Halloween, full moon, time change this weekend

(CNN) — This week is a kind of Hell Week, figuratively and literally.

Our demons are coming out. The campaign signs dotting the streets in our neighborhoods are strewn in with gravestones and mock murder scenes and skeletons that this year feel a little more personal, having had death hang like a cloud over this year.

We’ve all spent months slogging through a presidential election campaign and a global pandemic, and this Saturday feels like an emotionally climactic night, a morbid moment punctuating a year of death and suspense. Halloween, a daylight saving time change and a full moon all align on a singular night.

While trick-or-treating and Halloween parties are curtailed this year due to physical distancing and concerns of spreading coronavirus, scholars say that acknowledging, if not fully celebrating, a night devoted to the demented is a useful escape valve. It’s a way to purge the year’s emotions before we declare our political intentions on November 3.

Allowing for a little intentional chaos in our spirit might be a good thing. As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”

Halloween night is also a full moon

The narrative tension is tight, and that all this would converge on the night of a full moon only makes this spookier.

“It’s a fraught moment for so many reasons. Even for those who don’t believe in the supernatural, we act as if we do. The metaphysical energy of this moment is huge,” said Regina Hansen, a master lecturer in rhetoric at Boston University and co-author of “Supernatural, Humanity, and the Soul: On the Highway to Hell and Back.”

Halloween is an opportunity to essentially be a stranger in a strange land. For a night you can inhabit a new self. That might mean the wish fulfillment of a child’s dream to be an astronaut. You can inhabit a character who is braver, stronger or more criminal than you are.

“It’s all heightened, it’s all elevated. There’s a sense of freedom that’s almost magical,” she said. “Children control the night. They walk up to strangers’ houses and ask for, no, demand candy.”

Or it could be a way to express a message of political satire in going out as an undead version of a political figure you might like to banish.

That could mean donning a bloodied suit and tie and parting your hair as a zombie politician (it’s been done). Taboo thoughts are sanctioned, if only for an evening.

This Halloween’s full moon is also a blue moon. While the moon won’t actually look blue, a blue moon refers to the second of two full moons occurring in the same month, which happens once every 2.5 to three years, or “once in a blue moon.”

A full moon appears on Halloween roughly every 19 years, so of course tack it up to 2020 for one more rare feat. Take note when the full moon rises on Saturday as it won’t happen again on Halloween in many time zones until 2039, 2058, 2077 and 2096.

Though full moons have long been tied to our fascination with madness and werewolves — the word “lunatic” derives from “lunar” — there isn’t strong scientific evidence that more crime occurs when…