Night-time is an intoxicating new land: how learning to love the dark eased my grief

03.06.2024 - 12:45 / theguardian.com

As I slip out of my clothes, my stomach pinches with fear. The beach – Pevensey Bay in East Sussex – is inky black and eerily empty. The sound of slurping seawater seems noisier than usual, the air smells brinier than it does during the day, and the night breeze feels cool and sharp.

My previous efforts at night swimming have been unsuccessful – the current too strong, the waves too wild, my imagination too extravagant. But tonight I’m determined. My daughter Imogen shouts to encourage me and the emergence of a full moon steadies my nerves. Within moments I am bobbing about amid glittering moonshine, laughing and gasping, and wondering why it has taken me half a century to do something as simple and magical as a moonlit dip.

Night swimming is the latest in a series of nocturnal journeys that have changed how my family and I view darkness. What was once a time for moving indoors and turning on lights has become a place for travel and adventuring. We call these lightless excursions our “night journeys”, and they began during a long stint of insomnia triggered by grief. Reluctant to take medication, I slowly overcame my dread of darkness by embracing my wakeful nights, seeing them as a gift of extra, exotically located time.

My first insomniac months were spent reading, writing and drawing – indoors. But one spring night I pulled a mattress on to my balcony and lay gazing upwards at a black sky sequined with stars. The sense of restful space stretching endlessly upwards seemed to release me from the burden of worry and grief. For the first time in months, I slept.

According to a recent study from the University of Derby, being safely out at night can have a dramatic impact on our wellbeing. Its author, psychologist Dr Christopher Barnes, told me that “having a connection to the night sky is important because of what it gives us – a place to be restored, inspired and free”. Barnes’s investigations found that people out after dark used different language: “Darkness seemed to be a deeply tranquil and restorative experience that often brought a sense of peace and a chance for contemplation.”

Other studies have found that being beneath high ceilings alters how we think, making us more open-minded. Meanwhile, studies of the “mind after midnight” suggest that our after-dark brains perceive things differently. At night, and beneath vast skies, we quite literally see the world through a fresh, more imaginative lens. We are no longer our day selves. We are our night selves. By this point I was so enthralled by the night (and my night self), that I began venturing further afield. With a pair of astronomical binoculars and an iPhone stocked with stargazing apps, I took to walking through nearby meadows. I followed