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The following article was published in our article directory on August 26, 2013.
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Before the 1800s People Slept in a Way that Modern Sleepers would find Bizarre

Article Category: Lifestyle

Author Name: Sue Tamani

Ok, most likely your grandparents in all likelihood slept similar to most people. As well as your great, great-grandparents. As soon as you go back to prior to the 1800s, the way we sleep begins to look a good deal different. Your ancestors rested in a method which modern sleepers would most likely believe peculiar-- they slept a second time. And so can you.

The Past
The existence of our going to sleep two times per night was originally learnt about by Roger Ekirch, professor of History at Virginia Tech.

His investigation uncovered that people didn't typically rest in a single eight hour chunk. We used to sleep in two smaller periods, over an extended range of night-time. This sequence was about 12 hours long, and got going with a sleep of several hours, wakefulness of up to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

References are dispersed all through literature, court papers, private papers, and the ephemera of yesteryear. Just what is surprising is not that people fell asleep in two sessions, but that the technique was so incredibly common. Two-piece sleeping was the rule of thumb, accepted manner in which to sleep.

"It's not only just the number of mentions-- it is the technique they refer to it, just as if it was normal knowledge," Ekirch says.

An English physician published, for example, that the best period for learning and meditation was between "first sleep" and "second sleep." Chaucer tells of a character in the Canterbury Tales who goes to bed after her "firste sleep." And, explaining the main reason why unskilled laborers conceived more offspring, a doctor from the 1500s documented that they normally had sex following their first sleep.

Ekirch's book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past is replete with such examples.

Just what did people do with these extra twilight hours? Pretty much what you might expect.

Most stayed in their beds and bedrooms, sometimes reading, and often they would use the time to pray. Religious manuals included special prayers to be said in the mid-sleep hours.

Others might smoke, talk with co-sleepers, or have sex. Some were more active and would leave to visit with neighbors.

With the rise of more street lighting, night stopped being the domain of criminals and sub-classes and became a time for work or socializing. Two sleeps were eventually considered a wasteful way to spend these hours.

In spite of why the change occurred, shortly after the turn of the 20th century the idea of two sleeps had disappeared altogether from common knowledge.

Up until about 1990.

The Science
Two sleeps per night might have been the method of antiquity, but tendencies towards it still linger in modern man. There could be an innate biological desire for two sleeps, given the ideal situations.

In the early '90s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr of National Institutes of Mental Health performed a study on photoperiodicity (being exposed to light), and its effect on sleep patterns.

Rather than keeping up and busy the normal sixteen hours per day, they would stay up just ten. The other fourteen hours they would be in a sealed, dark room, in which they would relax or sleep as much as possible.

In the beginning, the subjects would sleep huge lengths of time, most likely counterbalancing sleep debt that's typical among modern-day men and women. The moment they had caught up on their sleep however, a weird thing started to take place.

They began to have two sleeps.

Over a twelve hour period, the subjects would commonly sleep for about four or five hours initially, then wake for a few hours, then sleep once again until morning. They slept not more than eight hours total.

The middle hours of the night, in between two sleeps, was characterized by uncommon quietness, equated to meditation. This was not the middle-of-the-night toss-and-turn that many of us experienced. The patients did not worry about falling back asleep, but made use of the time to take it easy.

Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford, identifies that even with standard sleep patterns, this night awakening isn't always reason for worry. "Many people awake at night and overreact," he says. "I advise them that what they are experiencing is a legacy of the bi-modal sleep system.".

Outside of a scientific setting, this kind of sleep pattern is still achievable, but it does require changing our present day, electric lifestyle. A very cool person J. D. Moyer did just that. He and his family intentionally went an entire month with no electric light.

In the winter season months, this involved a lot of darkness and a lot of sleep. Moyer writes "... I used to go to bed very early, like 8:30, and then awaken around 2:30 am. This was worrying initially, but then I recalled that this sleep pattern was fairly typical in pre-electric light days. When this occurred I would finish up reading or writing by candlelight for an hour or two, then returning to bed.".

Moyer didn't intend to duplicate our forefathers sleep pattern, it just occurred as a byproduct of a lot of dark hours.

Should We Restore Two Sleeps?
Antiquity shows that two sleeping was usual, and science indicates that it is (in some circumstances) natural, there is no indication that it is far better. Two sleeps might leave you really feeling more relaxed, but this could simply be because you are purposefully giving yourself more time to rest, relax, and sleep. Giving the same recognition to the single, eight-hour sleep should be just as effectual.

Keep in mind as well that two sleeping needs a lot of darkness-- darkness that is just possible normally during the winter months. The greater levels of daylight during summer and other seasons would make two sleeping challenging, or even impossible.

Perhaps two sleeping is just a coping mechanism to get through the long, cold, boring nights of the winter. Today, we don't need to cope. So long as we give our sleep the time and respect it requires, achieving the "standard" eight hours of sleep should be ok.

Next time you awake at 2 AM and can't sleep, simply keep in mind your great, great, great, great, great grandfather. He did the same thing each and every night.

Keywords: sleep pattersn, ancestor sleep

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