Heliophobia: The Fear of Light and the Shadows It Casts
The city was a black ocean at night, its streets glistening with the last piss of the rain. In the alleys, in the backrooms, in the hearts of men, the worst things happened when the lights were low. Brute crime was mostly done under the covering of darkness, so that it would not come up in the light. The knife slides easier, the lies sound sweeter, the fists swing harder when nobody sees them.
Even love—if you could call it that—hid from the light. Many couples prefer sex in dim lighting because darkness covers all imperfections. A few drinks, the right music, a little shadow, and even the ugliest bastard could be beautiful for a night. It was all illusion, but what wasn’t? A trick of the light. Or the lack of it.
But turn the lights on, and all the roaches run. They scatter like bad memories when you wake up, slipping into cracks, into corners, under rugs. Nobody wants to be caught in full view. Nobody wants to be seen for what they really are.
There is something powerful and fearful about light. It burns, it exposes, it makes things real. That’s why people avoid it. That’s why the best lies are whispered in the dark. But sooner or later, the sun comes up. And when it does, you better be ready to see everything for what it is.
1. The Definition of the Fear
Heliophobia—an intense and frequently crippling fear of sunlight. A clinical disorder. A black hole in the mind, where daylight burns not just the skin but the psyche. Those who suffer from it don’t just avoid the sun; they dread it. The mere thought of stepping outside at noon can tighten the chest, accelerate the heartbeat, flood the nervous system with cortisol. It’s more than preference. It’s pathology.
2. The Roots of Darkness
Where does this fear begin? Somewhere in the tangled corridors of the subconscious. Perhaps in childhood, when a mother shrieked at the sight of a sunburn. Or later, when the warnings about melanoma became gospel. Maybe the ultimate cause is deeper, buried in evolution—our ancestors fearing the searing heat of an unrelenting sun in a barren wasteland, associating it with dehydration, death. The body remembers what the mind has long forgotten.
3. Who Studied This Fear?
The fear of sunlight has haunted minds throughout psychology’s history. Sigmund Freud whispered about phobias rooted in the unconscious—trauma disguised as aversion. Carl Jung would have called it a shadow complex, a fear of exposure, of revealing one’s true self under the harsh scrutiny of the light. More recently, scholars like Isaac Marks and David Barlow have mapped out the neural circuits of anxiety disorders, including specific phobias like heliophobia. Cognitive-behavioral psychologists frame it as a conditioned response, reinforced by avoidance. The more you fear, the less you face. The less you face, the deeper the fear digs in.
4. Similar Happenings: The Many Forms of Fear
Heliophobia is just one head of the hydra. The fear of water—aquaphobia. The fear of confined spaces—claustrophobia. The fear of being looked at—scopophobia. Each has its origins in something primal, something ancestral. The medieval fear of witches and their supposed connection to the night mirrors modern photophobia, a hypersensitivity to light often misdiagnosed as heliophobia. The human mind has always manufactured its own demons.
5. Sunlit Nightmares in Literature and Film
The fear of sunlight, exposure, illumination—this is a motif stitched deep into human storytelling. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) gave us a creature that disintegrates under daylight, reinforcing heliophobia as something vampiric, something unnatural. F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) burned the fear onto film, with the iconic scene of Count Orlok perishing in a shaft of sunlight. More modern interpretations emerge in The Others (2001), where Nicole Kidman’s character shields her children from the light, not knowing that they are already dead. And then there’s Bukowski himself, who wrote: “The sun is a joke. I’d rather go in darkness than deal with that blinding mockery.”
6. Ancient Worship and Ancient Fears
But before it was feared, the sun was worshiped. The Egyptians knelt before Ra, the all-seeing eye of fire that gave life and punished sin. The Aztecs ripped out beating hearts to feed their own sun god, Huitzilopochtli, believing that darkness would swallow them whole without his daily dose of blood. To fear the sun is, in some twisted way, to still acknowledge its power. The ancients sacrificed to it, and the modern heliophobe hides from it. Same awe. Different response.
7. The Beauty Obsession: Cancer and Wrinkles
The modern heliophobic mind doesn’t just dread the sun’s touch—it fears its consequences. The looming specter of melanoma, the paranoia of ultraviolet radiation penetrating the dermis, mutating cells into something unrecognizable, something fatal. And for some, the terror is vanity itself—the slow erosion of beauty, the etching of wrinkles into once-taut skin, the dulling of youth’s glow. The sun giveth, and the sun taketh away.
8. The Cure: Stepping Into the Light
Is there salvation from this? Exposure therapy, the psychologists say. Little by little. Stand by the window. Step outside at dusk. Let the light seep in, inch by inch. Cognitive restructuring—reframing the sun not as an enemy but as a necessity, as something that feeds, not consumes. Vitamin D supplementation can trick the body into thinking it’s been kissed by the sun, but the mind knows better. Healing is messy, nonlinear.
One former heliophobe put it best: “One day, I just stopped running. I walked outside. The sun hit my face, and it was warm. It didn’t burn me. It didn’t destroy me. It was just light. And I was still here.”
And maybe that’s the only cure—realizing that the shadows were never real to begin with.
