Setting grim tales during nighttime was critiqued as a cliché in 1594 by Thomas Nashe. “When any poet would describe a horrible tragical accident,” he wrote, “to add the more probability and credence unto it, he dismally begins to tell how it was dark night when it was done.”

“When the white man landed on the moon, my father cried,” a young Oklahoma Indian told psychologist Robert Coles in the 1970s. “He was sure Indians were crying up there, and trying to hide, and hoping that soon they’d go back to their earth, the white men.” The boy also spoke to his aunt. “The moon is yours to look at and talk to,” she told him, “so don’t worry.”

“Darkness has come upon me,” a hymn in the Rig Veda laments. “O Dawn, banish it like a debt.” The morning light is here asked, suggested translator Wendy Doniger, to act as a collection agency—to “make good what darkness had incurred or ‘exact’ the darkness from night as one would exact money.”

Astronomers theorizing the existence of small moons orbiting larger moons have proposed calling them “moonmoons.” The planet Kepler-1625b, which has a Neptune-sized moon distantly orbiting it, was cited as “sort of the best-case scenario for a moonmoon.”

A study of sixty-two mammalian species found that animals around the world have shifted into more nocturnal lives. “Humans are now this ubiquitous, terrifying force on the planet,” said lead author Kaitlyn Gaynor, “and we are driving all the other mammals back into the night-time.” The Southeast Asian sun bear, formerly diurnal, now spends as much as 70 percent more time awake at night to avoid humans.

In 2005 the British Cheese Board attempted to dispel the idea that eating cheese before bed causes nightmares. No evidence of this “evil myth” was reported among two hundred volunteers, though eating Stilton was found to lead to “crazy” dreams, while eating cheddar often led to dreams of celebrities. “We hope that people will think positively about eating cheese before bed,” said the board secretary.

Psychologists at the University of California recognized a lack of sleep “as a social repellent” and its effect contagious: “People who come in contact with a sleep-deprived individual, even through a brief one-minute interaction, feel lonelier themselves as a result.”

Neo-Confucian philosopher Fujiwara Seika visited a friend on the night of the Han mid-autumn festival in 1606. As the moon appeared, the men climbed onto the roof. “The guest felt in his heart the endlessness of space,” wrote Seika’s student Hayashi Razan, “but the host seemed not to notice this, so the guest also acted as if he had not either.” Drunk on wine just before dawn, the pair began asking questions of the moon. No answers came, Razan wrote: “What could the moon say?”

Poet Edward Fairfax kept a 1621 account of his daughter Helen’s terrible nightmares, describing an incident in which she complained about a demonic white cat that “has been long upon me and drawn my breath.” The cat, she said, “has left in my mouth and throat so filthy a smell that it does poison me.”