About Sleep and Light – Pale Blue Scratch Email Newsletter #7

“At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
-Willa Cather

Have you ever gone camping overnight? There’s an astounding lack of electricity in the wild, unless you bring batteries with you. But that’s where this illustration point ends since I wanted to talk about how people slept before electricity…and those convenient batteries.

The world of Pale Blue Scratch is at a pre-electric level; or rather, electricity is really at the intermediate experimental stage. Light comes from candles, lanterns, and the sun. The artificial providers of light could be costly, so people tended to go to sleep not long after sundown, and didn’t start their day until dawn.

That leaves a rather long stretch of time for sleeping—a few hours more than the eight or so most people need or can tolerate. How did people “get through the night?” They may have slept twice:

[Historian Roger Ekirch’s] arguments are based on 16 years of research during which he studied hundreds of historical documents from ancient to modern times, including diaries, court records, medical books and literature. He identified countless references to ‘first’ and ‘second’ sleeps in English. Other languages also describe this pattern, for example, premier sommeil in French, primo sonno in Italian and primo somno in Latin. It was the ordinariness of the allusions to segmented sleeping that led Ekirch to conclude this pattern was once common, an everyday cycle of sleeping and waking.

….

For those who indulged [in segmented sleep], however, night-waking was used for activities such as reading, praying and writing, untangling dreams, talking to sleeping partners or making love. As Ekirch points out, after a hard day of labouring, people were often too tired for amorous activities at ‘first’ bedtime (which might strike a chord with many busy people today) but, when they woke in the night, our ancestors were refreshed and ready for action. After various nocturnal activities, people became drowsy again and slipped into their second sleep cycle (also for three or four hours) before rising to a new day. We too can imagine, for example, going to bed at 9pm on a winter night, waking at midnight, reading and chatting until around 2am, then sleeping again until 6am.

For those of us who are creative types, like some quiet time, or just have trouble sleeping in general, segmented sleep not only sounds like a good idea, but may be completely natural.

Further reading/watching:
The myth of the eight-hour sleep
Sleep Patterns Before Electricity were Very different
Busting the 8-Hour Sleep Myth: Why You Should Wake Up in the Night