Fear of the Dark

When the fear of the dark appears and peaks

The developmental account is unusually specific. The fear rarely appears before the age of two and peaks at around four, which places it after the point at which a child can imagine an absent thing and roughly where that capacity is developing fastest. Most children lose it.

The 2015 reference Phobias: The Psychology of Irrational Fear supplies the clinical threshold rather than a description of it. The fear counts as a phobia when:

• exposure to darkness produces extreme distress or real impairment
• and it has lasted six months or more

The example it gives is a child who wants to go to sleepovers and camp and cannot.

Why the nyctophobia prevalence figures get confused

Twenty-nine per cent of children in one clinical sample endorsed a fear of the dark. Around three and a half per cent of the general population have it at a level that counts as a clinically significant phobia. Those figures describe different things, are drawn from different populations, and are routinely repeated as though the first were the prevalence of the second.

The same reference adds a detail that keeps this fear out of clinics: it is rarely the only reason a family seeks help. Children who fear the dark usually have other specific phobias as well, and the fear travels with separation anxiety disorder and with generalised anxiety focused on the safety of the household. Children sleeping alone report more fear of the dark than children sleeping beside a parent.

What nyctophobia costs is sleep

The mechanism by which this fear does damage is not panic but sleep. Some children want the light bright enough to prevent sleep. Where a parent insists on turning it off, the anxiety prevents it instead. Bedtime accumulates rituals, complaints and difficulty, and the fear becomes one thread in a knot rather than a single problem.

Carney, Moss, Atwood, Crowe and Andrews reported in 2014 that poor sleep in adults may be related to fear of the dark, which the 2015 reference describes as worth exploring further and as resting on very little. Research on adults is described there as scant.

How rats trained to fear darkness produced scotophobin

The strangest item in the record belongs to the 1960s. Researchers looking for the molecules that carry memory conditioned rats, which are nocturnal, to fear darkness, and reported extracting from their brains a substance they called scotophobin, said to hold the memory of that fear. The findings were subsequently debunked.

The episode is worth keeping because of what it attached to. The name survives in the literature as a curiosity, and the fear it was named after is one of the most ordinary experiences in childhood.

Why fear of the dark has several names

Sigmund Freud treated fear of the dark as an expression of separation anxiety, and later writers have followed him. The 2015 reference notes the association without adopting the explanation, which is the more careful position.

The naming is a mess. Five words are in circulation for one fear, built on three different roots:

• nyctophobia and noctophobia, on night
• scotophobia and achluophobia, on darkness
• lygophobia, on twilight

Scotophobia is described as having gained currency socially without clinical recognition. Five words, one fear, and the distinction between fearing the night and fearing a dark room is real enough that a vocabulary might have been useful.