Night 'Lights

Stacey Na

Bergen County Academies Personal Essay

In some drawer of some storage area in some forgotten corner of my house are the five or six two-faced night lights of my childhood nightmares. A few of these night lights are antique, and as I like to refer to them, “poor Christmas light dupes”: the bulbs of these night lights mirror the intensity and shape of a traditional christmas light.

When, as a five-year-old, I’d eagerly plug these sad night lights into an outlet, they projected the most inhospitable yellow. My face scrunched up in disgust and my smile lines became both frown lines and forehead wrinkles. The light from these light bulbs was the color of rotting teeth,1 or maybe decaying wood.

The switch to turn on this particular type of night light produces a singular, ominous click. Moving this switch from on to off, or off to on, requires a strange amount of force. Some of these vertical black or brown on and off switches are chipped from heavy wear.2 Besides being terribly ugly and emitting a crummy shade of yellow light, these night-lights are also inexplicably dim.

Adequate power was supplied through the outlet, as proven by the extension cord plugged in and capable of providing energy for a standing lamp, desktop lamp, heater, while simultaneously charging a laptop and a phone. And the light bulbs themselves, at the time of initial use, were relatively new. Thus, there was no real reason as to why the light produced by these night lights were constantly dim. It was infuriating.

These antique night lights serve no real purpose and, in all honesty, fail to do what an ideal night-light is designed to do. And so, with this sad excuse of a night light plugged into an outlet in my room, my five-year-old self was incapable of taking on whatever the darkness had in store for my imagination and me.

Now these dim lights, as provided by these Christmas light knockoffs, are the very definition of hypocrisy. Any night light makes the undying promise to a child to provide the comfort of their presence in the darkest of times. Dim night-lights do not have the power to ward off the cyan monster with purple spots and six countable pointy teeth and bushy eyebrows waiting in the dark to

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feed on two year olds.3 Dim night-lights do not provide those suffering from nyctophobia the comfort of a source of light in the bleakness of the night. Dim night-lights are just simply not bright enough to provide the user with an adequate degree of comfort, as should any good night- light.

And through a practical lens, dim night lights are incapable of assisting someone who does not have very good night time vision in going to the bathroom, nor someone wanting a cup of water, in the middle of the night.

These dim night-lights comprise a fraction of the night-lights that were plugged in my bedroom wall. Cinderella's castle4 projected four colors (pink, blue, green, and yellow), each approximately twenty or so seconds in length before switching off to the next color. The color of these lights was closer to neon than to pastel, and thus produced an annoyingly bright echo on my plain, innocent wall.

Bright night-lights are arguably more counterintuitive than dim night-lights. If the night-light provides light in all corners of your room, why not just turn on a lamp on your nightstand? Why go the extra mile to turn on the night-light, likely farther away from you than you are from the nightstand, when you can just reach over to the night stand and sleep with the lamp on? Why don’t you just turn on all the lights and just not sleep?

Yes, brighter night-lights are of potential assistance in an individual’s midnight conquest to obtain a glass of water from the kitchen likely on the opposite side of the house in the night, but, in truth, this individual would not even be asleep in the first place because of the jarring intensity of this night light.

The absolute worst night-lights are the special type of night-lights that provide just enough light to cast evil shadows. These sadistic night lights and their side-kicks (power outlets near furniture) wreak havoc on someone’s meant-to-be-restful night, brewing up a perfect storm of one part uncertainty and one part unknown. The bulbs of these night-lights of perfect intensity radiate light in a perfect fraction of the room, unlike the lamps that bring light to the entirety of the room. These lamps barely cast shadows, as they bring light to the entire room and there is not much stark contrast between light and dark. On the contrary, the light bulbs of ideal intensity cast definitive shadows; the mercilessly perfect contrast between light and dark is apparent in a dark room with just the right amount of localized light and darkness as opposed to a completely lit room or a completely dark room. Shadows are at most mischievous. A swivel chair may have a shadow of the enormous monster, or of an ominous figure. These night lights give rise to theshadows of anyone’s worst fear: the unknown. A closet door may appear as a person in the middle of the night. And so, you awake entirely from your slumber and reach for the lamp on your nightstand in one frantic motion, possibly knocking over a bottle of unassuming moisturizer. As the room is lit up by this lamp, you may look in the direction of the “person,” and conclude that this “person” was a closet door.

Whether a night-light works to be of physical or mental assistance is completely up to you, as the intensity of a night light is a matter of personal preference. How I see it, the cons of night lights outweigh the pros, and by a landslide. Night-lights are the same kind of “useless” as pet rocks5 and diet water, but also, in retrospect, the same breed of “useless” as plastic water bottles and polystyrene foam takeout containers (not questioned before use and are, when in use, counterintuitive). Night-lights are the same kind of “useless” as audience-less TVs, or fans left on in a hot, person-less room; they remain on when no one is really conscious of them.

1 of every child’s dental nightmares.

2One deviation from these antique christmas bulb shaped night lights had a plain white body and a blue guard with elementary cutouts of stars. These cutouts were so poorly designed, the sharp corners of the stars transferred blunt on the walls. These so-called corners of these so-called stars merged to form The Blob.

3Sulley from Monsters Inc.

4 Closer (in description) to that of the castle in original 1950’s Cinderella than of the castle in DisneyWorld.

5 Homage to Patrick Star’s pet rock in an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, “The Great Snail Race.”

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