Space is an integral constituent of the
self. Our psychological sense of selfhood has a spatial dimension which
we recognize in our feelings of comfort or unease in response to the
places that we visit and inhabit. At night the world of clear and
articulated objects finds itself abolished.
Night makes us aware
of the spatial nature of our being, since it readily abolishes the
distinction between "us" and the "beyond," between the demarcating
limits which the imagination creates for the self to join us to the
world, while still retaining a sense of our separate identity. The dark
makes the familiar unfamiliar and threatening. The monsters that lurk in
our imagination come out to haunt us.