night fear

Noun

night fear (countable and uncountable, plural night fears)

1. (uncountable) The fear of the night, nighttime, or darkness.
   • […] just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood — what luck! — never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, cold lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numbly before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; […]1983, Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions
   • At night, the sounds were different, no less pitiful. Screams from nightmare and nightfear.2004, Gail Sidonie Sobat, A Winter's Tale, page 101

   Synonyms:

   nightfright, noctophobia, nyctophobia

2. (countable, figuratively, literal) A fear or terror that one typically has at night.
   • It has required much British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of...1917, Thorstein Veblen, An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation, page 251
   • A new form of fear within me—the real night-fear of the unknown, my honest doubt as to whether we would survive.2014, Barry Blanchard, The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains