Things Are Different After Dark - Night Words To Comfort You

Do take a listen to the second of my Night Rambles, where I chat loosely around a theme, with plenty of digressions and personal anecdotes that aim to distract and comfort your busy mind and hopefully nudge you gently to sleep. The theme tonight is nocturnal animals and plants, and why humans can't see colours in the dark.

Transcript

Hello there,

It's Mandy here.

Thanks so much for joining me for the second in my series of pieces about night.

It's always great to listen to a story,

But sometimes if the story is interesting it's quite difficult to fall asleep to it because you want to find out what happened.

So the idea behind my night rambles is just to talk to you about any old thing,

To ramble on purely for the sake of it,

So you don't have to follow a storyline but can just fall asleep listening to the sound of my voice.

In my first instalment I talked about being alone,

Awake and yet connected to other people.

Do feel free to take a listen to it if you haven't yet done so.

It's in the free tracks here on Insight Timer.

To be honest,

I was blown away by all the lovely reviews and comments,

So much so that it made me feel I'd like to write more.

I particularly loved it when people told me where in the world they were listening from.

So I'd love it if you did that,

If you get a spare moment that is.

Anyway,

In this second instalment I thought we might ponder a little on things that are very different in the night time from the way they are in the day.

And the first thing on my mind is colours.

The colour of things seems to change completely in the dark.

That of course is because of our eyes.

I hope you won't mind if I get a bit technical now.

But there are two kinds of light-sensitive organs at the backs of our eyes,

Rods and cones.

They're both sensitive to light,

But they're sensitive in different ways.

Rods let us see in very dim light,

But they don't let us see colours.

Cones do let us see colours,

But they don't respond in the dark.

So,

Although when it gets dark the rods in your eyes are continuing to see,

The cones have shut up shop and that's why you can't see colours very well.

What you do see instead is a range of greys and blacks.

By the way,

You might find that when it's dark you can see more clearly out of the sides of your eyes.

And that's because the light-sensitive rods are more highly concentrated at the side back of your eye.

Give it a try sometime and let me know how you get on.

We all know we can't see so well in the dark,

But we get very used to that.

So when we switch the lights off to go to sleep,

We probably don't even think about the way all the colours of our bedroom have gone kind of monochromatic,

Or in other words,

Black and white.

I say black and white,

But I don't think black and white really covers it.

You'll know that if you've ever spent any time watching black and white movies or looking at black and white photographs.

At night,

When I wake up and look around my bedroom,

I wouldn't describe the hues and tones that I see there as black and white.

Would you,

I wonder?

Maybe you've never thought about it before.

I mean,

I'm sure you've got better things to do.

I'm sure you've got quite a lot of better things to do.

But it's something that has puzzled me for some time.

I find that I'm looking to see what's there and wondering how to describe it.

I've never actually spoken to anyone else about this except you.

And even though I'm a writer and it's my job to do so,

I don't really have any words to describe exactly what it is that I see,

Colour-wise that is.

If you're awake now and feel like doing it,

Take a peep out of one eye.

There,

See?

If you've got any way at all of describing the colours or non-colours that you see,

Please let me know.

Now,

You can close that eye again and snuggle back down again into whatever comfy place you're lying in.

I wouldn't dream,

Or perhaps dare is a better word,

Of asking you to open an eye again.

You are quite safe from any such unreasonable demands from now on.

For me,

The colour of things at night seems to be something I can't really grasp,

So my mind does its usual shorthand and tells me,

The furniture is all made of wood,

So it's brown,

And the door handles are silver.

Because it tells me all this so insistently,

I find it very difficult to actually see what these things really do look like in real life.

So,

If you're awake now and feel like doing it,

Take a peep out of one eye and snuggle back down again into whatever comfy place you're lying in.

Now,

If you're in the dark,

If you've ever done any drawing and maybe had any lessons or read a book about how to draw,

It's quite likely that you've been told to try and draw exactly what you see,

Rather than what you think you see.

And it's quite difficult to do this,

Because your mind is so bossy nearly all the time,

It hardly ever lets up.

So there you are on day one,

Trying to draw a tree,

Trying to draw exactly what you see,

Which is perhaps a big mass of pale green with a trunk that in this particular light,

In this particular wood in the early morning,

Looks pale green too.

But the mind knows this is an aspen tree,

Its leaves are heart-shaped and very much mid-green,

Its trunk is silvery grey,

Its bark is smooth.

So while we're busy trying to draw exactly what we see,

The mind is busy overriding us,

And we end up drawing the tree from the mind's knowledge and not the eye's knowledge.

And somehow,

When we look at what we've drawn,

We're a bit dissatisfied,

And we feel as though we haven't drawn what we actually saw at all.

Mind you,

It's something we can practice if we want to,

And something we can probably get a whole lot better at over time.

But I don't mean to criticise the mind.

Our minds have created shorthand for millions of everyday things like this.

And it's a good thing,

I'm sure,

Because it stops us being totally overwhelmed by everything,

Everywhere,

All at once.

For example,

If every time we got into a car or a bus,

We were amazed afresh we were amazed afresh by the workings of the combustion engine,

We'd probably never get to our destination.

If every time we put a piece of bread into the toaster,

We couldn't believe in electricity or take it for granted that the little heating element inside would brown our bread,

Getting our toast in the morning might take a long time.

If we spend all day marvelling at all the amazing things our bodies are doing,

Every second,

We might not have much time for anything else.

Sometimes you've just got to focus and get on with things.

So,

When we wake at night and decide to get up and go to the bathroom,

We might tend to grope our way across the room in the dark,

Knowing exactly what all the dark shapes are.

The footboard at the end of the bed,

Perhaps.

The big pine chest of jaws.

And don't catch your foot in the rug.

Oop,

Too late.

But the interesting thing,

I think,

Is that,

Say a team of pigment scientists were working in your room,

Very gently and quietly,

Of course,

And totally invisibly,

And in such a way that they didn't disturb you.

Disturb or worry you at all.

They would be able,

With their colour measuring instruments,

To detect the pigment in your furniture,

Your walls,

Your curtains or blinds,

Even in the dark.

Don't ask me how,

So perhaps it's time we moved on.

We'll leave the pigment scientists in their clean white coats,

Fetching a little stepladder so that they can clamber up onto your chest of jaws to measure the colour of your ceiling and lampshade,

If you've got one,

While we think about something very different.

Let's travel further afield.

Let's climb down out of your bedroom window and into the garden or yard or anywhere nearby where there are plants growing.

After the daytime creatures have flown off to their nests and burrows or their hives,

Bees are key workers on the day shift,

For example,

As are hawks.

There's a whole new night shift of creatures that have been asleep in the day,

But who are now ready to clock on and begin their work for the night.

By the way,

Did you know that honeybees are very much like us in their habit of spending between five and seven hours of sleep every night?

They may also take naps during the day too.

They have to sleep at night because they simply aren't able to fly in the dark,

Though they are able to crawl.

While the bees are tucking their legs under them and drawing in their wings,

Some like to hold on to each other's legs to sleep.

It's the turn of the moths to emerge into the night,

Along with many other insects and bats and owls.

The moths,

Knowing that they have to get up and go to work at night,

Have been sleeping during the daytime in any dark shady place they can find.

Sometimes that's in a tree or in a bush.

Sometimes that's in a tree or a bush.

And sometimes it's in a drawer or wardrobe among your softest,

Most comfy jumpers.

All the owls have been asleep somewhere like,

Say,

A hollow in a tree,

Though there are also burrowing owls who make their sleeping spaces in the ground.

Bats favour a nice dark tree hollow too,

Or a cave,

And some species have a particular liking for sleeping under roof timbers under the tiles.

As you probably know,

Bats enjoy hanging upside down to sleep,

All huddled together for warmth.

I wonder if you've ever seen bats asleep,

Maybe in nature,

Or maybe in an animal park or sanctuary.

I saw some once,

And they looked amazing,

Like a whole load of broken black umbrellas,

All folded up and hanging down from the ceiling.

But it isn't just the creatures who are different at night.

There's also a whole different set of flowers and plants that come into their own at night.

Some of them giving off quite strong fragrances to attract the pollinators of the night.

Speaking as a gardener,

I've always loved the perfume that comes from night-scented stock.

I try every year to grow it,

And I'm not always successful.

But I remember one glorious summer,

About 20 years ago,

When it grew really profusely.

When it grew really profusely in my garden,

On either side of the front door of the house I was living in then.

You had to go up some steps to get to the door,

And if I'd been out for the evening,

And if it was very warm,

I'd go up the steps,

And while I was standing there scrabbling about in my bag for the front door key,

The sweet,

Heady scent used to rise up in the warm night air,

And enfold and thrill me like some sort of fairy enchantment.

I would open the door,

But then just stand there,

Unwilling to go into the house.

But like most of my successes in gardening,

I don't really know why it happened.

I've certainly never managed to make it happen again.

But anyway,

At dusk and beyond,

These plants begin to make their own adjustments to get ready to welcome the night pollinators.

Their leaves might change position,

Their flowers,

Which have been closed all day,

Might start to open.

This happens not just in rural areas,

But in towns and cities too.

So now,

Just a word,

While we're on the subject,

About dusk,

Sunset and twilight.

Have you ever wondered about the difference between those three things?

Well,

I haven't until talking to you now.

I'd always thought that they were three vague terms,

Perhaps a bit poetic.

So I've looked them up,

And it turns out that they have specific meanings.

Who knew?

Though perhaps you did.

But the technical description of sunset really is rather technical.

The kind of thing where even just listening,

You run the risk of sparking off thinking.

And as we're trying to relax right now,

I've decided not to burden you with it tonight.

And I discovered that no one seems to agree on the meaning of the word dusk.

To some,

It means complete darkness,

While to others,

It means that half-light you get just after the sun sets.

So we'll draw a veil over dusk for the time being.

But I think you can cope with hearing about twilight.

Please feel free to disagree and let my words wash over you even more than they usually do.

Let them become just a faint verbal in the distance.

So twilight is the term used to describe the period between sunset and total dark.

But what's really interesting is that there turn out to be three precise stages of twilight.

After sunset,

As soon as the sun is six degrees below the horizon,

Comes syphil twilight.

Syphil twilight.

What a wonderful and rather polite term.

Perhaps it's when gardeners decide to stop gardening and instead spend a few moments chatting to their neighbour across the garden fence.

It is definitely the time when vehicles are advised to switch their headlights on,

Or rather,

The vehicle's drivers are advised.

Mind you,

Cars nowadays seem able to make this decision all by themselves.

During syphil twilight,

You can begin to see the very brightest stars.

Syphil twilight ends when the sun drops to 12 degrees below the horizon and nautical twilight begins.

This is when,

If you were in a ship and if you were a skilled navigator,

You would now be able to use the position of well-known stars in relation to the horizon to navigate by.

That's why this phase is known as nautical twilight.

Once the sun has dropped 18 degrees below the horizon,

We get astronomical twilight.

Now you know it's really well and truly dark.

Your eyes have stopped being able to see colours properly and in the sky there's no sign of the sun's afterglow at all.

The fainter stars,

Those smaller or further away,

Now show themselves.

The sky is now as dark as it's going to be for the rest of the night.

It's quite interesting that,

Isn't it?

Well,

I think so.

But anyway,

Let's get back to the night-opening flowers.

Night-opening flowers are usually quite pale colours,

White or yellow or pink,

And they have quite a musky smell.

Sometimes they're a bit stinky,

To be frank.

Insects seem to like that sort of thing,

Though.

There's no accounting for tastes.

Anyway,

They smell the scent before they see the flower.

They turn towards the source and then the pale petals act as a kind of beacon,

Shining palely in the soft moonlight,

Guiding the insect to the flower's hidden store of nectar.

Perhaps it's a bit like a lighthouse guiding sailors into a sailing ship.

Guiding sailors into a safe harbour at night.

You know,

Insects see in a very different way to the way humans see.

They have what's known as compound eyes and can see ultraviolet light.

And it's thought that flowers appear glowing and iridescent to them,

Which is quite a thought.

You might say that the flowers are iridescent.

It's just us that can't see it.

The nectar in night-opening flowers tends to lie deeper in the flower than in day-opening flowers.

Moths and bats have to go right to the deep centre of the flower to get their treat,

Using their long proboscis,

Or tongue,

Which they unfurl and then plunge into the flower's heart.

I'm sure the nectar they find there is worth the trouble.

There is one bee,

Though,

That's active at night.

While the other bees are tucked up in the hive or sleeping outdoors somewhere,

Which is how solitary bees tend to spend the night,

Squash bees begin work before dawn.

They can easily have a whole field of squash,

Zucchini or pumpkin plants pollinated before the other bees have even woken up.

Squash flowers unfurl their long orange or yellow petals at sunrise,

And the bees,

Who nest in the ground near the plants,

Very conveniently,

Are on hand and ready to go to work as soon as the flowers open.

Imagine all the gardeners and farmers still hitting the snooze buttons on their alarm clocks,

Or at best,

Throwing off the duvet and going downstairs to put the kettle on,

And the bees are almost ready to knock off for the day.

I'd also better mention the fact that there are some flies and beetles who are very active at night.

I don't want them feeling left out.

Fireflies,

Or lightning bugs,

As they are sometimes called,

Are a good example.

They too are night pollinators.

Fireflies are actually beetles,

Not flies,

Whatever their name suggests.

The rhinoceros beetle,

Quite a fierce-looking insect,

Which can have a body of up to six inches long,

Which I have to admit sounds far too big to me for an insect,

Is another creature that's active at night.

So too are slugs and snails.

I'm sure that at least once in your life you've woken up to silvery trails on the doormat,

Or floorboards,

Or carpet.

I'm afraid that once,

When I was a student and lived in a student house where all the rooms were used as bedrooms,

So that I had a room on the ground floor,

I used to sleep on a futon on the floor.

Anyway,

One morning I woke to silvery trails across the end of my futon.

As I was only about 21 then,

And a drama queen,

I screamed the house down and then cried for an excessive amount of time until my housemates got fed up with me and told me to shut up.

And the thing was,

We never could find exactly where the slug was getting in to block off its entrance,

And neither could we catch it in the act.

Even though I once stayed up for most of the night armed with a torch.

As if it knew,

Via some sort of sluggy sixth sense,

That I was waiting for it,

It decided to lay low that night and defer its futon scaling activities to some future date.

Or perhaps there was some sort of party in slug world that night or my slug got invited somewhere else to crawl on the corner of someone else's futon.

Not that I had any kind of plan for dealing with it,

Even if I'd managed to catch it,

I would probably just have screamed some more and woken all my housemates up.

Of course,

The night after my torchlight vigil,

The slug was back,

Leaving its sticky silvery trail on the bottom right-hand corner of the futon.

Looking back,

I can't understand why I didn't just get a proper bed.

It was probably the same impulse that meant we sat on beanbags on the floor instead of getting ordinary chair and sofa.

Of course,

I'm sure you've noticed that slugs and snails are active in daylight too,

Especially in the early hours of the day.

They're active in daylight too,

Especially when it's been raining.

But night is a good time for them because the temperature is lower and the humidity higher.

They like damp,

Dark places.

One summer in my garden here in the UK,

We had a plague of snails.

The conditions had been just right for them that year.

I was growing peas and we came back from holiday to find the peawig one absolutely covered in them in broad daylight too.

But I'm going to digress away from mollusks for a moment or two.

Thank goodness for that,

I hear you think.

But I'd like to talk about temperature and the fact that the ground is able to cool down tremendously at night.

In that way,

It's very unlike the sea or ocean,

Which tends to remain at a similar temperature to the way it was during the day.

It actually only changes by less than one degree.

If you've ever been for a night swim in the summer,

You might have noticed that.

In fact,

The sea can actually feel warmer at night,

Though it's really about the same temperature.

When you think about this difference between sea and land temperature,

It makes sense.

On land,

The dirt just sits there.

So when the sun hits it,

It just heats up the top layer.

Very little heat moves into the lower levels of the ground.

But water is constantly moving around,

Swirling and mixing.

That movement spreads the heat around.

It also keeps the temperature more constant.

The water in the sea or ocean is absorbed more energy from the sun in the first place because it's semi-transparent as opposed to the ground,

Which is opaque.

It's funny,

Isn't it,

How you can hear information like that and think,

Oh yes,

I get it.

But I'm aware in saying these last few sentences that I haven't the faintest idea exactly why more energy is absorbed by something transparent and less by something opaque.

I once tried to read the scientist Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time.

I remember thinking that I'd gained some sort of very surface,

Superficial understanding of the things he wrote about,

But that there was this vast chasm of confusion and questioning underneath that.

Children can be so great in exposing those areas with their question,

Yes,

But why?

But it's a bit like not being able to see colour in the dark.

In the end,

We have to accept that there are a million billion things we will never understand and that we can still live our lives perfectly well not knowing,

Although we may choose to find out about some of them.

And since we're talking about things that happen at night,

Let's stay with the ocean for a few more moments because it's under the ocean's surface that the largest migration on the planet happens every single day.

As the sun sets,

Fishes,

Squid,

Shrimps and zooplankton all swim upwards from the depths to near the ocean's surface.

Despite the small size of some,

No bigger than a mosquito,

They travel hundreds of metres in just a few hours.

Under the protection of darkness,

They feast on phytoplankton that grew during the day at the surface and they feast too on other animals eating the phytoplankton.

Then when the sun comes out and there's again enough light for predators to see them,

The migrators return to the deep darkness of the ocean.

Amazing.

But back to land and carpenter ants are active at night and so are crickets.

You've probably heard the chirping sound that crickets make on summer nights.

The ones that you hear are males and they're making that sound by rubbing their wings together.

They're hoping that by doing this they will attract females and also will warn rival males not to enter their territory.

After they've mated,

They chirp again but this time their chirpy song is to signal their success in having attracted a female.

I live in the UK and we don't get crickets here,

At least not as far as I know.

I wonder if you hear them where you are.

When I was a child,

We lived for two years in Nigeria and what we heard the most of there was cicadas.

Cicadas aren't the same as crickets,

They make a slightly different sound but like crickets,

They can make an amazing racket.

Great waves of sound that rise and fall in the night,

A bit like ocean waves crashing and subsiding.

There are many more creatures who are active at night but I'd like to mention just two of them.

The first are owls.

Owls are the most amazing creatures as I'm sure you know.

Most owls hunt at night though burrowing owls that we mentioned earlier are one of the few species that hunt by day.

Most owls have very large eyes in comparison to the rest of their heads which help them see in the dark and they are excellent at seeing into the far distance though they're not very good at seeing very close up.

They can also rotate their heads up to 270 degrees.

They have 14 vertebrae in their necks which is twice as many as we have to help them do this and unlike any other bird of prey they're able to fly almost completely silently.

They also fly more slowly.

This helps a lot when they're out hunting.

As humans,

We tend to be quite fascinated by owls.

We have quite a few sayings about them and many people in many countries of the world think of them as wise.

Our feelings are summed up in a well-known nursery rhyme.

A wise old owl sat on an oak the more he saw the less he spoke the less he spoke the more he heard why aren't we like that wise old bird?

The origin of that rhyme isn't known though people think it's probably 19th century.

You can imagine generations of parents down the ages using it to get their dear children to be quiet.

And this account of night creatures wouldn't be complete without mentioning the aye-aye a rare type of nocturnal lemur that's only found on the island of Madagascar.

So while there's very little chance of you seeing one in your garden I thought you might like to hear a little about the aye-aye which is actually a primate and related to chimps,

Apes and us.

Like owls,

Aye-ayes have big eyes they also have slender fingers and large sensitive ears they spend their lives up in the rainforest trees and avoid coming down to earth they built in the forks of large trees nests which look like closed balls with a single entry hole.

One of the things that's really special about the aye-aye is that its middle finger is much longer than the others and at night it taps on trees with this long finger and listens for wood-boring larvae moving under the bark.

If it detects any it fishes them out using the same long middle finger it also uses this finger for scooping the flesh out of coconuts and other fruits.

Many people in the past have considered the aye-aye to be an omen of bad luck this has led to a decrease in their population but today they're protected by law.

I was lucky enough several years ago to actually see an aye-aye at the Gerald Durrell Sanctuary on the island of Jersey which is one of the Channel Islands between Britain and France.

I have never forgotten the experience of seeing such a shy beautiful creature.

Well,

As usual you've been so patient you've listened to me without once disagreeing or telling me to be quiet.

I can't think where in life that could ever happen except here.

I really hope that my incessant burbling has done the trick and sent you drifting off downstream to the place you most want to sail to in the middle of the night the enchanted island of dreams.

So you might well be asleep now I hope you are but I wish you the best of nights anyway and hope that you wake refreshed and feeling good.

When you get a moment don't forget to tell me in the comments where you've been listening from.

And when.

But for now,

Sleep well my dear.

Reviews

I thought this was lovely thank you so much even made me smile several times.✨🙏🏼💜💜✨

1:00 AM, Montreal, 🍁 Canada 🇨🇦
Thanks again Mandy❤️

Hi Mandy. Been listening from NYC where I have been dozing on and off to this wonderful ramble. Would love more like these please. 🙏🏻😴

Celebrating that wonderful mind and heart of yours for sharing it with us. You indeed are certainly doing your part in making the world a better place and exposing us to so much. Be blessed knowing your worth. Thanks 💝💐😊🎶🐝🦉😴

Listening to crickets as I drift off to sleep in the summer is always a pleasure here in upstate New York. I fell asleep to this “ramble” last night but listened to it awake while doing my pre-sleep stretching tonight. I love now knowing that bees are sleeping now too. Thank you Mandy.

Your soothing voice brings my anxious mind a sense of calm and almost always puts me to sleep. You and I have been many places together. In April, I’ll hear your lovely voice in Italy, Spain and France. Tonight you’ll come through my earbuds in a small town in Texas, USA where I reside.
Thank you, for being with me.
Always,
Denise

Love this! Cones & rods and ‘peek out now’ with one eye… I smiled a lot and chuckled. But was asleep soon after. You are brilliant and so fun Keep on being your fabulous Mandy self and thanks for being here.

3:30 am in Downeast maine, a local term for my neck of the woods ( look it up!) stories lull me more but enjoyed all the facts in your dear voice❤️❤️

Hello Mandy, Cindy here. I’m listening to you from the Point Reyes peninsula in Northern California. Thank you for your ramblings about the night. I had always thought dusk and twilight were synonymous.