A dark room inhibits a child from orienting himself in the manner of a rapid awakening. And I myself have been sufficiently often discombobulated by waking up in strange places and, because of an absence of light, not being able to instantly orient myself, I know what the sensation is very plainly. It's quite an interesting sensation.
“All day long you depend on light and lighted objects to orient yourself. And you go to bed at night and you turn out all the lights and then you have no orientation if you wake up suddenly, so that you give yourself a nice moment of being lost. Otherwise, you're not lost when you wake up.
“And you turn on a light in the kid's room (not too bright but bright enough so that he can see where he is) and he actually will wake up a little bit, a tiny little bit—some noise or something—and he'll see where he is and he'll go back to sleep.
“If there's no light present, he wakes up, he tries to use his accustomed method of perception and orientation, which is sight, and he doesn't know where he is. So he becomes terrified. He feels lost, he becomes terrified, he begins to scream, he has to go find somebody. He can't account for this, so he now dubs in a nightmare, mocks-up a false series of orientation-points—because a thetan would rather be anywhere than nowhere—and the parents, of course, have to get up and so on. So we can assume parents that do this sort of thing just want more randomity. There's no sense in it.
“Of course, night lights are expensive, they cost over sixty-seven cents and about—they cost more than a nickel a month to run. I've noticed this great insistence on the part of some people, though, of making a child sleep in a dark room and they seem to be obsessed with the idea. Well, they are simply obsessed with the ideas of lightness and darkness.”
L. Ron Hubbard
from 16th American Advanced Clinical Course lecture
“Control, Communication & Havingness, General Use of Procedure”
8 February 1957
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