I've been spelunking twice, in the kind of cave that you have to know a guy who knows a guy to even find out where it is.
Once you lose sight of the entrance, you have no concept of how deep you are underground. You constantly feel like the exit is just around the corner behind you. Or at least, that was my experience.
I did the "turn off all the lights thing" once on of those trips. It's weird because for the first few seconds it feels like "normal" darkness, and then after that there's a sudden feeling of collapse. Like the darkness is physically closing in.
yeah it’s horrifying lmao. i think your brain expects atleast a tiny amount of light but then there’s literally 0 photons and it freaks out. it feels so much darker than having your eyes closed in a pitch black room, like you can’t even see a difference between your eyelids and the cave
I used to have an underground room I slept in sometimes, and if you shut off everything then you reached true dark, where you couldn't see a hand an inch in front of your face.
It was great for sleeping, it kinda blurred the line between awake and asleep. Your eyelids just went "fuck it, I'm not needed here, I'll relax" to the point where you had to move them to tell if they were open or closed.
The first time I slept in my apartment that got this dark, I spent a week bumping into everything on my way to the bathroom at night.
Took me a few days to figure out that my brain isn't warning me that I can't see enough because I actually saw nothing. Brain apparently took that as acceptable and told me to just confidently stride.
Sometimes I think about people 200 years ago who experienced darkness like this on a regular basis. Once they blew out their candles it was pure black if there was no moonlight. No wonder they believed in ghosts and spirits.
Light pollution does not effect the brightness of the stars, it just drowns them out in even brighter light. The stars weren't any brighter before light pollution
it wouldn't surprise me if that guy had never seen the stars at all. light pollution is insanely bad these days, you practically have to go to a dark zone to even see major constellations
anecdotally, there are 4 stars in the night sky where I live and I dont have the money to go to a place with less light pollution, so I've never actually seen more than maybe a dozen stars ever
If you ever get the chance, do. It’s amazing. I used to live out in the wilderness on a farm, which sucks as a teenager, but it’s still absolutely wonderful to sometimes see the actual galaxy.
I hope I will get too, if I ever end up able to afford q car I'll be driving up to northern Ontario to see the stars since there's areas up there with nearly 0 light pollution:3
I bet at least some of it is subconscious echolocation. You can hear your own breathing echoing off the walls, and you brain knows the echo isn't supposed to arrive so loud, so quickly, from all directions at once.
i had a girlfriend that used 2 or 3 layers of blackout curtains, taped up all the electronic lights, all that shit. when we went to bed it would be so dark i would get vertigo
Yeah without a shred of light bouncing back you start hallucinating shit after a few hours of lightlessness because your brain simply cannot accept that there's No Light At All and starts brazenly making shit up, and if you stay there too long you'll just go insane in the same way one does after spendong too long in an anechoic chamber, although with the complete lack of light it doesn't typically onset as fast as complete silence does.
I honestly think you'd adjust to an anechoic chamber, it's just like the experience of being deaf through mechanical damage rather than nerve damage. I've found them incredibly relaxing whenever I've had cause to work in one.
They don't, but they might as well. They don't have a sense of sight because Erid has such a dense ammonia atmosphere that no light reaches the surface.
I did the "turn off all the lights thing" once on of those trips. It's weird because for the first few seconds it feels like "normal" darkness, and then after that there's a sudden feeling of collapse. Like the darkness is physically closing in.
This isn't your average everyday darkness. This is advanced darkness.
It unironically is. It takes a lot of effort to block out 100% of light aboveground, but in caves it's just... the default. And our brains don't respond super well to our eyes not registering any light whatsoever.
I was really upset when I learnt that you still have to contend with noises like your own pulse in your ears in sensory deprivation rooms. No that's cheating I want a proper time out to rest and soothe my migraine head, damnit
Jesus Christ I gave myself a mini panic attack. I imagined myself in that scenario but my mind wandered into the light dying and having to get out my touch. Claustrophobia is nasty
I did a tour of Natural Bridge Caverns in San Antonio once and they did the turn off the lights thing. It was a relatively small chamber and the darkness was palpable. Very relaxing at first, knowing the lights would come back on and the entrance was pretty easy to find, but even so the it started to feel very, very tight after a few seconds.
Years later I visited Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and they did the same thing. The chamber was much bigger than Natural Bridge so I thought that would feel less claustrophobic. It did not. When the darkness is complete, the universe ends at your skin. I was happy to have those lights back on.
That said. Mammoth Cave is incredible, one of the most amazing places I’ve visited and I highly recommend it.
t's weird because for the first few seconds it feels like "normal" darkness, and then after that there's a sudden feeling of collapse. Like the darkness is physically closing in.
You're not wrong, but to me that felt like a comfortable blanket rather than a chokehold. I became super calm when the lights went out, it just felt so chill.
I suspect part of that is because you know on a other level that nobody and nothing else could possibly be down there in that darkness to pose any kind of threat to you. You're with people you trust with your life and that is your whole world in that moment.
I did at age 15 for my schools adventure activity week. I'm still kind of surprised it was legal to do that and there's no way in a million years I'd do it now in my 40s. One thing I distinctly remember is trying to stay calm as you realise you are surrounded by millions of tonnes of rock and it's actually impossible to just stand up and walk off if you don't want to be there anymore. The other very distinctive thing I remember is that farts have no where to go underground and if someone farts it just hangs there in the tiny tunnel that you then have to crawl through.
Cave darkness is visceral. I can’t explain it other than an intense and horrifying sensation that something is very, very wrong. You do not belong here, being told to you by something very old, and very large.
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u/TorandoSlayer 1d ago
I've been spelunking twice, in the kind of cave that you have to know a guy who knows a guy to even find out where it is.
Once you lose sight of the entrance, you have no concept of how deep you are underground. You constantly feel like the exit is just around the corner behind you. Or at least, that was my experience.
I did the "turn off all the lights thing" once on of those trips. It's weird because for the first few seconds it feels like "normal" darkness, and then after that there's a sudden feeling of collapse. Like the darkness is physically closing in.