Kids And Monsters Under The Bed

Nearly every parent has run into it: the little kid who swears there's something under the bed or lurking in the closet. Easy to wave off as nonsense. It isn't nonsense, though. Lately, in my own dimly lit bedroom, I've caught myself seeing things that turn out to be nothing like what I first thought, usually when I wake somewhere in the middle of the night, groggy and only half awake. By the time my head clears, the shape I was staring at is just an ordinary object. While going back over the sensation and perception chapter in the general psychology textbook for a course I was teaching, I got a reminder of why. The rods and cones in the retina build the image you end up seeing. Rods sit mostly toward the edges of the eye, they pick up far less detail, and the picture they hand you is in black and white. They're a gift in low light. But the fuzzy, washed-out image they produce in semidarkness is nothing close to what the cones give you in full daylight, all that sharpness and color.

So of course children are frightened of the dark. A bedroom at 3 a.m. can feel like a different room entirely. A nightlight throws off only a sliver of light, and leaving the door cracked does about the same. Under those conditions the rods are doing most of the work, and what a small child takes in is gray, colorless, with edges that won't hold still. It's not hard to see how a young mind turns that into a boogeyman or a monster. You could, I suppose, lean on the misunderstanding to keep a kid in bed. It seems more decent, though, for a parent to simply admit out loud that things look strange at night because it's dark. Familiar objects stop looking familiar when the light drops.

I've been working at mindfulness, trying to notice what I actually see and hear before I slap a meaning onto it. Slowing the brain down on visual input is genuinely hard, because we process it fast on purpose: something out there might be dangerous and need a quick reaction. Given that, who can blame a child for seeing monsters? Nighttime adds another layer. The small sounds we tune out all day, buried under everything else going on, suddenly stand out, and half the time we can't place what's making them. For me it's the ice maker clunking away in the refrigerator, invisible to me until the house goes quiet. Couldn't a noise like that be a monster shuffling around, getting into things? Throw in a cat that won't settle and keeps prowling. A child has every right to be scared, to be given a real explanation, and to work out, together with you, some plan for handling these confusing signals. Laughing at the fear only deepens it, because now the kid decides there's no one safe to tell, and the fear doesn't go anywhere.

Children who've been abused will often think of the person who hurt them as a monster. In daylight they'd know exactly who it was. In the dark they don't recognize the face right away, and whatever was done to them frightened them, maybe hurt them, so in their minds it could only have come from a monster rather than someone they knew.

To give an ordinary example: when I surface in the middle of the night, I don't always register the lumps and ridges of my husband asleep next to me. Now imagine what that same confusion does to someone living with post-traumatic stress, still on alert after time in genuine danger, maybe where people around them died or were taken by gangs or enemy forces, and it could just as easily have been them. A child may face a version of this too, not recognizing the relative or houseguest who comes to them at night. They get hurt, they're terrified, they know something is wrong, and then an adult tells them they were only seeing things or having a bad dream.

A lighter one. Two nights ago I was convinced a Christmas tree skirt and one of those white fake snow blankets were spread across the top of my covers. My first thought was that I must have left them out on the bed while cleaning out the bedroom closet. I pulled and pulled and the thing wouldn't budge, wouldn't come loose so I could set it aside. It was the corner of the king-size comforter the whole time. I got there eventually and quit yanking at my own bedding. I wonder how much of it was that I was still halfway inside a dream, enough to spin a whole story about a tree skirt out of a folded edge of blanket.

People talk, shift around, even thrash in their sleep, and I'd guess children do all of it too. Wake them and they usually have no idea what they were doing, and whatever they're saying tends to come out garbled. Kids and adults both need somewhere safe to sleep so they can get their hours, seven or eight for adults and more than that for a child. Don't let that place turn into something scary. As a kid I was afraid to sleep in the dark and kept a light on with a pillow pulled over my head. I don't think I'd have reached for either of those if something hadn't happened to make me afraid of the dark in the first place. The fear also tended to stay away when I shared a bed, or even just a room, with someone else.

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