There’s a growing body of evidence which suggests that an “eight straight” sleep cycle is not so natural as we had been led to assume:
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.
Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren’t entirely solitary – people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.
Good: So I’m not an insomniac, but just a throwback.
That part I knew already.
I’ve been having trouble sleeping…
When I go to bed at 10 PM I sleep soundly until 6 AM or so.
My afternoon nap around 3 I sleep just fine.
It’s that morning nap where I just can’t seem to get any rest.
Just make sure you wake up in time so that you don’t sleep straight thru your mid-afternoon nap, Flugelman!
Funny; like listening to denizens of the Shire discussing second breakfast.
Well, it eases my mind to know I’m a throwback too, even though I gave up worrying about my segmented sleeping patterns a few years back. It IS inconvenient when your bedtime is the hour most (working) people are waking up and your day begins sometime around noon. But… what the Hell. One adapts.
I guess I’m getting old when I look forward to my 3 p.m. nap. We fly in the morning out to the rigs and we do another flight in the evening, three days a week. There’s nothing better than dozing off in-between. It’s either that or surf the web.
Speaking of that, I hear the rack calling my name.
…a proud throwback indeed…count me in…as for chatting with bed-fellows or having sex…count me puzzled…
…since when did social/sexual intercourse in this venue become an either/or activity? Best
I would point to the domestication of dogs and cats as the first real indicator of the two sleep periods. Millenia of being awakened by stinky doggie farts, or by rotten kittehs pestering them in the middle of the night explains everything.
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
I resemble this comment above
I pass the time by playing Zombie Gunship on my iPad. The AC-130 Spectre was aptly named…
2300-0300, 0500-0900. In a perfect world. Sadly, I do not live in a perfect world. C’est la vie.
Yeah, and the Shoe’s make it worse by that awful “rev” watch.
Onboard our sailboat, I found three on six off gets the best rem sleep and rest.
One of the B/N’s in our squadron was either in the wardroom, flying, or asleep. When asked why he spent so much time in the rack, his response was “Every hour I’m asleep this deployment is one hour shorter.”
Found myself jealous of his ability to do the Rip Van Winkle.
‘Course, my rack was under the starboard JBD. Sleep was sometimes hard to come by.
A guy in my division once overslept. When asked why he was late to the brief he responded “I was time traveling and went a bit too far.”
I’m a throwback. I sleep from 11-2, then I’m up from 2-3, then I sleep until 6:30. I’m definitely up an hour to two hours every night. It’s not always been that way, but has become my adult sleeping pattern. I really thought it was just a genetic thing as this is how my Dad has always been as far back as I remember. I remember as a teenager hearing him walk the house around 2AM every night. My Mom started this a little later… her hours are similar as well now.
Funnily enough, I hang around a lot of elderly people, and one couple actually gets up and eats breakfast, watches TV and then goes back to bed from around 6-9AM. This is their routine and they love it. Everyone knows not to call them before 9.
My husband is not a throwback. That man could sleep in the back of a pick up truck full of shovels. Once his head hits the pillow, he is out like a light for the next 8-10 hours. I’m kind of jealous, to be honest.
That’s my gal too. Don’t know how she swings it. Eighteen forever, I guess.
MacGyver is the same way – he’s asleep before his head hits the pillow. Sadly, it doesn’t let him stay there much beyond 0530, regardless of his work schedule (which varies often). He and I were cut from entirely different cloth.
Bou – The Oracle is like your husband. I need a good 6-7 hours of sleep to feel rested. Don’t always get them.
Back in my firefighting days I developed the ability to cat nap. We be waitng for the horn, and if the palne was clean and paperwork caught up. I’d grab 40 winks in the plane of pilot’s shack.Usually we’d get a call late afternoon and work ’till dark.(about 9-10 pm in the high summer.
what really screwed us up was Alaska, dropping mud at 12:00am and fueling at 1;00am broad daylight, never got used to that…
Commanding Officers of all the ships at sea would write their Standing and Night Orders down in a book that the watches would read and some of them would demand a wake up call for any surface contact that demonstrated a closest point of approach of less then 5000 yards. The SWO bag of tricks came out to try to ensure that we didn’t have to do that thing if we were proactive. Particularly in the Persian Gulf. Other skippers were content with 2000 yards.
Working for rabid sleepless ferrets who never get any sleep kind of killed the joy.
No light then so it was off to bed when it got dark and up with the sunrise, that’s a lot of time in bed in winter.
I, too, adopted this sleep pattern some time ago. I have decided to use it to my advantage to get some things done during this quiet period of the night/morning rather than fight to get back to sleep, as some of my friends report doing. Still, it is interesting to learn about the research and history backing the phenomenon. Thanks.
Well, I told y’all I was weird, the first time I showed up here. Now, it seems I’m “Normal.” I feel insulted.