It's in the darkness everything begins. Dreams come to be, ideas are created, anxiety thrives, and loneliness turns into something else: something more. Some is scared by the dark, some feels safe. Some feels both, I'm one of them. Most of the time, the darkness is my friend. It's in the dark, I get my ideas. At other times, it's my greatest enemy. It scares me. Or to be more precise: the things hiding in the dark scares me.

Before humans discovered the fire, we lived in darkness when the sun fell. Most likely, we were surrounded by alien sounds - maybe it was then our fear of darkness came to be? You couldn't see what was hiding out there. It could right as well be an evil spirit as a hungry lion. When mankind figured out how to make fire, we could scare away the dark when the sun fell. You could chase away the spirits and the wild animals, and jet the fear did not go away.

We tell the tales of heroes who chase of the villains. We tell the tales of wizards who fights of evil powers. We dance, we sing, and we perform rituals to keep away the spirits and the dark. Even in a modern society, we can not free ourselves from our heritage. We still fear the dark, but maybe it is as much a symptom of the modern society as of the generations that came before us. When the streetlights turn on, we feel safe. But then the power goes out or we find ourselves somewhere without artificial light, well, in that moment we feel the fear creeping up on us.

That's what makes our ideas come to life. It's from those moments, our dreams come into our sleep followed by the nightmares. It's our uncossioness playing games with our minds. It is buried so deep inside of us that there is no getting away from it.

But it is not only at night, darkness appears. Life and death. Good and evil. Light and dark. Darkness is a kind of unknown. It's the uncertainty of what happens to us after death. What happens to us when we die? We know no more than our ancestors. That is something no one has ever known. This is the place for imagination.

It's the idea appearing from the dark. It's the ideas that hide places with no artificial light. The places where only starlight and moon shine reaches. This is the moments the stories come into existence. It's in the darkness after death, life comes to be. It's in the emptiness, everything comes to be. It's in those moments where the dark is my friend. At those moments, it's safe.

But the darkness after death destroys too. Dreams turn into nightmares. Ideas are ripped apart. They wither and disappears with the last sheds of darkness. Nervousness sneaks up upon you, turns to fear; a fear that can not be chased away by the flickering street lamps.

It at those moments, we have become our own wizards. As the first humans did, we have to bring forth the fire. As the heroes, we have to chase away the villains. It's difficult, but important. And then we have to remember that we are not alone. Not in the dark, and not in the emptiness between life and death. There will always be someone else. A friend. A sidekick. We need not be alone. Just like the heroes and the wizards are never alone, we don't have to be either.

You can use the dark to your own advantage. You can camouflage your feelings, hide the twitching of your eyes. When night descends on us, we have room from the conversations we would never have had in the light of day. You can talk about the serious things and make them feel less pressing. Tucked away under the blankets while the stars blink above us and street lights outside your window make the shadows dance, you can discuss the life, death, and everything in between without facing reality.

I can share my innermost feeling with you. You can share your greatest secrets with me, or we can share them with the monsters under our bed and the fairies behind the stars. The monster and the fairies might even respond, bringing us back to a time long since gone. They may bring us back to a time before artificial light and burning flames.

I don't doubt that sometimes, I travel across time and space. Sometimes I just travels to a place deep inside myself. Into my own wonderland, normally surrounded by nothingness, but when darkness falls lit by the moon and the stars and the magic inside of me. It's in this nothingness ideas live before they turn into ideas. It's the place dreams grow before they float into our sleep. And that's the plade nightmares inhabit the shadows.

But this is also the place, the shelves keeping my cremated ideas are placed. This is the place where shards of broken glass are stored in a golden jar. Beside these shelves the gravestones reach the horizon. This is the first place of existence, and the last place of destruction.

If truth come to, neither monsters, fairies, nor the unknown are the things that scare us the most. It's not the evil spirits, not the wild animals. Not the side of our self we show to other people in the light of day, nor the side of ourself we show in the artificial light. Those sides of ourselves, we know. We know them so well. We like them. They make us feel safe. It's the sides that shows themselves only in the dark of night that we fear.

We try to hide them. We are ashamed of them, and we fear them. The animalistic sides that kept our ancestors alife. The instincts that make us put ourselves before everybody else. Live or die. Survival instinct. The selfish, the egotistical site of us that we can show to some extent, but never fully embrace. We have to be humane. Polite. Follow the norms. But it is always there just underneath the surface.

We have always feared the darkness. The first humans told stories to keep the fear at bay. Today we cloak ourselves in the blanket of civilizations, in the artificial light that lights up and buries the darkness - making it obsolete. The dark has always scared us, the dark will always scare us. No matter how much our scientists figure out, a part of us will always sit side by side with our ancestors around the fires.

Prompt: Essay