Nocturne

People once woke up halfway

 through the night to think,

 write or make love. 

What have we lost by

 sleeping straight through?

    Karen Emslie

NOCTURNE

Electric light changed our experience of nighttime. Prior to Edison’s revolutionary invention of the light bulb, sleep was naturally divided into two parts. We think of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep as normal. But before gas and electric light, people bunkered down earlier and it was normal to have two segments of sleep. The time of the first sleep varied with the season and social class, but it usually started soon after dusk and lasted for three or four hours. In pre-industrial societies people naturally woke up from the first sleep to engage in activities that had a different quality, where perhaps the daytime analytical mind was not quite so active. Nearer to the dream-world, people were more imaginative, finding it easier to ‘write, think and make love’. A doctor's manual from 16th Century France advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when " they have more enjoyment" and "do it better". Such a reference to ‘first and second sleep appear in countless old records, literary texts, medical manuscripts, diaries, archives, documents and letters in pre-industrial times. It is not so much what they said about segmented sleep, but the way they referred to it – taking it absolutely for grated as the normal mode of nighttime life. 

This unnoticed aspect of our history has recently been investigated by sleep scientists, and most notably by the historian A. Roger Ekirch of the Virginia State University in his book At Close of Day,  a study based on 16 years of research. Ekirch tells us, ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind.’ He goes on to say that people fell asleep not long after dark for the “first sleep.” Then they awoke, somnolent but not asleep, often around midnight, when for a few hours they talked, read, prayed, had sex, brewed beer or burgled. Then they went back to sleep for a shorter period. 

Psychiatrist Thomas Wehr suggests that the most common insomnia we suffer, is not a disorder but rather a harking back to a natural form of segmented sleep.  Wehr also suggests that not only have modern routines altered our sleeping patterns, they have also robbed us of this ancient connection between our dreams and waking life, and ‘might provide a explanation for the observation that modern humans seem to have lost touch with the wellspring of myths and fantasies’. In pre-industrial times people might simply have lain in bed ruminating on the meaning of a fresh dream, thereby permitting the conscious mind a window onto the human psyche that remains shuttered for us moderns in the rush to start the day, missing the experience of this slightly ‘altered state’.

Ekirch tells us: ‘By turning night into day, modern technology has obstructed our oldest avenue to the human psyche, making us, to invoke the words of the 17th-century English playwright Thomas Middleton, “disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies”. 

Night triggers hormonal changes in our brains that suit creativity. Wehr has noted that, during the waking period between sleeps the pituitary gland still excretes high levels of prolactin. This is the hormone associated with sensations of peace and the dreamlike hallucinations we sometimes experience as we fall asleep, or upon waking. It is produced when we feel sexual satisfaction and when nursing mothers lactate. In segmented sleep intervals it must also help create that non-anxious wakefulness that most nearly resembles a meditative state. 

But not always. When the iron grip of the analytic mind is loosened in such intervals, an unpleasant and repressed feeling may surface. It is an opportunity to look into what episodes in one’s life it relates and to re-experience, if not the memory, at least the felt-sense of it. This can free up the whole tone of a day.

Kate Bussmann writes in the Sunday Telegraph, “How does this history help insomnia? For me, it proved that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the idea of an eight-hour uninterrupted sleep. If I went to bed earlier, it was OK to wake up for a few hours. It also meant that I stopped howling into the void during those few hours I was awake and instead used that time to read novels, do relaxation exercises or write. In my efforts to keep as close to my medieval forbears as possible, I never looked at my phone.  The worst thing you can do when you wake up at 3am is to stress. And nothing is likely to induce panic more than the idea that sleeping uninterrupted for eight hours is necessary for mental and physical health.”

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264