So you did have a night light?
so interestingly enough, my parents never really let me have a night light growing up, they said I didn't need one past my toddler years, but because of the nightmares I used to stay up as late as my body could handle to delay the nightmares, although I believe doing this for long at a young age caused me to develop some form of insomnia, since when I hit my pre-teen/teenage years I started to randomly go days without sleeping usually ending up falling asleep in school or randomly through out the day, honestly not sure if you can develop insomnia like that or what but hey, my doctor said I have it so who knows.
But anyway, when it was bed time I'd pretend to sleep until my parents went to bed, and once the coast was clear, I'd sneak out of bed, throw the tv on and turn the volume down to 1, and I'd just lay back down and either stare at the wall or watch the tv for a bit until I was able to pass out, I started to notice the nights I slept with the light from the TV I didn't dream at all, at least not that I could ever remember when I woke up, and when I did dream, it was always your typical basic dreams, there were times when I thought the nightmares had ended so I wouldn't turn the TV on and just sleep in the dark, and sure enough, nightmares.
I've experimented through out the years with different light levels, sleeping environments and habits, I've tried sleeping in the room with a light on in both hot and cold weather, sleeping with the light off in hot and cold weather, with and without white noise, heavy blankets and light blankets, with and without wearing clothes/pajamas, with and without sheets, sleeping pills etc etc, I've even slept on a concrete basement floor and I've found for me, the best, most comfortable sleep I can ever get, is in a room with just enough light to see everything clearly at a level where I can look at the lightbulb directly without getting an after-image, between 30 to 50F or -1 to 10C, heavy or multiple blankets, wearing sweatpants/pajama bottoms, sheets and without taking sleeping pills.
What an oddly specific list right? but yea it's the truth, now some of my friends say it could be a side affect of autism, which I'm not claiming because I was never formally tested as an adult by a professional, and I know it's not normal, nobody else in my family or friend group have even a slightly similar sleeping style, they all sleep in the dark, and my brother even uses a sleep mask to make sure it stays dark.
Another weird little quirk I used to have with sleep, no matter how much sleep I get, it was always enough, for example the craziest episode I had, I was around 14, during summer break so no school, I had been up for 2 and a half days decided to take a nap before visiting a friend, fell asleep for exactly 15 minutes, got woken up by someone, went to my friends house, figured I'd fall asleep when night came, turns out I stayed up for another 3 days, finally passed out, slept for about 14-15 hours and woke up feeling completely fine.
Never had something like that happen again and that ability has slowly gone away the older I get, now there are times where the more I sleep the less rested I get lol, I also apologize for the length of this post, I got a bit carried away, but yea I have a very strange relationship with sleep lol.
