WILMINGTON – October is upon us.
And with it, expressions of all things ghoulish and frightening.
The act of “celebrating” these innate fears is man’s attempt to gain control over them.
To understand them.
The more we know about the things that “go bump in the night,” the less we are forced to imagine and scare ourselves into believing.
One such fear that seems to permeate throughout our collective childhoods is “The Monster Under the Bed.”
The “Thing” behind the closet door.
The “Boogeyman.”
All are attempts at personifying man’s instinctual fear of the unknown, which often manifests itself as a healthy fear of the dark.
This fear comes from our hunter-gatherer ancestors who would find it abhorrent to learn that we routinely place our children, alone, in a dark area, seemingly to roll the dice on no creature, animal or rival tribe carrying them away in the night.
The practice of us sleeping in separate quarters, and especially children sleeping alone, was unheard of until relativity recently on the human time scale.
Our ancestors had no brick homes, dead-bolted doors and locked windows to protect them from the unknown.
They relied on each other to be wary of danger and to sound the alarms if it approached.
Staying together as much as possible was key to our survival.
Especially at night when predators hunted, searching for anything that had separated from the pack.
When you put a child to bed, and they begin to cry in protest, it is not the idea of sleep that frightens them.
They are trying to tell you that by leaving them alone, they are being put in harm’s way.
That is why it is so hard as a parent to follow the advice of child care professionals who tout the “cry it out” method of teaching a child to sleep on their own.
Those cries and scared yelps from your offspring that you are instructed to “wait out” are intended to affect you on an instinctual level.
Ignoring those cries was, at one time in our distant past, to put the human species itself at risk.
Luckily, we have survived long enough to (seemingly) take control over our environment and the creatures within it.
We no longer need to fear the things that go bump in the night.
But deep down in our DNA, those fears remain.
While typically dormant, they bubble to the surface from time to time to remind us that while we may be at the top of the food chain for the moment – we are still very much connected to it and all those unknown boogeymen looking up at us.
Waiting.
