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Unnerved by the experience you cannot get back to sleep. You can only wait out the long night until dawn approaches and it is time to get up again. Thus starved of essential sleep, you are unlikely to be able to apply your mind to your work - especially if it is creative mental work. Prolonged sleep starvation could eventually render you incapable of doing your job. A neighbour's light could thus destroy your career and hence your living. It seems that in England there is no law against robbing a neighbour of his sleep, sanity and career by beaming bright lights into his bedroom window at all times of the night. I have personally suffered from this for over 25 years. The problem is becoming ever more wide spread.
On the other hand, if after having been driven systematically mad by sleep deprivation, you smash, or otherwise disable, your neighbour's light, you will be 'guilty' of criminal damage to his precious property - all £10 worth of it! It seems that the law of this land considers one person's £10 floodlight to be of far greater worth than another person's sleep, livelihood and sanity. Little wonder that though people may fear the law, they have lost all respect for it.
The owners of these lights are quick to point out that people can sleep perfectly well in daylight. That is true. But daylight is different. Firstly it is a different spectrum of light. Secondly it moves and changes continuously according to a 24 hour cycle which is older than the human species. Consequently, the human biorhythms which take their cue from daylight have evolved to expect bright light to change its direction, spectrum and intensity continuously according to this eternal cycle. A daytime sleeper would doubtless wake up in a very disturbed state if the sun stayed at exactly the same angel in exactly the same direction at exactly the same intensity, switching on and off sporadically. It does not even do that during a total eclipse.
The purpose of these lights is supposedly to help keep one's home secure. Some insurance companies even give them away free with new household policies and reduce the premiums of those who fit them. The concern of insurance companies is of course to increase their profits slightly by, they suppose, reducing the risk slightly. The fact that it costs others their sleep, livelihoods and sanity is of no concern to them.
Common sense strongly suggests to me that alienating neighbours by shining powerful lights into their bedroom windows at all times of the night is not exactly the best way to protect one's home. Any neighbour who, having been forcibly kept awake by a powerful light, on seeing a burglar breaking in to one's home is likely to be of a mind to wish the burglar the best of fortune and pray that the first thing he steals is the confounded flood light.
The bedroom in which my wife and I sleep has two windows. To block up either would breech planning regulations. Either alone is too small. On a wall parallel to one window and only 5 metres away is a bright light. It is mounted slightly off to one side of our window and about half a metre below its sill level. This light shines upwards into our window at a most awkward angle. We have a Venetian blind + a blackout curtain across that window at night. However, even these together will not keep sufficient light out to allow me to sleep when the light is on. If it comes on during the night, it immediately wakes me up. Despite my complaints, the light has been there for 25 years. My neighbour apparently 'has the right' to light up his driveway if and whenever he wishes. And he seems to want to have it on late into the night, long after my wife and I have gone to bed. For many years, it was switched on at 5am when my neighbour got up to see to his plants before leaving for work.
For several years, a bright light shone in our other bedroom window also. That was across the road roughly 15 metres away. It was a 500 watt quartz halogen lamp mounted at the same level as the window. It was an automatic lamp controlled by an infrared sensor. As a result, whenever a cat or a hedgehog came anywhere within sensor range during the night, on would come the light. Then it would go off again. On and off it would go all night at random and unpredictable intervals. My wife's sister came across some genuine World War II blackout material her mother had not used during the war. She gave it to my wife who lined the curtains of that bedroom window with it. Even this made little difference. The light was so intense that we could not get to sleep until the early hours. We complained to our neighbour, then rowed, about this light going on and off all night. So he arranged to keep it switched on all night - coming on at dusk and going off at dawn. We got little sleep until that neighbour moved. The light is still there, but it is now never on. The total inconsiderateness of such people is illustrated by the fact that this problem could be so quickly and easily solved by simple shields.
Currently, a third neighbour at the back of our house has two spot lights plus a halogen lamp that shine straight at my elder son's bedroom window. This got so bad that my wife called the local environmental officer. The officer spoke to the neighbour concerned. He told the neighbour that, although there were no specific regulations regarding external house lights, it was causing a nuisance and therefore would he kindly point them in a direction in which they could not be so. The neighbour was visibly annoyed. He said he would take out the bulbs. He then went back to Pakistan for 6 months, during which time my son could sleep. However, upon his return, on went the lights again. That neighbour's family go to bed very late and appear to get up very late also. In the summer they stay in the garden until very late with the lights on. Fortunately in summer, some shielding is afforded by the leaves on our apple tree. However, once they thin out and fall in the autumn, the lights beam straight into my son's bedroom window every time a cat or a hedgehog walks across the neighbour's garden.
People have suggested that, since there is no law against beaming lights into other people's bedroom windows, I could retaliate. I could fit a 500 watt quartz halogen lamp and set it to trigger off the neighbour's lights, thus depriving his daughters of their sleep and sanity. Perhaps then he would refrain. There are two reasons why I do not retaliate. Firstly, my lamp would cause grief to other neighbours who cause no trouble at all. Secondly, with 4 adults in our house currently having to live on the amount of benefit designed for two adults, we can hardly afford to eat, let alone waste money on such a frivolous device.
I simply had to embark on a project for which I had little money, time or skill; namely that of fitting a thick plastic impregnated blackout lining to my son's bedroom curtains to try to reduce the glare to a level that would allow him to sleep. In the event, it didn't. So I also fitted a roller blind to see if the combination of the two would reduce the light sufficiently. It didn't. The light is so powerful it splays out around the edges of the curtains and lights up his bedroom. It also takes away form him the convenience and well-being of being able to awaken naturally with the dawn. In the bright light of day his bedroom is still very dark. Like me, he has to rely on an alarm clock to awaken him in the height of summer as in the depth of winter - all because of inconsiderate selfish neighbours.
Forced sleep deprivation is a serious thing - especially to my son who, partly as a result of this, now suffers from mental illness. If the random switching on and off of a powerful light were used by any oppressive regime as an aid to interrogation, it would be internationally condemned as torture. Yet when perpetrated by an inconsiderate householder against his neighbours, this acute form of psychological torture isn't even against the law. This is despite the fact that protection from torture is one of the only two unconditional human rights granted to us under the European Convention. The whole situation is rankly despicable.
As technology makes available all kinds of powerful gadgets to a nation populated in significant proportion by conscienceless self-centred inconsiderate excuses for humanity from whom the law affords no practicable protection, problems like this are bound to escalate. The environment will become increasingly polluted with unnatural light and noise.
Enacting a law to forbid such lights would annoy the selfish majority of voters. A democratically elected government is therefore unlikely to enact such a law. I doubt such a government would even consider bringing in a regulation stating that all external lamps should
But that would require a modern Brit to take direct action to benefit his neighbour without gain or advantage for himself. And that would never do. In fact, just about every rule, regulation and statutory requirement of this kind could be done away and replaced by the rule "Love thy neighbour as thyself.".
The only practical solution is for the offended parties to construct some means of passive defence against these lights. One could build bedrooms in future homes with very small horizontal windows sporting light-proof shutters. Just so that you can see the world outside during the day. The bedroom's main source of daylight would have to be from skylight windows in the ceiling. Grants would have to be made available to enable poor people to convert their existing homes. Perhaps these grants could be financed by a tax on external lights.
But would this be a solution? Perhaps sooner or later the same problem will come from inconsiderate airline pilots leaving their powerful landing lights on. You probably guessed. I live near an airport. The only real solution is a change in the hearts of the British people to make them into good neighbours. But I can't see that happening.
As always, though, the ultimate culprit is industrial capitalism for driving people from the land and caging them in unnatural proximity to power its factories and offices - and then persuading them to buy lots of silly gadgets with which to annoy each other.