I served a proselyting mission in Upstate New York, and there were many evenings that we were walking forested roads after the sun went down. The forest can get very, very dark.  I imagine that it was even darker for Joseph, just prior to his amazing vision that illuminated his life and the world with eternal truth. 

Joseph Smith History 1:16

16 But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. 

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