Acquainted with the Night: Excursions through the World After Dark (or Acquainted with the Night: A Celebration of the Dark Hours) is a non-fiction book by Christopher Dewdney about various aspects of night. It was first published in 2004 by HarperCollins. It uses the same title as the Robert Frost poem "Acquainted with the Night". The book consists of 14 chapters, with one chapter dedicated to each hour of the night, from 6 pm to 5 am. Mini-essays populate each chapter which each follow a theme, like nocturnal creatures, dreams, astronomy, and mythology. Other subjects and topics touched upon include science, art, culture, natural history, superstitions, and psychology. The book was a finalist for the 2004 Governor General's Awards and for the 2005 Charles Taylor Prize. It tied with Dark Matter: Reading The Bones for the World Fantasy Award in Anthologies.
Background
At the time of Acquainted with the Night'''s writing, author and poet Christopher Dewdney was 52 years old and living in Toronto with his wife, Barbara Gowdy. He had previously written 14 books, the last being the 2002 book of poetry, The Natural History. His previous non-fiction books were Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era (1998) on the impacts of technological advances on humanism, The Secular Grail: Paradigms of Perception (1993) regarding the human psyche, and The Immaculate Perception (1986) on his views of consciousness, language and dreams. Dewdney's past books were described as being "more admired than read". On the topic of 'the night', he had a lifelong fascination with nightlife and eventually decided to write a book about it. He quickly became overwhelmed by the amount of information relating to the subject. For research, he consulted a variety of genres and formats, including books, journals, magazines, music, and movies, and collected information within the broad topics of art, science, social sciences and history. The perspective Dewdney took was that of "explaining night to beings from another planet that had two opposed suns and no night at all".
Content
The content is divided into 14 chapters. The first chapter serves as an introduction and considers the mythological and geological origin of night. The next 12 chapters are each titled after an hour starting with chapter 2's 6 pm and ending with chapter 13's 5 am. Chapter 2 discusses the transition into night, including sunsets, the green flash, the stages of twilight, as well as Olbers' paradox, and a definition of the size and speed of night. The 7 pm chapter deals with nature at night, how animals see and hear differently at night with a focus on bats, nighthawks, and nocturnal insects. The 8 pm chapter analyzes children's literature and bedtime stories. The 9 pm chapter discusses aspects of the city at night, including the evolution of nightclubs, street lights, and the impacts of light pollution. The 10 pm chapter discusses night festivals around the world and throughout history. The 11 pm chapter explains the circadian rhythm and the physiology of sleep and dreams.
The 12 am chapter traces the history behind dream interpretation from Gilgamesh to Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Calvin Hall. Here, Dewdney considers nightmares and takes sudden unexplained death syndrome, whose sufferers are almost always Asian males, between 20 and 49 years old, as an extreme example of nightmares that cause the dreamer to die from a "ventricular fibrillation...brought about by extreme terror". The 1 am chapter compares literary and mythological personifications of, or beings associated with, the night. The 2 am chapter tells the stories of the legends behind the moon and the constellations. The 3 am chapter is all about insomnia. The 4 am chapter provides a geographical aspect, touring the places with long nights, like Las Vegas, caves, the poles, and deep within the oceans. The 5 am chapter discusses artistic representations of night, especially in music, on film and through paintings. The final chapter is a conclusion in which Dewdney reflects on memorable sunrises he has experienced and contrasts sunrises with sunsets.