Reclaiming the Evening Hour

In the traditional village, when darkness falls, the cooking fires are stoked and the griots begin to speak. In our high-rise glass towers, we do the opposite—we feed our eyes with blue light and social media dopamine, effectively blinding ourselves to the subtle whispers of the Egungun who speak most clearly in the liminal space between waking and sleeping. I have installed a rigid spiritual boundary: from 8 PM to 9 PM, all screens are dead. No emails, no Netflix, no doom-scrolling. I light a single beeswax candle—this flame acts as a beacon for the ancestors, a signal that I am closing the door to the noise of the marketplace and opening the door to the realm of the spirits. I sit with a warm cup of ginger or moringa tea (moringa is known to open the third eye), and I invite my guardians to converse with me.

Sometimes I sit in silence and simply listen to the emptiness, which is never truly empty; I journal any sudden flashes of memory or insight that arise, as these are often forgotten messages from my lineage. Sometimes I call an elder in my family—not to gossip, but to hear their voice and absorb the vibration of their living wisdom. This hour of intentional “darkness” before bed is a spiritual technology that primes my subconscious to receive Ala (dream revelations). I keep a notepad by my bed because without fail, the solutions to problems I struggled with all week are delivered to me in vibrant, coded dreams. By honoring this twilight covenant, I am literally telling the universe: “I am available. I am listening. Speak to me in the language of the night.” It transformed my sleep, sharpened my intuition, and reconnected me to the dream-life that our ancestors revered as sacred.