Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep

In today's encore selection -- from Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep. For most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives. Then came the lightbulb. This unexpected "two sleep" phenomenon was uncovered by historian Roger Ekirch when he began to do research for a history of the night

"Something puzzled [Roger] Ekirch as he leafed through parchments ranging from property records to primers on how to spot a ghost. He kept noticing strange references to sleep. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, one of the characters in 'The Squire's Tale' wakes up in the early morning following her 'first sleep' and then goes back to bed. A fifteenth-century medical book, meanwhile, advised readers to spend the 'first sleep' on the right side and after that to lie on their left. And a scholar in England wrote that the time between the 'first sleep" and the 'second sleep' was the best time for serious study. Mentions of these two separate types of sleep came one after another, until Ekirch could no longer brush them aside as a curiosity. Sleep, he pieced together, wasn't always the one long block that we consider it today.

"From his cocoon of books in Virginia, Ekirch somehow rediscovered a fact of life that was once as common as eating breakfast. Every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the first sleep that kept popping up in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning -- the so-called second sleep. The time between the two bouts of sleep was a natural and expected part of the night and, depending on your needs, was spent praying, reading, contemplating your dreams, urinating, or having sex. The last one was perhaps the most popular. One sixteenth-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive several children because they waited until after the first sleep, when their energy was replenished, to make love. Their wives liked it more, too, he said. The first sleep let men 'do it better' and women 'have more enjoyment.' ...

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"Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn't artificial light -- and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows -- people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep. ... [Yet] almost two decades after Wehr's study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers -- not to mention your average physician -- have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time in the middle of the night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing that they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years. Patients, meanwhile, see waking up as a sign that something is wrong."

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