anything good.

Scary: Back in grade school during the winter time, I would sprint to the bus stop in the morning – glancing over my shoulder frequently to make sure some sort of street monster wasn’t coming after me ready gobble me up. As if reaching the bus stop was a safe zone or something. I always had irrational fears of monsters lurking in the dark.

Once my brothers and I went to the golf course after a big rain to harvest fishing worms. New moon, very dark out. One fun thing to do was to run full bore until the ground out from under you!

Kissing a blonde boy named Jason under his basement stairs. It was pitch black and I was about 9. I’ll never forget it.

My father set up a kid’s “living room” in our basement so that he could watch tv in the real living room in peace. The problem was that ¾ of the basement was completely unfinished and without lighting. And I only used the area to watch Unsolved Mysteries. Holy crap, Jack Palance used to scare the poop out of me.

Spiders! Ack! Some nights when my light was off (this is as a child) I would see giant spiders on the ceiling. They weren’t there, but I could see them.most of the time I could close my eyes and make them go away. About once a year I couldn’t do it and would end up sleeping with my mom & dad. This got awkward when I turned 19.

The other thing? Terrorists in the basement. I was 8 when the Munich Olympics were going on. I remember the news footage and feeling petrified. After that, when I would have to go in the basement for anything, the light had to be on. When I went back upstairs, I had to close the door almost the whole way, slide my hand through the crack, turn off the light and quickly shut the door. I felt like they were right behind me and if it was dark, they would shoot me. That creepy feeling lasted through junior high.

Just…hanging out in the dark, on warm summer nights. Our neighborhood was on a cul de sac, tucked away in the country. We had one street light that we’d congregate under, and tell stories, surrounded by the blanket of the dark. Night time is a very special time. It’s like the world has changed. You feel so much closer, and yet further at the same time, to everything.

Only one bad experience, when I was about 4. I HATED going into the dark basement where the washer and dryer were. It always felt like something (Muwhaahaaaaaa) was right behind me! Mom told me it was Jesus, so don’t worry. I remember thinking that wasn’t a very nice thing for Jesus to do to a kid, but it did help, a little!

Also…this isn’t a childhood memory, but my first grandson was born on the 4th of July. We had just moved from the city to a small rural town about 50 miles away. We’d only been in our new town two weeks, so the wide open, country spaces were still a novel experience. I remember coming back from the hospital that night, about 9:00 p.m., tired, but glowing with the feeling that a brand new life coming into this world gives you. We got to the top of a rise on the little two-lane highway…..and all around us, all the little towns, near and far, were setting off their fireworks! It was a joyous sight to see, the fire and colors punctuating the night, everywhere, surrounding us!

Best of all, the closer we got to home, the closer we got to the fireworks that our town was setting off….and the closer we got, the more we appeared to be heading smack into where they were being set off! Well, that’s when we found out that they set them off at the college, which was only two blocks from our house! They’d go off directly over our house! O what a night!

Kissing a blonde boy named Jason under his basement stairs. It was pitch black and I was about 9. I’ll never forget it. Wait a minute!

Oh my! @75movies You just brought back at least four memories of “Boys and Girls in Dark Basements!” Oh dear!

@75movies hahaha! You’re awesome!

The dark was mysterious to me, I loved grabbing a flashlight and exploring. I remember playing “dark tag” in our basement as a kid, that was scary and fun. I also remember playing outside in the winter at night and making a snow angel but ending up laying there staring up at the stars. Which always seem better on a cold, clear, winter night.

Our house had the stairs with no backing down to the basement and the light was halfway down. I used gymnastic moves to get that light on. the furnace was beside and there was room beside it and under the stairs for murderers and ghouls to hide!! As a 21 yr old married woman, i was scared to go down to the freezer after dark!! On the good side walking home from the neighborhood pub with a good freind. There was no one driving on the streets and huge fluffy snow was falling, magical! And camping with a blazing campfire and so many stars above.

I’ve always been a fan of scary movies and watching them in the dark. Then right before I go to bed I get a bit freaked out. I’m always afraid that something is going to grab my ankles as I’m crawling into bed and pull me underneath it. So I stand by the light switch, flip if off, and then run and jump into bed.
Another is when I had an awful nightmare when I was about 6 or so. My mom had just tucked me in and I was falling asleep. In my dream I felt like I was awake and I’m not sure if it was actually a dream or if I was making myself see things in the dark that weren’t there. Anyway, what I saw wasn’t pretty and it terrified me. I saw a skeleton sitting next to my bed rocking back and forth in a rocking chair. He was smoking a cigarette, but he never put his fingers up to his mouth. Then the skeleton started to reach it’s hand out to touch me. I screamed and my mom came to get me.
I’ve also got some really happy memories of the dark. Like when I went away to camp for two weeks in the sixth grade. We took a night hike and cracked LifeSavers with our teeth so they sparked. Also, sometimes in the summer my friends and I drive our to the middle of a field and sit in the back of truck beds and just gaze up at the sky. It’s gorgeous when there are no lights around to dilute it. (We do this when we’re drunk too sometimes, but we stay in the backyard. When we’re drunk we also like to walk to the flying saucer art in the park. We climb on it, lay there, and have some deep heart-to-heart talks sometimes.)

When I was a kid, I lived in a place that was reeeeally far out into the suburbs, almost country. There was still farmland and woods all over the place. My friends and I had a lot of space to do whatever the hell we wanted. We played in a park on top of a hill that had a huge wild field at the bottom of the hill, and woods on top of the hill. When it was time to come in for dinner, the field was a shortcut. During the summer, about a million fireflies came out every night around dusk. Once during the winter, we were playing in the woods and I just sort of wandered off on my own. It got really dark out, and a full moon came up. It was one of those great cold, clear, starry nights. I wandered a long way. There were power lines through the woods with a big clearing around them, so I just kept following them for probably miles and miles. Eventually the power lines crossed back into some other part of the neighborhood, so I found my way home. I have no idea why I decided to do that without telling anyone. My parents were so upset.

@Allie Why is it that heart-to-heart talks always end up happening in the dark? I remember having deep conversations at sleepovers with friends too.

@J0E Maybe it’s just something about being with each other during the night. The day is the time to do stuff you need to do and the night is the time to relax. Maybe when you don’t have a million things on your mind and you’re just kicking back with friends, heart-to-hearts happen more easily.

Edit: In my case, I’m sure the alcohol helped too. But I’ve had sober heart-to-hearts with these friends as well.

When I think of dark I remember being a kid when it started storming. During bad thunderstorms my mom would get frightened and no matter what time it was (sometimes 3am) she would wake up all the kids and make them come down to the family room to camp out on the floor with her until the storm passed. Many times the power would be out so we lit tons of candles and huddled together all night. Those were the days :)

Once I was playing hide and seek with my friends inside the house and I hid on top of the refrigerator. I was up high and it was very dark there, they never found me. It was fun lol

Good- staying up late with a friend who stayed over night with me. We talked, giggled, and philosophized as best as two 9 year olds could.

Bad- lying in bed alone, scared, always being afraid of dying and thinking that I was seeing things that weren’t there. Maybe my house was just really creepy, as this seemed to happen a lot.

My memories of the dark aren’t very good…I had horrible siblings who used to find great enjoyment out of locking me in the hall way in the dark until I literally was terrified and full of rage and anger. In the hall was a cellar door which I would run past to get to the kitchen door…to this day I am not overly fond of cellars.

My brother also used to switch the light off going upstairs and say ‘Ooohhhh the bogey mans coming to get you’ Evidently I’m psychologically damaged when it comes to the dark and I’m still more scared of the ‘bogey man’ getting me than real people who may intrude.

That’s siblings for you hey??...lol

Turning off the little B/W TV set in my room after the national anthem played and the static started (yes, in the days when a station went of the air until 6AM!), then watching the picture shrink down into a dot and disappear. For a moment, time to seemed to hang – and then it was dark.

Most memories of the dark weren’t so good, though.

Oh gosh yes. “Oh say can you seeeee! And you better look quick!!!! Because soon you won’t see. Anythiiiing at allallllll!!” I’d stare at the colored bars they’d put up, just HOPING something else would magically come on! Do you remember when they started with all night programming @aprilsimnel? come to think of it, Soul Train was one of the first, wasn’t it? In the 70’s?

I remember as a toddler in our second house… I had my first big-boy bed. It was against a white wall and i would sleep on my side facing the wall. I remember at night I would see an old lady’s face on the wall. I was never afraid of her and she would talk to me and I would talk back. The last time I saw her though I forget what was happening in our lives but something was changing (I think my mom was pregnant with my sister or something)... and the old lady was mad.. started loosing it and I started to feel pain up and down my arm… still wasn’t afraid. Woke up the next day with scratch marks and what looked like multiple spider bites or something on my right arm. Not sure if i had scratched myself during the night or what happened… but I still remember not being afraid of her and missing her when she was gone.

@Dr_C any idea who she might have been??? What kind of things did you talk about?

When I was about three I went down into our finished basement in Seattle (not the unfinished, dark one that Jesus would follow me into.) At the bottom of the stairs, on the wall to the right, was an oil painting of some buildings…like, wharf-side buildings. No people in it. This one night I went down there, and there was a little boy in a sailor suit standing in the picture, smiling at me!!! I remember doing a double take, shaking my head, rubbing my eyes….and he was still there!! I ran and got mom and dad…and when they came to look he was gone. Silly boy. Made a total fool of me. (But it feels so real to this day…..)

Walking through the pitch dark in the house as a kid.. knowing that something was there about to get me.

@Val123, I was probably about 11 when, where I lived, CNN Headline News would take over on the NBC affiliate after 1am or so; this was pre-cable in my area. I remember getting up to see the wedding of Charles and Di at 3 in the morning on CNN. I’ll bet I was the only one on my street who did! [/off-topic]

@Val123 I wish I remembered but it was over 20 years ago! (Now you made me feel old.. thanx a bunch!). All i remember is a wrinkled old face… very large as if projected onto the wall but with no light in the room except the face… Now that I try and go back and remember she looked a little bit like what I remembered of my great grandmother before she passed…. but just different enough that you knew it wasn’t her.

20 years ago…well, wait till you get to say 40 years ago!! :)

So many, many years later I can still conjure up the fear I felt walking into the garage at night. I would literally feel light-headed.

When really young my twin brother and I used to take flash lights and a club and bravely explore the darkest corner of the basement.

When older, Jr. High and high school, we would play night games like flash light take and kick the can and such which was really an excuse to get out and be around members of the opposite sex.

The only memories I have left are the moon and the stars. I fell in love with them at a very early age, and could hardly wait for them to come out. My mom told me she would often find me sleeping on the porch, because I would sneak out at night just so I could see them. I hated winter, when it got too cold to go out at night.

I have no childhood memories of the dark – is that weird?

Did you sleep with the lights on?

@Val123 no – when I was really young, I slept with my parents and brother and then just with my brother in the room – it wasn’t until his death when I was 17 that I got my own room

I slept in Mom’s bed because my father ws ill and we were poor, but I sure remember going to bed before everyone else. If I forgot to check under the bed to make sure there were no tigers or giraffes[!] under there, it was torture.

Swimming during the evening at Amy’s house. They had light filters of various colors and I always enjoyed swimming when the red filter was used. Green was pretty cool too.

I also remember Amy going inside to pee and leaving me alone in the pool. I hung to the side of the pool waiting for her to return. All I could think of the entire time that she was gone was the theme from Jaws and/or Friday the 13th. This was late 70’s/ early 80s

@ringaroundtherosie I remember swimming at Amy’s house too.

I love the dark but didn’t play in the dark at all as a child. My parents wouldn’t let me go outside if it was dark, even as I became a teenager. However, I would sneak out once I was old enough to become rebellious. My most vivid memory….I was 17, snuck out of the house to join friends at a local pub. While walking home, alone, a man began following me and yelling things at me. I was freaked. I ran as fast as I could home, yelling help as I ran. As I approached home, my parents were awake (having realized I had snuck out) and the man was no longer there. I didn’t sneak out again.

As an adult, here in America, I have played tag, flag football, hide and seek, zombie apocalypse and all sorts of games at night. It’s wonderful.

Ah! Sneaking out in the middle of the night, creeping into the dark, dark woods, feeling my way along my memory and my feet, to rendezvous with my boyfriend!