Here is a particularly instructive case. A boy of four years had for some time been afraid of the dark and indulged by having the candle left burning at night. On hearing that the Crystal Palace had been burned down he asked for the first time to have the light taken away, fear of the dark being now cast out by the bigger fear of fire. Some time after this he volunteered an account of his obsolete terrors to his father. “Do you know,” he said, “what I thought dark was? A great large live thing the colour of black with a mouth and eyes.” Here we have the ‘reifying’ of darkness, and we probably see the influence of the comparatively bright spots in the attribution of eyes to the monster, an influence still more apparent in the instance quoted above, where a child saw the eyes of lions and tigers glaring as they walked round the room. Another suggestive instance here is that given by M. Compayré, in which a child on being asked why he did not like to be in a dark place answered: “I don’t like chimney-sweeps”.[153] Here the blackness with its dim suggestions of brighter spots determined the image of the black chimney-sweep with his white flashes of mouth and eyes.[154] I should like to observe here parenthetically that we still need to learn from children themselves, by talking to them and inviting their confidence when the fear of the dark is first noticed, how they are apt to envisage it. ----- Footnote 153: _Op. cit._, pp. 100, 101. Footnote 154: It is supposable too that disturbances of the retina giving rise to subjective luminous sensations, as the well-known small bright moving discs, might assist in the case of nervous children in suggesting glaring eyes. ----- When imagination becomes abnormally active, and the child is haunted by alarming images, these by recurring with greatest force in the stillness and darkness of the night will add to the terrifying associations of darkness. This is illustrated in the case of the boy Stevens, who was haunted by the spectre of ‘Cocky’ at night. Dreams, especially of the horrible nightmare kind to which nervous children are subject, may invest the dark with a new terror. A child suddenly waking up and with open eyes seeing the phantom-object of his dream against the black background may be forgiven for acquiring a dread of dark rooms. Possibly this experience gives the clue to the observation already quoted of a boy who did not want to sleep in a particular room because there were so many dreams in it.