Thanks for the feedback!
The cat eyes are automatic, although if you run out of Spirit Energy they will stop working until you regenerate your spirit energy. Maybe I need to change the wording to make it clearer, but they cause you to regenerate your Spirit Energy slower in the dark. If you hold B/SPACE/CIRCLE to run, you'll see your Spirit Energy drops faster in the dark and that it doesn't recover while you move. Maybe I should just not mention anything about Spirit Energy since it confuses some people and isn't really that important.
I'll look for the place you got stuck in, I haven't seen that before. If you can send a screenshot, that might help, but I can probably find it from your description. Thanks for pointing it out.