I was always afraid of the dark. It wasn't the ghosts that scared me. What feared me were the things that could be there on my way and the anxiety of not knowing what might be in front of me.
We are always afraid of things that we are unsure of, aren't we?
I overcame this fear by walking in dark rooms in my house. Now I don't have that fear. If that room is unfamiliar to me then I will take at least a stick with me to poke on things and the ground to make sure the place is safe.
I am even more terrified of dimly lit places. Places like big halls and closed rooms lit by a faint light source scare me the most.
Our mind tends to match our perception with our previous knowledge. Like joining the dots to form a bigger picture. In a faint light, we will not be able to see things completely, and it might only be a part of the information that our visual sense perceives and send to the brain. Likewise, many such bits might have accumulated there. Our brain tries to make a big picture with these bits and that might sometimes look like a person or something very creepy. And that was what scared me.
Even now I am afraid to go around in a dimly lit room.
Fear and phobias, are they the same? Phobias are extreme fear, something that is excessive when compared to normal fear. When I was a kid, the sight of spiders used to scare me because of the stories I heard about spiders from my grandma. That fear was not a phobia but I always thought it was. Now I know that the ones in my home can't hurt me, they don't scare me anymore. So maybe the dimly lit room is not something as simple as fear.
We often tell people as advice, that you can overcome fear by getting yourself involved in doing what terrifies you. I don't think it works with everyone. Some fears might not be as severe as phobias. If we make a person afraid of heights to stand atop a big building, they might experience giddiness which might lead to a wrong result.
So know your fear, understand its severity and then take care of them accordingly.
