I live in a quiet neighborhood. If I should go out in the middle of the night, say 2 AM, all is silent and you can see a part of the sky through tall trees, shadows cast by the few dim foundation lights around other houses. Generally there are no animals making noises. Occasionally a meteor streaks through darkness or a slowly moving pinpoint of colored light from a passing high altitude plane. I recognize some stars asterisms and planets. I might take out my smartphone to name more but I don’t at that time.  Not a thing is there to interrupt personal thoughts and feelings.

In dark solitude with nothing to interrupt conquers me.  I’m in an altered state. An intense feeling of oneness spreads over me, along with doubt about my opinions held by day.

In the light of day I know we live in a post religious age. Belief in God and other beings is superstition. At night, alone, I disbelieve my atheism. Looking at the stars I never fail to sense the presence of a creator or design an appreciation of my insignificance and all I do not know, an uncertainty about matters I felt so strongly only the day before. I have the notion that i should be expressing appreciation for whoever is the author of all of this.

I’m thinking that just as I am looking up now there have to be other cognizant beings looking up from their vantages over vast distances wondering about me as I wonder about them. The stillness and my inner sense about the existence of other sentient beings and of God fills me at that time with something wonderful.

By night I witness the vast temple of the sky, to cast your gaze into the infinite. Alone at night you begin to doubt your suppositions a you enter an transcendent state.

The difference of night and day is reflected in altered states in animals and plants. Day is time for distraction of objects clearly seen whereas by night we experience generally an exclusion of most sensory stimluli. The eyes are closed and sensory thresholds for hearing and felling and smelling are greatere at night particularly as one sleeps. By night thoughts and emotions are far more self-generated as in a dream and occur in vague darkness. Emotions and thoughts unavailable by day, occur in sleep where we have the absence of awake editing of thoughts and emotions. Things happen in nighttime darkness that are impossible by day. Memories are worked out and consolidated at night during sleep.

Day vision is foveal and stimulates cones near the center of the retina. It is more specific, lexical and colorful and requires more light whereas night vision uses primarily rod receptors sensitive to low light intensity. When you don’t see as  clearly by night, there’s the tendency to fill in detail by yourself. Under conditions of low light, far more is left to the imagination. I used to run before dawn. In the night there’s a tendency to hallucinate objects such as making mailboxes into people which has scared me more than once. This is what is called the Charles Bonnet syndrome after eighteenth century man who noted the tendency to hallucinate in situations of low vision.

Here illustrated is a vast difference in the human psyche by day versus the night. By night we see less clearly, and hear less from the daytime skeptic, editor, critic. Imagination is allowed to run wild even if we are no in an official dreaming state. By night the events of the previous day are shuffled, organized, remembered and forgotten by active mental processes. Unencumbered by influx of sensory stimuli, the mind has time to work processing its own thoughts, to keep what is important and ponder its significance even to work out unsolved problems presenting themselves in daylight.