The Dark

from Lovecraft supernatural horror. In literature, children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with mind sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life, which made poll sat in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own lobe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moon struck can limps. That was beautiful. And if you guys haven't guessed out there, we are

diving way into the deep dark in this episode. And I love that because it really does evoke the sort of primal fear that darkness has particularly for children. Yeah, I mean the great thing about this topic is that light and dark, those are the cycles that have defined our lives, that have defined life for the most part for so long. I mean, life here on Earth exists within these cycles of light and dark, and that has played into uh the evolutionary ascent of of almost all organists.

And it's so important to us that we have woven it into this symbolic level, right, I mean the ying and yang of dark and light, these opposites which really represent these ideas of not just values, but of the spheares that we inhabit. Because on one level of the world of light, the word the sunlit world, I mean that's an area of the known, and then the world of darkness that isn't an area of the if not the unknown, at least the uncertain. The other the possible.

They had sort of the quantum state where the darkness can be simply emptiness. The darkness can be something you could trip over, it could be a thief, it could be a monster. There's there's room for just about any

fear within that undefined space of shadow. And that undefined space of shadow is largely what occupied the the human experience and in fact, if you look at archaeological evidence that suggests that, you know, just four d thousand years ago or so, early humans mastered fire before that, what would you do. I mean, you didn't. You didn't really have that access to something that could glow and provide

some sort of illumination in the dark. Now skip ahead to today, where we have a possibility for twenty four hour light environments, and we kind of take that for granted that darkness really did rule the night. Indeed, I mean for the longest, to borrow a phrase from historian William Manchester, you had a world uh lit only by fire, right at least a night lit only by fire. So you even if you had you had fire, you had candles,

you had torches, you had campfires. Eventually you get gas lighting and and and lanterns and other uh luminary innovations. But but for the most part, you're sort of carving out a little bit. You were reclaiming a little bit of the night, but it's not quite as good as the daylight, and you're still surrounded by all these shadows and just gulfs of impenetrable darkness. Right until you had like a really good um widespread source of artificial light.

All you have those dying embers to light the space around you. So what would you do. You would submit to that dark and most of us would go to sleep. And that brings up this idea which we've touched upon before, of two a sleep. Yeah, I mean this is pretty simple. What happens when it gets dark? And again you may have some some some light at your disposal, you may have a camp fire your disposal, but your abilities are

greatly reduced. So you go to sleep. You simply call it a day, except something happens about about halfway through, right you wake because according to historian Rogert Eckert, who published a book on the matter called at Days Closed Night in Times Past, which by the way, was a culmination of his sixteen years of research that uncovered more than five references to a segmented sleeping pattern, he found that you would wake in this fourteen hour sleep pattern

for maybe an hour or two, get up, tend your animals, do a little white house keeping in the moonlight, have sex, lay in bed, thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with your bed fellows. In fact, and we've mentioned before, I love this. It's widely known that Benjamin Franklin would light a candle and take cold air baths, reading naked in a chair. Indeed, that was his his strategy for this

this period between the two sleeps. And one thing I love about this is it also really defines that idea about the middle of the night, right because for us, the middle of the night is typically more a situation of staying up late enough for it to be the

middle of the night. But you go back to to this, this earlier mode of sleep, and it's it's not merely a stage of lateness, but a true in between that this this little space, this little uh clutch of the darkness that you end up occupying between these two dominant phases of sleep. Now and Stephen Johnson's book How We Got to Now in the PBS series, there is a

section on light and he talks about that. He talks with historian Craig Koslovsky, who says that you know, are kind of nighttime wakenings now or even insomnia may be attributed to this original for seen our sleep phase. In other words, it's kind of normal that we get up sometimes, you know, midnight or two o'clock in the morning, and we can't get back to sleep for a while. Yeah, I mean that's the biological norm. That's what we evolved

to do. And it's only been in the last hundred and fifty years, two hundred years, that we've really carved out a substantial zone of the night and and ReLit it. According to Stephen Johnson in the in the book of How We Got to Now, in that that chapter and Light points out that today's night sky burned six thousand times brighter than it did in me or one hundred and fifty years ago. So it's it's transforms. It's transformed the way we sleep, the way we work and uh.

And that's of course spiral of office, Johnson explains in his book into the creation of global networks of communication. Uh and and and a lot of our modern technological world. Yeah, because all of a sudden, you have improved street lighting, you had the advent of social opportunities at the in during the evening, you have you know, restaurants and cafes

to go to. And that cause is a shift in people sleep patterns because before that, according to Koslovski, you had associations with the night that we're not so good. We're talking about before the seventeenth century. He says the night was a place populated by people of disrepute, criminals, prostitutes, and drunks. And he said even the wealthy who could afford candle light had better things to spend their money on than burning their candles all night long. There really

wasn't any prestige or social value. And staying up all night, yeah, I mean nightfalls. You locked the door because the only people out there are going to be people that are probably up to no good. You don't want anything to do with that. And the walls to the city, if you have walls around your your here in which you live, those are gonna close because anyone entering the city in the night again up to no good. And hey, don't forget about those nighttime predators of the animal ilk, right,

that's right. I mean it takes us back to our primeval self, right. Uh, the idea that that there are predators out there that will eat us and the night belongs to to those creatures, not to us. Um. And you know, you can spiral off from that into a lot of our our fears of the of the dark, of the dark, and concerns about the night and uh, and that basic type one error and cognition that we make when we believe a connection is really there and

uh when it isn't. We're hardwired to make type one errors because a type to air a false negative gets you killed. Always better to assume that their predators out there in the dark. Always better to assume their thieves and criminals and and whatever out there in the shadows, because it's a safer bed. Now we'll talk later about how this type one into cognition errors can uh kind

of mess us up here in our modern world. But for now, let's try to figure out why we respond so greatly to light and dark in the first place. And in order to do that, we got to look our old friends on the tree of life. I'm talking about single filled bacteria because again, this comes back through

the very the basic nature of the evolution of life. Right, Life evolved on a world that experiences period clockwork, periods of night and day of light and darkness, and so life itself is taking form within these environmental constraints yep. And one of these constraints is a circadian rhythm, which tracks a standard Earth day's twenty four hour cycle. It's a secret to why we can adjust to different time

zones and their accompanying sleep patterns. And according to Annally Knew, it's writing for I O nine in the article this is why you Can't sleep quote, it's likely that circadian rhythms evolved in sino bacteria blue green algae over three billion years ago. And so you would say, okay, fine, why but why did that blue green algae need to have some sort of circadian rhythm? And the answer is

that it's all about energy. Because single cell bacteria they need energy, but to get at their bodies had to carry out two different chemical processes that interfered with each other. So the bacteria began keeping time by tracking the sun. So when it was light outside the cyanobacteria, we'd get energy from photosynthesis, and when it was dark they could get energy by sequestering nitrogen. But if these two processes

were done simultaneously, they would cancel each other out. But sequentially keeping track of light and dark and went to do these chemical processes allowed a maximum gathering of energy. Now, the other idea is that at that time there were life forms who shared the same environment, and this was also a way to compete with each other for food. So some evolved to feed during the day and others to feed at night. And then you go forward and you have us bipedal energy hogs really taking advantage of

this whole circadian rhythm thing. And of course this brings us back to our old friend, the pineal gland, which we we did an entire episode about about the pineal gland.

I think we called it my third eye peneal optics um and uh, certainly go back and listen to that one if you want a deeper dive into this, but just to refresh, pineal gland is a small organ shaped like a pine cone, hence the name, and it's located on the mid line attached to the posterior end of the roof of the third ventricle in the brain and humans is roughly one sentiment or in length, and the

pennel is composed of penelocytes and giggle cells. In older animals, the penel often contains calcium deposits or brain stand Now, it's it's not an eye, it's not a true eye, but it is. It does have optical properties, and it does and light does play a role in what it does. So light exposure to the retina relays to the hypothalamus, and this is an area in the brain that is involved in the in the coordination of biological clock signals.

UH and fibers from the hypothalamus descend to the spinal cord and project to the superior cervical ganglia, from which post a ganglionic neutrons ascend back to the pineal gland. So the penneal transduces signals from the sympathetic nervous system into a hormone linal signal, and it produces several important hormones,

including melotonin, in response to environmental lighting. So the human penel regulates the rhythm that beats out the biological thought by secreting a substance melatonin according to the light stimulus received through the eyes and from the skin. Yeah, the penel gland acts as a control tower for the biological clock. Inside of this directing some body functions like sleep based on the data that it's getting back from these light

sensing skills. And I love this idea that this third eye does have all the components of an eye, but is not an eye, and it is taking in all of these environmental cues in order to tell the body. Hey, time to wake up or time to go to sleep? Now, Um.

Alison louder Milk, who is whenres senior editors here, had brought up the point before, and I think she was like talking about whales at the Georgia Aquarium who are affected by daylight savings time she ran up the point of what what would happen if you weren't exposed to light at all? Yeah, this brings to mind some research from two thousand eleven UH into the nature of the Mexican blind cave fish. Now, despite what the name would have you think, this species exists in both subterranean and

surface populations. Now the surface fish swim with the benefit of sighted eyes, while their underground can go about blindly in laboratory populations this UH. In this two thousand eleven to say, the surface fish slept while the cavers darted around all night. Uh. The researchers discovered that the differing sleep behavior hinged on a few dominant gene mutations that became fixed in the cave populations when they took to

the dark. After All, as we've discussed in our truck lafonta episode of food is scarce in the subterranean environments particularly in Subtranian waters. So natural selection favors the scavengers who are willing to work long, long hours. Um. This research also brings to mind the account of researcher Christina Lanzoni, who spent a whopping two hundred and sixty nine days of solitary confinement in the subterranean under lab in the

Frasasi Caves in central Italy. Now, granted she didn't have to swim about all night scaven scaven for food, but her sleep patterns altered significantly. On average, Lanzoni's waking days stretched on for fifty four to fifty six hours, followed by fourteen to sixteen hours of sleep. For furthermore, that sleep was much more like that of an infant, as she fall immediately into rim sleep and dream of wide

and open spaces. So UM, what I like about those two studies is that they do really drive home how crucial light and dark um is. Do an organism be it to being an organism's uh evolutionary advancement into a into a realm of darkness, or its continuing existence in a room of light, or just taking a single organism and taking it out of that that flow of light and dark and putting it into a subterranean world. Now, in those examples, as are those are all organisms who

could detect light. But the question becomes, what if you were never indoctrinated into light in the first place. We're going to take a quick break when we get back, we're going to talk about blindness. We're gonna talk about twenty four hours sleep wake disorder and fear of the dark. All right, we're back, and we're discussing darkness. But it's like to to live as an organism in a world of light and dark and how light and dark rules

less at a very basic biological level. But what about those of us whose ability to perceive light and darkness is significantly degraded or almost erased, almost completely, at least at the retina level. Yeah, and we'll talk about that in a moment, about people who are blind and what their sleep patterns are like. But first you have to kind of go back to the whole spartadian rhythm in

the first place. And it turns out that most of us have body clocks that run a little longer than twenty four hours, and this can sometimes lead to something called the twenty four hours sleep wake disorder. Or non twenty four And according to the non twenty four site, if your body clock is say twenty four point five hours long, today, you're running a half hour behind. Tomorrow you're an hour behind, and so on until your natural rhythms have you sleeping during the day and a week

at night. Now this can go on and on and on.

So what basically what this um is saying is that you could go to sleep at ten o'clock every night, but if you have this non twenty four disorder, you know, you might false ip at ten thirty and then eleven, and then so on and so forth, and it just keeps pushing that needle of your body clock around this twenty four hour cycle, and in some cases it takes up to say one and a half months to get back to where you are simped up to say a normal cycle that the rest of the world, at least

your time zone is on. I feel like this this matches up at a symbolic level with with pretty much everything uh in my modern life. Imagine with a lot of people that you have within the the the calendar year, within the the the confines of clock time, you have x amount of time to spend on a given thing. Unfortunately that thing actually takes x point five um to to complete and it all adds up and you end up just sort of not sticking to any particular schedule,

but just sort of falling through it. And this with this amorphous sleeps cycle, with the amorphous attention to detail and various corners of your life. UM and I feel like my own just my own sleep sometimes falls like this, like I'm not never never, just like to go to sleep at this time, wake up at this It's like like it'll it'll sort of flow and shift throughout a

given week. Well. As a former insomniac scept for, I try to keep really close to the times that I fall asleep and wake up because that helps a lot in terms of regulation. But I understand what you mean. I read on twenty four and I was like, well, this is this does kind of feel like sleep can become this very random thing and as you say, something that you fall through as opposed to just being completely

SYNCD up on. And it turns out that among people who are totally blind, as many as seventy suffer from the effects of NON twenty four, which again comes about because of this light of light perception, or more specifically, the transmission of ocular light from the retina to their circadian clock that is impaired, So you don't have that sort of reset button, and you don't have that sort of environmental cue of hey, let's wake up, and it

can be much more prevalent among the blind. So, you know, we talked about that, this this idea that I can take a month and a half to get sinked back up to that cycle that at least your time zones on. Imagine this sort of chronic sleep disorder that would be in place, and all the symptoms that would follow. It would feel like you had jet leg every single day of your life. Yeah, I agree. That's that's the way I felt before I had when I had this unaddressed

to sleep problems a while back. Yeah, And in these cases, it's you know, extremely difficult to be on time and stay awake at work, to attend school, pursue interest, keep your social life intact, and so there aren't many things that you can do for this. However, some people have found limited relief through treatment with a synthetic version of melotonin that will sometimes help to drag forward the body clocks reset time by creating that chemical pulse to the

circadian um body clock. But again this is limited and not everybody responds to it. Yeah, but still the synthetic melotonin is key, much better than wandering around in the middle of the night trying to stuff the pineal glands out of people, so that if you're victims skulls. Yeah, there are only so many air bath that you can take.

But I mean, that's one of the things about sleep problems, right, There's so many things you have to do in during the course of a day, and here you are awake in the dead of night, in the dark, and this is you and you it's not only is it not the time to do most of those things, but even even the things that you could conceivably do that you can turn on a light and grab a book or or whatever, you work on your homework, work on your you know, some some of your daylit work stuff, you

don't have the mindset to do it because what you need is sleep at that time. Yeah, And I mean it can also lead to other sleep disturbances like nightmares. And there was a really interesting study that just came out in the journal Sleep Medicine. And granted it is one study, and it's very small, but in the study, it showed that an average of of the dreams experienced by people born blind are nightmares. And when you look at sighted people in nightmares, it accounts for only six

percent of the dreams that they have. So that's you know, a fourfold increase if you are born blind in this one study. Yeah, Now, I do want to want to drive home here that this is this is not something that causes excessive trouble for those individuals. So don't think about any blind people in your life or just you know, uh that you may know and think, oh my god, that you know that that poor person they're having to just live of nightmare every night, something to that effect,

because it's not like that. No. In fact, when the study participants who are born blinds were told of this fourfold increase, they didn't even realize that it was disproportionate. And they did they were fine for it. And if you think about it, then we'll talk a little bit more about this. That's maybe because dreams and nightmares kind

of helped guide us in an odd way. Yeah, we've we've talked about dreams and nightmares in the past, and I mean, you basically get down to this idea that the dreams are, of course not just a screen saver like dreams and and everything that's going on in your brain at night. It's about processing the information, and from the day, it's about processing your environment, your struggles, your stresses, the problems that you're facing and working them out in

the brain. And sort of the the byproduct of all that is the dreamscape that you end up inhabiting. Yeah, and let's droll down into the nitty gritty of this study because I think it tells something about that dreamscape. So, people who are born blind, they didn't have dreams with visual content, that's one thing, and then that's where their

dreams became nightmares. Now, people who lost their sight later in life may have visual content in their dreams, although the longer they've been blind, the fear dreams they had with visual content. Now, consider that seven percent of their dreams were nightmares, and dreams have normally sided people are based on the images and that they had, and they

have nightmares only six percent a time. Now. The trial subjects nightmares were often related to threats experienced in everyday life, and one woman had nightmares about being run over by a car or getting into embarrassing social situations like spilling a cup of coffee on her. And if I remember this correctly, I believe the woman was someone who had

been blind since birth. Now all of that comes to suggest that again, that dreamscape is trying to work out all of the things that are happening to you emotionally and physically throughout the day. So there's this idea that increased nightmares and those blind from birth maybe a way to remember information that's important to survival and welfare, particularly if you think about the more complex interactions with the

physical world, like navigating traffic. If you don't have any sort of mental imagery of that or visual imagery of that, then it's harder to create that blueprint. Right, So there's there's more work that has to be done at night while the bride brain is sleeping to help process all that information. So it's just, you know, the situation where there's there's a they live in a slightly different sense world than cited individuals, and the way they interact with

that sense world requires more processing in the night. It maybe perhaps more fear based processing is a way to inform the way that they're going to navigate their their world the next day, and again the researchers found like zero pronounced anxiety or depression as a result of increased nightmares. Yeah, because even when you get don't get down into like really like fear with a capital of f A lot of our navigation during the course of the day is

ultimately fear based. You know. Just think of taking the train in the morning, which I often think about that in terms of of people who who deal with blindness, because there are a number of of of blind individuals who take the train. We see them, see them every day. But and you think about the the effort of doing that.

You're dealing with a this murderous piece of machinery that goes down the tracks, that travels in this uh in this pit that has rats in it, and and you have to get there, have to go up an elevator or take the stairs, and there's there. There's so many different places, in different opportunities for me to die in the course of of my daily commute, and I have the benefit of sight uh to help me. I think it also calls in, you know, to light this idea that we really do dream with all of our senses

and those are all available to us. Yeah, it's it's a it's a different sense world, that's for sure. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we get back we will talk about being afraid of the dark and whether or not having seem to do with insomnia. All right, we're back. And this leads us inevitably to nicktophobia, to fear of the dark. Now I have a toddler. He's not really at the point where he seems to have a fear of the dark yet. Um, he's in

the dark. You just can't see. But uh, your your child is a is a bit older. Have you been through fear of the dark has played into her experiences at all? No, uh, not yet. I mean she's five and a half. But I remember when I was um around her age that I was definitely afraid of some sort of monster lurking in the closet, which would only become a fear, of course, when the lights were out.

When was the last time you slept with all the lights on with but with the not not by accident, but because you said I am going to leave a light on when I go. I can't remember. I mean, now I'm like Elvis and I have blackout shades and you know, not not one little stream of light gets through.

What about you? Um? You know, I feel like there was a time in the last few years when my before my child came and uh, and that's when my wife was out of town, and I think, I like, I read something kind of spooky or watch something spooky, and uh, and without the normal sort of comfort own of sharing a bed with someone, I was like, oh, wow,

it's just me in here. And I ended up sleeping at least part of the night with the light on because because having that other person there you have, something comes for you in the night, either they all hear it or they can only really kill one of you at once effectively, so someone's going to survive. That's so funny, because when we've talked about outsourcing memory before, it's kind of like outsourcing responsibility. A murder comes, then you take

care of it. But I do remember years before when I saw The Ring for the first time, I slept with definitely slept with the lights on all night after seeing that. That one, that one scared me pretty bad. I remember the book I Am Legend, which I got from you, Richard Matheson that terrified. We had a hard

time going to say that's a good one. That's a good fear of the dark book for sure, because it has to deal with a character who, on top of all of his his angst and his problems and his his alcoholism, when the sun goes down, dark things come out of of the shadow and come for him and call for him, and uh and he must resist sleep

in order to survive. Yeah, it's it's it's an impressive book. Yeah, not to mention his alcoholism too, which is that's not a good time to be an alcoholic when you've got the bloodthirstay at your door, alright, So uh yeah, nickophobia, it is this anxiety reaction which is characterized by an obsessive, irrational fear of the dark. And typically you see that in children, and you know they tend to grow out of it, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes people are still

feared of the dark. And there's this idea that um sleep disturbances could just be a fear of the dark. And there's a paper call quote, are people with insomnia afraid of the dark? Pilot study from Ryerson University Sleep in Depression Lab, And it looks at a possible link

between sleep disorders and the dark. Yeah, and this study, nearly half of the students who reported having poor sleep also reported a fear of the dark, and researchers confirmed this objectively by measuring blink responses to sudden noise bursts in light and dark surroundings. Good sleepers became accustomed to the noise burst, but the poor sleepers grew more anticipatory when the lights went down. So you end up with a situation where the poor sleepers were far more easy

to startle in the dark compared to the good sleepers. Yeah, and the reason for all the eye theatrics, according to Dr Colleen Karney of Ryerson University, is that if you're already a little anxious, the noise will make you flinch. And she said, we looked at eye reactions because it is one of the most robust ways to measure this anxiety. If you blink immediately after the noise, that means it

startles you. It's It's an interesting thing about this in terms of phobias because, as we recently discussed in our Fear of Holes episode where we discussed phobias a bit, I mean, phobias come out of in many cases anyway, they stem from a realistic fear. And certainly it's realistic, as we've discussed, to have some apprehension about the dark, because at the very least, the dark is the environment where you will not see the whole you're about to

step into. Yeah, it's again it's that uncertainty that's stepping into the unknown. And so when you say, like you know, a spouses out of town, all of a sudden, those those noises in the dark become much larger in your mind than they possibly are, and um, you respond to them in a much more robust way. So the interesting thing about this study is that it got the researchers to thinking if some people with sleep disorders like insomnia they have an active and untreated phobia of the dark,

that treatment methods may need to be reevaluated. In other words, could the underlying cause of the insomnia be a phobia to the dark. So in other words, maybe we're better off treating the phobia if it's there, rather than the inability to sleep. Yeah, and again this is more like a hunch of the study, so you know, and they're saying that they're just there's some people who do not respond to behavioral drug therapy. Therefore, maybe there's something else

going on and it could relate to this. It's certainly this would be a good one to hear from from listeners because I know we have listeners. I know for a fact we have listeners that have had problems with sleep.

And so, yeah, I ask yourself, to what extent do you are you, honestly, um apprehensive about the dark and do you feel that plays into your scenario or is your scenario definitely not associated with that, because I know I have a friend or I have one friend in particular who has had always hadn't been plagued by insomnia, and I know he's not afraid of the dark kind of a guy like I think he just goes out

and walks in the dark. If you can't sleep, Yeah, and then I mean there could be other underlying conditions that you could have an anxiety just where you could have PTSD. So it's not really um that apparent that it could be just a more general phobia of the dark. Um. But if you are afraid of the dark, if it's something that bothers you, imagine being placed into this fictional room outfitted and the darkest material known to man. WHOA,

you're of course talking about Zanta black. That's right. It's so dark that any light that gets through the cracks will essentially vanish into this material, which was created by the company Surrey Nano Systems. And we're talking about a dense forest of carbon nanotubes, single atom carbon tubes ten thou times thinner than human hair that drink in nine six percent of all incoming radiation. Yeah, it's super black,

it's infinite black. It's the gothiest material possible. Uh and uh, you're probably wondering, why would you why would you create this? What's the point? Are you just trying to suck the soul right right out of this? Well? Uh, this is the main applications for this material would relate to sensitive optical equipment like telescopes. UM and in fact, a NASA Goddard team led by John Hagga Paine has been developing

nanotube material else like this since the two thousand seven. Yeah, it's been described by one of the CEOs as um deep featureless black. Even when folded and scrunched. He says, you expect to see the hills and all you can see it's like black. It's like a hole, like there's nothing there. It looks so strange. So it's it's a wonderfully creepy concept in innovation. I love it. I would

love to see it. I mean, you put it on a gallery wall and let us stare into it, because I love I love works of art that are just like stark, you know, white and dark, and you can sort of lose yourself in the depths of of the darkness. Well, and what I think is so interesting about it is that even when you're in the dark, you do perceive some sort of light. Usually there's a source of somewhere if you're never fulling in the dark. But here is a possibility to create a room that would truly encase

you and in total lightlessness. And what I was thinking about, um we were talking about this earlier, is that we are now entering into fall and very soon it's going to be winter, and already the days are getting shorter.

There's not as much sunlight available to us. And so that's why this idea of darkness is so interesting, because a lot of us start to turn in word right now and we start to see these sort of cracks in our psyche and it can be sort of a depressive time for some people, and then sometimes it can be good. Um yeah, why they plan to do the holidays during the darkest period of the year. I never understood that can we do it in a happier mind at least go outside? Well, I thought I thought I

could take comfort from this. One aspect of it is that if you and not to make light of suffering. If if you find that this is a season that does make you turn in word and become more serious about things or grapple with things, that, um, it's beneficial to us ultimately. And because again those cracks in the psyche are important. And uh, if I may, I will read a quote from Leonard Cohen which goes a little like this. There is a crack in everything, and that's

how the light gets in. So keep that in mind, because you lie to candle at five third a p m. When the sun goes down in your neck of the woods, and lock the doors. Be sure to lock the doors, because there are things out there in the night and they want to get to you, all right. So there you have it. Lots of good uh content in there. I think kind of a just a dive into the the idea of fearing the dark, our feelings about the dark, evolving as a as a as a creature in this

world of light and darkness. So I'm sure a lot of people have some feedback on that. In the meantime, go to stuffabol your Mind dot com. That is where you'll find all the podcast episodes we've ever done, the videos, the blog post links after our social media accounts, and on each and every podcast we're putting down these days, you know, we're making a point to have a podcast

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