Sleeping With the Light On

Superstition or Caution?

By David Haldane

Oct. 28, 2024

I first noticed it years ago when my Filipino wife’s family moved into our house. Rising in the middle of the night for a glass of water, I’d see the eerie glow of white light flowing out from around the edges of her parents’ bedroom door. Once, thinking they’d forgotten to flick off the switch, I quietly entered the room and did it for them. Only to be surprised the very next night by the very same spectacle.

Wow, I remember thinking, is this a family thing or a Filipino thing?

Both my college-age nieces insist that it’s a national habit, though I haven’t yet found any studies or articles corroborating that. “I don’t know why we do it,” one niece admitted, “but practically every Filipino I know does.”

Then I saw an interesting statistic: Filipinos are the most sleep-deprived people in Southeast Asia and the fourth most sleep-deprived in the world. “Wake up! It’s time to sleep,” declared a recent ad for a Swedish brand offering sleep products at its Pasay City showroom. Among other things, it included videos of people falling asleep in that showroom, including one depicting a three-year-old Filipino girl seen by over 4.5 million viewers on TikTok last year.

The ad’s inspiration: that 2023 study showing 56% of Filipinos enjoy less than seven hours of sleep daily, averaging only 6.13 hours. Hmmm, I couldn’t help wondering, is there a connection between leaving the lights on and this national dearth of good night’s sleeps?

It’s an issue about which I felt some lingering concern.

Then came another statistic offering a major clue: for the third year in a row, according to the 2024 edition of World Risk Report, the Philippines is the world’s most at-risk nation for extreme natural weather events including earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding, and typhoons. The report, the Office of Civil Defense proclaimed in a statement, offers “a clear reminder” of the dangers facing Filipinos.

And that’s when a theory slowly began taking shape in my head. Could it be, I wondered, that the Filipino penchant for leaving the lights on at night is not entirely without reason? Is it a necessary national precaution in a country filled with inordinate peril? It wasn’t too long before an opportunity for personal research presented itself with unmitigated enthusiasm.

“Hey,” it yelled very clearly into my wide-open ears, “there’s a big wind coming!”

It was actually quite a bit more than just a big wind; more like God’s dark counterpart blowing his hot breath directly onto our trembling windowpanes. Which then rocked and rolled like nothing I’ve ever heard.

For a while, my four-year-old daughter and I—sharing a large bedroom upstairs—lay cuddled together, shivering fearfully each time the house erupted into massive shudders. It felt like an enormous fist reaching out from heaven—or the other place—banging on our shabby walls. Were the lights on? You bet. Until the power went out, leaving us quivering blindly in the darkness. And that’s when two large windows suddenly shattered, throwing glass every which way as we retreated screaming down the stairs to another room with much smaller but still-intact windows.

We survived, of course. After several sleepless nights spent in the relative safety of that downstairs room listening to the upper walls groaning amidst the tinkling of glass, the fierce winds passed as did our fear. We have since replaced the huge glass panes upstairs, now strongly reinforced by protective metal shutters that roll down in storms.

But not before gaining a new understanding of that Philippine national custom that once seemed oh-so-strange, namely sleeping with those bright lights blaring. Lately, in fact, I’ve taken to sleeping that way myself because, heck, you just never know what might be hurtling your way in the darkness of a Philippine night.

Maybe I’m finally becoming a real Filipino.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, A Tooth in My Popsicle, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.