Nocturnal Pleasures

What is it about the night that amplifies our fears? Perhaps it is a primal instinct, born in a time when our ancestors huddled in caves for protection against nocturnal predators that posed a real and tangible threat to their very lives. Perhaps it is the darkness, a neutralizing of our primary sense that turns the otherwise familiar world around us into a world of shadows, a world of mystery, a world of the unknown.Perhaps it is the silence, a time of reflection on all the worries we managed to push to the back of our minds in the din and cacophony of the waking day. Worries about our well-being. Worries about the future. Worries about our own mortality. All brought to the forefront, ignored by the fading conscious mind yet seized upon by the subconscious, scrambled together and transformed into ghosts, goblins, and demons. Or perhaps we fear the night so much because there really are demons out there....