Days-Long ‘Dark Retreats’ Are the Newest Spiritual Conquest for Tech Elites

Just 12 hours after entering a pitch-black, 400-square-foot cabin dug into the hillside in southern Oregon, crypto founder Charles Hoskinson fled in terror.

Hoskinson, 37, who created Cardano, the 10th biggest crypto coin—with a market cap of around $24 billion, set out to spend five days in complete darkness at the Sky Cave center “to gain a deeper understanding of myself and the world,” he told his million followers on X in early January, a couple of days before going in.

But he cut his journey inward short after suffering from “terrifying shadows gnawing at my soul, sleep paralysis demons, and [an] inability to breathe,” he posted, equating the grueling overnight experience with a cult horror movie. “Much wisdom gained, but I need a few days off at the ranch since starring in The Ring wasn't on my 2025 bucket list.” Hoskinson declined to speak to WIRED for this article, but Sky Cave founder Scott Berman confirmed his attendance.

Hoskinson is not the only tech elite seeking spiritual enlightenment in the dark.

Darkness retreats remain niche, but they have become the latest extreme spiritual practice for founders, athletes, influencers, psychonauts, and yogis to attempt traversing and later flex about. Typically, a darkness retreat consists of several days alone in a room in complete darkness and silence. Participants are delivered three meals through a hatch that maintains the darkness in their dwellings, which also each contain a bed, bath, and flushing toilet. They can leave simply by opening the door, and they can also break their silence to chat with the facilitators at two intervals throughout the day when they come to the door to check on them and bring the food. Electronic items like phones or tablets are not allowed inside dark rooms, making it perhaps the ultimate dopamine fast. Imagine a meditation retreat, but alone, in the dark.

“It's meditation on steroids,” says Andrew Holecek, an author and lucid dreaming teacher. This might partially explain why short-on-time celebrities are embracing it. Four-time NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers has spent four days in the dark, as has comedian Tiffany Haddish, while NBA star Rudy Gobert and decorated former baller Dwight Howard did three days each. “It was the best thing I ever did,” Howard wrote afterward. “Life just feels simple again.”

But the possible benefits are in direct proportion to the risks, Holecek warns. “You can go to incredible depths really quickly. This is where the promise and the peril lies.”

While retreats offering people voluntary isolation in the dark are relatively few, the practice has ancient roots. The Buddha is said to have meditated in a dark cave for long periods before gaining enlightenment. The prophet Muhammad was isolating in a cave when legend says an angel dictated the first verses of the Quran to him. When Abraham, the founder of Judaism, followed a calf into a cave, it was there that he is believed to have found the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Even today, infants identified as future shamans in Colombia’s Indigenous Kogi community are sent into the relative dark for extended periods to access altered states of consciousness.

“In the practice of darkness, people have to learn to spend time on themselves,” says Taoist master and dark retreat facilitator Mantak Chia, who published a 2002 manual titled Darkness Technology. “There is nobody to talk to, nothing to see. They have to turn inwardly into their body. I guide them into the calm and let the body’s healing energy activate.” Chia ran darkness retreats in the US in the 1980s, making him one of the modern pioneers in spreading the practice. The darkness, according to Chia, who facilitates group darkness retreats in Thailand, is the ultimate setting “to let go, and forgive and forget.”

People are typically drawn to darkness retreats because they wish either to go into a state of deep inquiry, simply unplug, deepen their meditation practice, or explore altered states, according to Berman. Others, it seems, want to conquer a gargantuan challenge—facing off with humanity’s most primal fear, harking back to a primordial prefire age when predators circled vulnerable early humans during the night.

Facilitators say that the first day or two, flush with all the darkness-induced overproduction of melatonin, is often of deep rest—if one can remain blissfully asleep without any sleep paralysis demons disturbing them. The initial sensations of the darkness could feel akin to taking a sedative drug. Then, comes the introspection, interspersed with periods of discomfort, angst, or serene enjoyment. And, around day three, hints of psychedelic visuals, even with the eyes open, and a feeling not dissimilar from the final stages of a DMT trip. Some studies report that sensory deprivation environments can induce troubling hallucinations and paranoia, as with other altered states. But Chia says the hallucinations are a hallmark of the beginning of “enlightenment, because you see the light.”

There are around five darkness retreat centers in the US, Berman says, with approximately 100 worldwide. Sky Cave has three dark rooms; four-night retreats cost $1,770, with an extra night to settle in and another to decompress afterward.

The potential effects of prolonged darkness have not been studied well, but there are early indications to suggest that the practice may have a host of mental health benefits; a Czech center claims it can ease “long-term fatigue and stress” through spurring the processing of inner experiences. When people come out of one of Sky Cave’s three “caves,” video footage shows some crying with emotion.

But the process of subjecting oneself to solitary confinement in complete darkness also carries little-understood risks. “To my knowledge there has as yet not been studies reporting on the negative outcomes of dark rooms for extended periods in naturalistic environments, although there are numerous isolated anecdotes of psychotic-like symptoms and prolonged dissociation,” says David Luke, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich who has conducted research on dark experiences and the similarities with psychedelic trips.

Some people at Berman’s center have spent as long as 40 days in one of his light-deprived dwellings. Others lasted just half an hour. “We don't let people come any longer than four nights anymore,” says Berman. “We don’t actually think this is beneficial, as we tend to find that most people use some kind of coping strategy to stay in the dark for long periods of time.” Such strategies, Berman explains, are difficult to define, but they essentially pertain to people “doing” things in the dark, even meditation or spiritual practices—rather than simply relaxing, doing nothing, and surrendering a sense of control. This ultimately insulates them to some degree from the mysterious and deeply self-reflective process the darkness is said to instigate, he says.

“This is a very dangerous practice if it isn’t done right,” adds Holecek, who expressed particular concern for people who go in with “a machismo, white-knuckle” mentality.

“I know people who have gone in who come out worse,” he says, explaining that a 49-day retreat was once an advanced Tibetan Buddhist rite of passage outside of a few traditions in which it is still used. “It fell out of favor because ill-prepared, unsupported people went in for 49 days and then, instead of attaining enlightenment, they would literally go crazy.”

Jason Halbert, former vice president of people and global security at Snap, did a darkness retreat at Sky Cave in February 2024. Speaking to The Profile podcast shortly after, Halbert, a behavioral scientist, explained that it took him about a day to get used to not absentmindedly checking his phone. “When you’re truly deprived of any inbound visual stimulation, be it your phone, light, TV—eventually you’re left with dreams, thoughts, and blackness,” he said. “We don’t realize the enormous amount of triggers that anchor our identity.”

Describing himself as someone who “thinks all the time,” Halbert likened his four-night spell in the dark to “cleaning up my office” and said it helped him ponder how to be a “better human, professional, dad, coach, and husband.” (Halbert left Snap in 2019; in 2017, The Information reported that current and former employees alleged he told “odd” and “inappropriate” stories at work. Halbert told WIRED the allegations are “false.”)

According to Luke, some people are more prone to hallucinations than others. And not everyone embraces them. “It's distracting to them,” says Berman. “The lights and stuff kind of feel a bit overwhelming and draw them back out of the subtleties.” But wellness entrepreneur and author Aubrey Marcus took it in his stride. “These stalactite mites were dripping in gold, almost like Nickelodeon gak,” he says of his six-night experience at a center in Germany’s Black Forest in 2020, which he documented, helping to introduce the practice to his spiritually inclined Joe Rogan podcast listener fans. Marcus also had visions of flashing strobe lights, fractal geometry, and aliens, who he claims to have communicated with. “I would say it would be like the twilight of a really heavy, highly visual DMT experience,” he says.

Marcus said he slept for 12 hours on the first night, according to data captured by his wearable, but by the end of his sojourn he was sleeping for less than two hours, “because the visions were just so strong.”

Some darkness practitioners and facilitators claim the hallucinations people experience are due to the possibility of prolonged darkness elevating levels of endogenous DMT, a potent psychedelic found not only in small amounts in the body but also in many plants. This is an “as yet unproven and controversial hypothesis,” Luke wrote in a 2019 anthology, Psychedelicacies. “Theoretically, the longer you spend in there, the more of a trip it becomes,” he says.

Holecek, the lucid dreaming teacher, has his own dark room within his home and has clocked hundreds of days in darkness. “You're entering the death space,” he says of the practice, referencing the Tibetan Buddhist state of “bardo,” in between death and rebirth. “People, I've discovered, are simultaneously magnetized and repulsed by darkness.”

So where next for the practice? Berman says Sky Cave has a two-year waiting list, and a “big tech founder” is set to visit in the coming months. He and Hocelek are working with Berman and the Institute of Advanced Consciousness Studies on a scientific study to measure any psycho-spiritual shifts brought about by the practice. “I'd say we're hardly at the tip of the iceberg of where this will be in five or 10 years,” Berman says.

While he’s coy on being too evangelical about the potential benefits of the dark, “there are incredible transformations that happen for people here,” he says. “We can begin to see ourselves as we actually are.”