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Interrupted Sleep or an Age-Old Pattern
Works for me
Because my sleep pattern, since I retired, consists of a waking period of about two hours during the night, I was interested in a short piece in an online BBC magazine about a historian investigating the term “first sleep.” Roger Ekirch, of the University of Virginia, was in England researching criminal trial records for a book he was writing on sleep habits in the pre-Industrial age world when he came across the term “first sleep.”
Apparently, before the Industrial Age, people didn’t sleep for one six to eight-hour period. They slept in two stages, as do I, with about a two-hour gap of wakefulness, usually from about 1 to 3 am.
As he expanded his research, he discovered that a two-stage pattern, called biphasic sleep, was the standard way people slept, as revealed in ancient records and literature.
Most people, whether peasant or nobility, went to bed at about 10 pm, woke up around 1 or 2, worked for about two hours, and then returned to bed until about 6, or sunrise, according to Ekirch.
This custom was noted in diaries, medical reports, military records, and literature. It’s mentioned in stories from Homer’s The Odyssey, in the 8th Century BCE, to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
