The Darkness That Blew My Mind

The darkness has a name, but I don’t know that yet. All I know is that I’m scared.

I’m sitting with my feet in a creek in the scrubby mountains southeast of Ashland, Oregon, watching how the water spills over gray rocks into a shallow pool. All day long, I’ve been alone and unplugged, doing my best to savor moments like this one. I note how the sunlight filters through the black oaks and flickers in the water like coins in a fountain. Colors get special attention: the denim-blue lupines, the amber grass, and the plum-colored mountains around me. I squirrel these images away to return to later, like nuts before winter.

A forgettable dirt road follows the creek out of Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which surrounds this place, but that’s as much as I’ll say about the location. A lot of famous people keen on their privacy come up this way, but even plebs like me are welcome. Once you’re here, you have to become no one anyway. In a metaphorical sense, which doesn’t feel metaphorical at all, you must be ready to be buried alive.

I walk slowly, deliberately, uphill to a small clearing ringed by aspen and oak. The anxiety that’s been ricing my lungs turns steely and sharp when I see a pale wooden door built into a hillside, framed by lava rock. It looks like the entrance to Bilbo Baggins’s house. I go in. A stairway tumbles down to a windowless, 300-square-foot room with textured walls, a bathroom, and a wooden bed that smells like sage. A single low-wattage bulb hums faintly overhead. It’s controlled by a switch covered with a hard plastic guard, which makes it difficult to turn off and on. That’s the point.

This room and two others like it in these secret woodlands are the heart of what might be the country’s only established commercial dark retreat. This is a spiritual place, where visitors pay good money to spend long periods of time in crypt-like blackness, devoid of all light and most sounds, in an attempt to uncage their minds and, they hope, discover something deeper within. I’m here to give it a shot, but the mere thought has left my hands clammy and my breathing pinched. I flip the switch to see just how dark the dark is, and terror presses into me like 13,000 vertical feet of seawater. I implode and race outside, gasping.

All humans know the feeling. This isn’t the dark of the inside of a tent on a moonless night, when the forest sways in purple starlight, nor is it a creepy basement where a thin ribbon of light can weasel under the door. You can feel this kind of dark at a place like Carlsbad Caverns, where 830 feet under the New Mexican desert, the rangers turn off the lights and let the children scream. It’s the kind that triggers some atavistic line of code that sends your amygdala rag-dolling over evolution’s awful ledges. How can I survive this? How can I escape it? And the worst: What else is in here, and is it hungry?

Evening comes. Time to be brave. I take one last look around outside and gather a few more nuts. A mountain chickadee twitters about. Deer slip through the grass. I go inside and seal myself into the room with a few necessities I’ll be able to locate by touch. A toothbrush. A Hydro Flask. A gray cotton onesie my wife got me for Christmas, because of the way it feels and smells—two senses the dark can’t steal. I light a small candle and turn off the overhead light, hoping to feel a sense of control for one last minute.

You can do this.

I blow out the candle and swallow the panic as the enormity of the situation settles in. My eyes will never adjust to this. Today is Sunday. It’ll be Thursday before I see a single photon again. That’s 82 hours, alone, in the absolute absence of light.

I can’t think about any of that now. Instead, I go to bed early and pretend everything is all right. But it isn’t. Things are about to get really, really weird.

I first heard about dark retreats one night, just before bed, while mindlessly scrolling through videos online. A place in southern Oregon called Sky Cave had posted clips featuring squinty-eyed guests returning to the sunlight after anywhere from one to forty days in the dark. You could not not watch them. After they’d adjusted to the nuclear blast of sunlight, they spoke with gratitude and marveled at how detailed the world looked. Many of them sobbed like castaways realizing that their rescue was real.

“There’s no familiar orientation for what to do with this,” a barefoot guy in a purple V-neck said in one video. “It’s like being born.”

Shameless rubbernecking at vulnerable strangers was entertaining, yes, but it was also moving. They seemed genuinely transformed by an experience that teetered on cruel and unusual. Many spoke of the dark as if it were a living, breathing, beneficent thing. It had taught them how to forgive or how to love. Others spoke of a great shedding of who they thought they were, and an even greater rebuilding of who they knew they could be. The mix was intriguing. Imagine the profound relief of a mountaineer just off a near disastrous ascent, combined with the lyrical rapture of an astronaut back from space.

A Google search seemed to show that Sky Cave was the only commercial dark retreat in the country (with a website, at least), though I later heard rumors of informal ones—as in “This dude has a room”—in Colorado. Guatemala has a dark retreat, as does Germany, where podcaster Aubrey Marcus went to produce a documentary, Awake in the Darkness, that helped put the practice on the modern map. The Czechs have embraced the concept by creating dozens of dark retreats—many of them connected with hospitals, helping people overcome depression, anxiety, and other issues.

Little scientific evidence exists to support the notion that there are benefits to spending a long time in the dark, but the work is just beginning. The practice itself is ancient: tenth-century Tibetan monks used the dark to attain a state of transitional consciousness. Among the Kogi people of Colombia, children chosen before birth to be priests have long spent the first years of their lives in darkness, as a way to connect with Aluna, nature’s “Great Mother.”

Every friend I ran the idea by shuddered in disbelief, as if I were deciding which eye to poke out. Four nights, three days, alone in the dark, no music, no phone?

The most relevant study of the potential benefits of darkness I found came from a Swedish psychologist, Anette Kjellgren, at the Human Performance Laboratory at Karlstad University. Kjellgren surveyed healthy participants after they completed 12 sessions over seven weeks floating for 45 minutes inside a dark, silent tank of warm saline. The results were clear. In a paper published in BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies in 2014, she argued that after the process, people—especially “mindful” people, meaning those “open or receptive to what is happening in the present”—experienced altered states of consciousness and reduced levels of stress, depression, and anxiety, while their optimism increased “significantly.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, demand for the dark is growing. Sky Cave, which charges $250 a night, currently has only three rooms but plans to build seven more, along with a 4,000-square-foot lodge. The wait has grown to about two years. In February 2023, Sky Cave got its biggest boost to date when NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers revealed that he was going into the dark, in part to help him figure out his next career move. He didn’t mention Sky Cave by name, but that’s where he went.

“It’s four nights of complete darkness,” Rodgers explained to ESPN’s Pat McAfee.

“What?” McAfee replied. “You’re going to Alaska?”

Beyond all reason, the thought of signing up for a stint in the abyss began to consume me. Every friend I ran the idea by shuddered in disbelief, as if I were deciding which eye to poke out. Four nights, three days, alone in the dark, no music, no phone? An eternity. I tried to remember what I’d been doing three days ago but couldn’t. It was already such a blur.

Even stranger, I had no real reason to do this, no unhappy childhood to unpack, no PTSD to manage, no offers from the Jets. I struggle with anxiety, and depression runs in the family, but neither to any degree that a good river trip can’t fix. Deep down I hoped that the dark might help rekindle a sense of purpose left bruised and bloodied by the pandemic. I figured I could treat it the way I treat travel to some of the difficult places my work has taken me. I would be curious and open, come what may. Doing that rarely leads to disappointment.

I managed to book a slot and got ready to go. The whole idea stressed out my wife, Heidi.

“I’m not worried like I was when you went to North Korea,” she said one night, citing other times I’d gone all in on questionable quests. “I’m worried you’ll love it and black out the house.”

I think I’ve slept through my first night, but with no way to check the hour without exposing myself to light, I can’t be sure. At first losing all sense of time seemed terrifying, but now it’s rather blissful. The uninterrupted, guilt-free rest feels like warm honey working its way into every achy, burned-out part of me. So I roll over and sleep some more. When I open my eyes, I just shut them again. The dark feels less scary that way.

When finally I rise, I create a routine. I change into shorts, do some push-ups, and make the bed, all by feel. Learning to navigate the room boils down to touching things in a certain order. Bed-corner-doorway takes me to the bathroom. Doorway-sink-wall puts me on the final approach to the toilet. Sit-cuss-stand is how I remember to put the seat down.

Breakfast. I feel my way over to a cushion on the floor, next to a low wooden bench. Above it is a box built into the wall linking the room to an outer vestibule. Doors on either side allow two-way access with no light coming through. For now this box is my only link to the outside world. I can leave at any time, but I promise myself that I won’t.

I open the box and feel around for metal containers holding soup, salad, PB&J, carrots, hummus, olives, and more. Eating is something, anything, to do, so I go slowly. I play with a hard-boiled egg, sliding it around the container like a slippery Weeble. It’s fun while it lasts. Fifteen minutes later, I have nothing to do again.

The idea of being bored for three-plus days worried me, but surprisingly it isn’t really an issue. Boredom to me is having lots of things to do, none of which sound fun. In here I can’t even stare at the wall, so “boredom” becomes longing—for sunlight, for mountain air, for interaction—and to long for is to dream. That’s easy in here.

Plus, I’m not truly alone. The day before I went dark, I met Scott Berman, who with his wife, Jill, started Sky Cave in 2020. He told me that every evening he would come and restock the food box and chat with me for a few minutes to check in. His main tips were to allow myself to “become nobody” and “soften” into the experience. When I asked for details, he put it more bluntly: “It’s like preparing for your deathbed.” In other words, it’s better to surrender and accept than to resist and suffer.

Berman, who is 40, has a lean, muscular frame and a big bushy beard. He says that people who fight the darkness with spiritual tools like chanting or meditation often have a hard time. Eventually, they become exhausted, it’s still dark, and there’s nothing to do but sit for hours and days. “The dark is almost counter to counterculture,” he says. “You can’t prop up your mind in there.”

Berman found this out some time ago. He grew up happy, the son of supportive parents in New Jersey, but a breakup in college sent him into a tailspin that morphed into an obsessive quest for spiritual fulfillment. He read Ram Dass and lived at a Vipassana meditation center in Canada. He stayed alone in a cabin in Alaska and a canyon in Baja. He ran around Joshua Tree naked after dark and sang and banged wildly on a drum at music festivals. “I had no filter at all,” he says. Once, he stood barefoot and shirtless outside New York’s Grand Central Station, singing to the sun, until a policeman offered to find him mental health support.

“Or I could just put on a shirt and stop being weird,” Berman replied.

“Yeah,” the officer said. “Let’s do that.”

In 2006, Berman met Jill at a bluegrass festival, and two years later they were inseparable. He’d sing and drum while she danced ecstatically. Around 2012, he started drifting back into mainstream society, while working at a cannabis farm in southern Oregon. For the first time in years, Berman had money, and he began to yearn for more material things, he says, “like nice dinners and [energy] crystals.” About that time they caught wind of a guy in Portland doing dark retreats, an idea that intrigued them. Instead of visiting his, they created their own by blocking out the windows of their rental home near Ashland. They stayed inside for five days. It wasn’t great.

“When you do it with someone you know, in your own house, there’s so much familiarity around you,” Berman says. So a few months later he tried it again—this time alone, in Baja, for a period of ten days. He was “completely floored” by how challenging being alone in the pitch black with zero distractions was. “I’m so happy when I’m in solitude in the woods, but that wasn’t my experience here,” he says. “Still, I was moved by how sensitive and aware I became.”

The initial discomfort, and his surrender to it, slowly revealed the kernel of his authentic self, the one he’d been busy burying under piles of New Age “spirituality.” All that nothingness stripped the constructs away. “All you have to do is just be in the space,” he says, meaning go deep and become more aware. “I came out and thought, I want to build darkness retreats.”

Three years after he opened Sky Cave, I’m here on the floor sifting through memories. I’m five, riding with my mom in her Corvair. It’s yesterday, and I’m sitting by a creek. I’m lying shirtless in bed feeling my wife’s breath as warm circles on my back. I do this for what feels like hours. Slowly, long pauses of nothing at all—no dreaming, no thinking, no focusing—slip between my thoughts. That’s when the hallucinations begin.

At first the visions are fun, because they seem so real. I blink a dozen times to confirm that the room has indeed become a limestone cave illuminated by beams that shoot from my eyes. And the darkness is no longer monolithic, but swirls with shades of black and a parade of textures. Meanwhile, my proprioceptive senses have gone haywire. I take a bath, and when the water cools I can see my foot reach up to find the hot-water faucet handle. I can’t see any detail. My foot just looks like a darker, smoother patch of darkness, but there’s no mistaking that it’s there.

As that first day drags on, the hallucinations become annoying. They all involve light, which makes me think that my eyes are short-circuiting from lack of stimulation. I’m staring out imaginary windows at the Alps when a DJ flicks on strobe lights that burn into my retinas. Later, I’m fooling with another hard-boiled egg when a dude in a 30-cylinder truck drills his high beams into the side of my face. “Really, man?” I shout, but he doesn’t reply.

Berman comes, takes my dishes, and replenishes the food. His visits are the only way I know for sure that it’s evening. We chat for a couple of minutes. I tell him about the space that’s opening up between thoughts. He tells me the space is always there and to think about it as the surface upon which life is imprinted. He asks me to ask myself who’s doing the thinking when a thought marches into that space. The question makes no sense.

“Of course it’s me,” I say. “Who else would it be?”

“Just explore it,” he says, and in ten minutes he’s gone.

Knowing that all I have to do is eat and then I can go to bed boosts my spirits. But then I begin to ruminate over how much time I have left in here: another night, another day, another night, another day, and another night. I stop thinking about that. It’s like running—better to enjoy the effort than to keep checking your watch.

At first the visions are fun, because they seem so real. I blink a dozen times to confirm that the room has indeed become a limestone cave illuminated by beams that shoot from my eyes.

I sleep poorly that second night, but force myself to stay in bed for as long as I can just to pass the time. When I grow so restless that my back begins to ache, I get up and do my routine. Ten minutes later, I’m lying on the floor daydreaming again. The space between thoughts has expanded to such a degree that I can float along in the nothingness for hours without really trying.

You only need a few hours in the dark to figure out what’s important to you. After about 36 hours, the real work begins as the hallucinations become wild and unhinged, yet all of them are deeply moving. Some make me laugh. Some make me sob. Soon I’m visualizing past experiences in a way that makes me feel insane. All the moments of my life—hearing a song, ordering a chalupa, riding a chairlift—have become millions of small, gelatinous cubes that I can physically hold and rearrange. In this nothingness, all those experiences have glommed on to each other to form, well, me—the product of everything I’ve ever interacted with. Some cubes are ugly and full of impatience, self-loathing, and jealousy, but in this dream state it’s easy to pluck them out of the pile and set them aside. When I come to, the darkness has shifted. It now has a presence, as if I’m not alone. But instead of terrifying me, the darkness feels strangely comforting.

Berman arrives and I tell him about the wild ride I’ve been having. It’s like I’m a painting that hasn’t been finished.

By the time I go to bed on day two, I tell myself that I’m ready to leave. I’ve come to terms with the dark, I’ve learned what’s important, and I feel no need to be impatient or jealous or mean again. But I stick it out, and I’m glad. Day three is a doozy.

With nothing to distinguish night and day, my circadian rhythm is fully whacked. Sleep comes in fits and starts, and time is meaningless. Long stretches pass when I’m unaware of the lack of light. The blackness that once felt like a suffocating garbage bag is now the airy backdrop for my mental image of the room. The visions seem so real, as if I can look around and see the tub, the box, the bench. Is this how bats experience the world? As a test, I reach out to grab the bed on the way back from the bathroom and miss it. The error makes me dizzy, until finally I find the bed, two feet away, and the room snaps back into place.

I do my routine but quickly make my way to a meditation corner, where the room is cooler and somehow darker. I lie down in a fetal position and effortlessly conjure up that space between thoughts. It is a really weird thing to be so conscious of a thought-free place, as if thinking and not thinking are the same thing. Somehow it works, and this time I try to impregnate the space with declarations like I am imperfect! and I am enough!

The fact that I’m doing any of this, that I’m uttering these affirmations like a #BestLife TikTok Ted Lasso, would make old me barf. But new me knows the benefits of playing along with an open mind. In practical terms, if nothing else, I have a much better sense than I used to of just how long a day is, and how much of that time I’ve been wasting.

But the darkness isn’t done. I’m busy filling the space with I Am Loved when a fight breaks out. Another thought, some scrawny Facebook argument, struts into the space demanding attention. I am too weak to ignore the intruder.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“You could have won that argument,” it replies.

“I don’t want to think about that,” I say.

The thought starts to utter a comeback, but I cut it off, yelling like a petulant child who’s fighting over an open swing on the playground. “Stop it!” I say aloud. “I was here first!”

That’s all it takes, that simple affirmation of being first. The space between thoughts has been there since long before I had words and jelly cubes to fill it, and as soon as I acknowledge it, the void becomes unshackled and expands so violently that I can feel it filling me up from the inside. My toes tingle. My hands heat up. My chest is an orange too big for its peel. It is as if I’ve been an airless balloon all my life and the dark has just shown me how to inflate it. The nothing within and the nothing without are shaped by me, a thin, rubbery shell.

Maybe I’m going nuts, but the feeling is one of total fulfillment. I spend hours wallowing in the expanded space, no longer hungry, no longer tired. The space is infinite and edgeless, and allows me to hold competing emotions freely. I can be sad and ecstatic, stressed and calm, angry and forgiving, all simultaneously. You’re hogging the drive-through? No worries. I can be impatient and happy to wait for you too.

“Janet,” I say, talking to the dark. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

There’s no reply, but I know I’m right. It’s a fitting name, borrowed from Good Janet, the afterlife’s all-knowing, all-giving, void-dwelling virtual assistant in the NBC comedy The Good Place. She (not a girl) has one last thing to show me, a little gelatinous cube hiding like a toy that I didn’t even know I’d lost. I pick it up. It’s different from the others. It’s green, with a dot on it. I sob uncontrollably when I realize that it’s my sense of wonder.

I sleep hard that last night, so hard that Berman has to bang on the door to tell me it’s Thursday morning and time to come out. I get dressed and put on an eye mask to ease myself into the light. I went in scared. Eighty-two hours later I’m coming out terrified, because I know that feeling of fullness will fade under the weight of the world. I sit in an Adirondack chair by the Baggins door and remove the mask, slowly. The light is far brighter than I ever could have imagined. I am raw and emotional, myself now a reel for rubberneckers.

Video courtesy of Sky Cave Retreats

In the coming weeks, the feeling of fullness does fade, but it’s never entirely gone. Even five months later, I can still conjure it up on demand and feel it race around my limbs to inflate all that space within. It’s not like I’m never angry or frustrated or anxious in my daily life anymore. Rather, I have room for those feelings to do their thing without crowding out everything else. And I got all that zen for the bargain price of just three days in the dark.

My wife notices the change: I’m more tranquil, totally happy to sit alone without the urge to check my phone.

I have no need for another retreat. The first day out, I raced back to Bend, ready to live, and that was all the purpose I needed. Heidi scored us Chris Stapleton tickets—the best reentry gift ever—and that night I danced with 8,000 strangers in a seething mass awash in sound and lasers. No one could imagine where I’d been. I was just grateful for the light.

From dancing with a Zulu witch doctor in South Africa to wandering into caves with Yazidi mystics in Iraq, Tim Neville has had some unusual encounters on the road. But this one was by far the weirdest—and one of the most rewarding. He has traveled to more than 90 countries, speaks four languages (and is learning a fifth), and punctuates every afternoon with an 18-minute nap.

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