The second sleep
I’ve been sleeping badly this week, somehow preventing myself from tumbling into that soft dark unknowing. I lie awake and my thoughts float freely, if I get up I feel fully awake. The next day I’m dried out with tiredness. My eyes feel raw as if I’ve spent hours diving in chlorinated water.
I try not to worry about it. Sleep is a funny thing. “The more anxious people feel about getting a good night’s sleep the more elusive that night becomes”, a sleep expert I interviewed for an article told me once.
The ideal night hasn’t always looked like we imagine it now.
“Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness”, writes historian A. Roger Ekirch in his book At Day’s Close.
These periods were sometimes called the first and the second sleep. The period in between had no name, but was sometimes described as the “watch” or “watching”.
People woke up around midnight and stayed up for an hour or two, or sometimes until daybreak (and then slept in for longer in the morning).
No one worried about the period of wakefulness. This was how most people slept.
“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”, writes Erich.
In a study he cites test subjects reverted to this way of sleeping when they were deprived of artificial light. The study showed that the period of non-anxious wakefulness had an endocrinology of it’s own “approaching an altered state of consciousness not unlike meditation”.
What did people do during those wakeful hours?
First they emptied their bladders, then they smoked, they read, the performed chores, they prayed or chatted to their spouses, they had sex or they simply let their thoughts drift.
That’s what I try to do now, I drift.
– Facts from At Day’s Close – A History of Nighttime by A. Rover Ekirch
– Photo by Moodywalk at Unsplash.