editor victoria’s comment ~ i align with this and have long thought our way of “sleeping” was off with the real needs of the body. (even though “modern science” says otherwise….)
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10 April, 2018
She was wide awake and it was nearly two in the morning. When asked if everything was alright, she said, “Yes.” Asked why she couldn’t get to sleep she said, “I don’t know.” Neuroscientist Russell Foster of Oxford might suggest she was exhibiting “a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.” Research suggests we used to sleep in two segments with a period of wakefulness in-between.
A. Roger Ekirch, historian at Virginia Tech, uncovered our segmented sleep history in his 2005 book At Day’s Close: A Night in Time’s Past. There’s very little direct scientific research on sleep done before the 20th century, so Ekirch spent years going through early literature, court records, diaries, and medical records to find out how we slumbered. He found over 500 references to first and second sleep going all the way back to Homer’s Odyssey. “It’s not just the number of references—it is the way they refer to it as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch tells BBC.
“He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream.” — Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)
Here’s a suggestion for dealing with depression from English ballad ‘Old Robin of Portingale’:
“And at the wakening of your first sleepe/You shall have a hott drinke made/And at the wakening of your next sleepe/Your sorrowes will have a slake.”
Two-part sleep was practiced into the 20th century by people in Central America and Brazil and is still practiced in areas of Nigeria.
(Photo: Alex Berger)
Night split in half
Segmented sleep—also known as broken sleep or biphasic sleep—worked like this:
- First sleep or dead sleep began around dusk, lasting for three to four hours.
- People woke up around midnight for a few hours of activity sometimes called “the watching.” They used it for things like praying, chopping wood, socializing with neighbors, and for sex. A 1500s character in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales posited that the lower classes had more children because they used the waking period for procreation. In fact, some doctors recommended it for making babies. Ekirch found a doctor’s reference from 16th century France that said the best time to conceive was not upon first going to bed, but after a restful first sleep, when it was likely to lead to “more enjoyment” and when lovers were more likely to “do it better.”
- “Second sleep,” or morning sleep, began after the waking period and lasted until morning.
CONTINUE HERE.
