When the Absence of Light Is the Medicine

Jen Andrulli entered the darkness for the first time last June in her Soldotna, Alaska, home. It was sunset, right after the summer solstice, in a room retrofitted to keep out light. With few sensory stimuli, aside from dogs barking in the distance and the rustles of the nearby forest, she began to feel like water—for five days and six nights.

“There are many ways to access expanded states of consciousness,” Andrulli, a 49-year-old Indigenous herbalist and educator from the Yup’ik people, tells DoubleBlind. Prolonged darkness—without any mind-altering substances—is one way, she explains, to “build a spaceship in your mind.” Physical tools like her drum and kalimba, along with breathwork and movement, helped her “hold no thought” and thus allow the visions to emerge more swiftly. “There really is no limit to where we can travel in consciousness.”

Her dark room visions, she says, were less hallucinations and more like “clarity.” During her fifth morning, Andrulli says she could see the “geometry” of the tea infusion she was drinking. The beverage had been delivered by a family member, along with her food, without bringing in light. She also had an extraordinary vision of her Yup’ik grandmother urging her to “remember who you are, remember where you came from.”

Cultural traditions concerning rites of passage are diverse in Alaska, but Indigenous women in the state generally underwent the coming of age passage into adulthood during or after puberty. Some went into seclusion in darkness for up to 40 days, in rare cases. Colonialism, however, created such serious cultural dislocation that ancestral practices were lost and the female puberty rites were no longer commonly practiced by the mid-20th century. (It's a similar story in other cultures that embraced darkness, though the Kogi people in Colombia have continued the practice as part of an unbroken lineage.) 

Andrulli has been on a path to reconnect with her familial customs; she is the first woman in four generations of her family to enter a prolonged period of darkness. “The sacred is secret and few will speak publicly of their families' continued or reclaimed spiritual practices,” she says.

After years of a hectic schedule, being in the dark was something of a relief for Andrulli, who says her body was flooded with the hormone melatonin. (Exposure to artificial light at night—from screens, indoor lighting, and even street lights—can significantly reduce melatonin levels.) “This was the first time as an adult,” says Andrulli, “that I've just taken five days to do nothing.”

It was my first time, too, at the age of 29, back in March 2023, though I had previously sat in a three-day meditation retreat. The first day of my own pitch-black solitude at The Bliss Haven in Oaxaca, Mexico—a hotel and wellness center specializing in dark meditation retreats—passed by in a flash. I fell asleep in the tiny single bed in my spartan quarters almost as soon as I was enveloped in black; the accumulated exhaustion of cheap dopamine highs, overworking, and drama was finally being invited to process. 

I only awoke the next morning with the delivery of scrambled eggs and sweet potato. My limbs felt weighty and leaden, like tree trunks, and I recalled Taoist master Mantak Chia, a proponent of darkness retreats, telling tales of how injured animals take refuge in caves to nurse their wounds. 

Religious leaders throughout history have sought inner calm and cosmic voyages through the altered states of consciousness reached deep in caves. The Prophet Muhammad was visited by the angel Gabriel, who revealed to him the beginning of the Quran, while isolating in a cave. The Buddha meditated in cave temples for years prior to his enlightenment, almost starving himself to death at one point, and 49-day dark retreats are today an advanced practice within Tibetan Buddhism. 

Abraham, the first Jew, famously followed a calf into a cave, where God spoke to him. “Internality itself is a place of darkness in some ways,” says Rabbi Fern Feldman, who has written about the sanctity of darkness in Jewish thought. “There's all these stories about people going into the cave, and it opens out somewhere else. In the darkness, we can sense that there's a deeper interconnectedness.”

With such a rich spiritual lineage, it's no surprise that New Age influencers like Aubrey Marcus are helping to stimulate fringe interest in the practice West. In his 2023 documentary, Awake in the Darkness, Marcus documented his own days-long experience and broke down in tears after traversing the “deep, deep black of my own psyche, my own soul.” 

In Czechia, Central Europe, there are already dozens of darkness therapy centers across the country, many of which are connected to hospitals. The practice became popular after German anthropologist Holger Kalweit, in the 1960s, started promoting dunkeltherapie, or dark therapy. Wait lists are known to be longer than two years in some cases, and people have reported overcoming depression and anxiety thanks to the dark. A reality TV show which aired in the UK last year, featuring C-list celebrities, also reflects the growing curiosity around darkness. Former footballer Paul Gascoigne and ex-boxer Chris Eubank were among those plunged into a Big Brother-esque bunker deprived of light for a season of the shot-in-monochrome Scared in the Dark.

Fellow contestant Chloe Burrows, of Love Island fame, who is so afraid of the dark she usually sleeps with both a light and her television on, had a panic attack in the first episode that caused her to flee the bunker. In one Czech study, according to a report, a participant experienced “semi-hallucinations” of snakes within his own body and required crisis-intervention psychotherapy sessions afterward. They are still afraid of the dark months later.

“It’s as potent as the psychedelic experience,” says Andrulli, who teaches applications of ethnomedicine at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Like meditating in the light, darkness meditations can also be destabilizing for some people, she adds. “I’d say the worst outcome could be a collapse in identity and willingness to be on the cog wheel of modernity.”

Tim Neville, a correspondent for Outside magazine, who did a four-day darkness retreat in Oregon earlier this year, says that he was surprised by the sheer volume of people who wrote to him after his story was published, curious to learn more about his experience. Nonetheless, he acknowledges, “most people are very, very scared” of the prospect of prolonged darkness. “It taps into that primordial fear we have of the dark.” Neville says it was by far the hardest, but most rewarding thing he has ever done—and the most mind-bending, too. “I would wake up and have no idea where I was,” he recalls. “The hallucinations when I started entering that dream state seemed so real. There were so many hours in there when I was completely unaware that it was even dark.” 

The benefits of prolonged darkness are little understood by science, but 2017 research suggests that it can induce positive psychopathological changes. There have also been anecdotal reports of recoveries from eczema and infections published in The Atlantic, as well as even more outlandish claims elsewhere. A 2014 randomized control pilot study conducted by Swedish researchers observed 65 participants who completed 12 sessions of 45 minutes in dark flotation tanks. “Stress, depression, anxiety, and [worse] pain were significantly decreased whereas optimism and sleep quality significantly increased for the flotation-restricted environmental stimulation therapy group,” the lead study author reported. “There was also a significant correlation between mindfulness in daily life and degree of altered states of consciousness during the relaxation in the flotation tank.”

As I entered the second half of my moonless retreat, I dozed between vivid dreams, hypnagogic imagery—meditations in which my unconscious mind revealed itself—and awakened idleness. My shadows reared their heads temporarily, but I was mostly in a state of sheer equanimity and serene lucidity, as if I had taken a mild “candy flip” of LSD and MDMA. Later, what felt like endogenous DMT seemed to emanate from between my eyebrows, the mythical third eye, and I experienced visions of fractal geometries with my eyes open. 

Then, a fleeting yet profound sense of fear and paranoia, coupled with the intensity of the aches in my joints, caused me to cut short my own darkness retreat by one night. My dreams had also become scarier than usual. During one nap, a gang of roosters took me hostage and pierced my nipples. I wasn’t sure if it was payback for all the eggs I had been eating at the retreat. “Be aware folks,” says Andrulli, “that these ancient practices shift our perspective of reality.”

I’m not sure if my five days did wholly shift my outlook on life, but it certainly led me to take things more slowly and to have a greater sense of self-sufficiency. After all, if you can go a few days alone in the dark, is there anything you can’t do?

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