Two Sleeps : To Sleep, To Dream and To Sleep Again Two Sleeps Doesn’t Mean Couples Sleeping by epSos.de
Our strange sleep history… Going back prior to the 1800s, the way people slept starts to look very different. Your forefathers fell asleep in a manner that modern sleepers would undoubtedly believe extraordinary– they went to sleep two times.
The Past
His research found that we didn’t constantly sleep in one eight hr chunk. We used to sleep in two much shorter intervals, through a much longer range of night time. This span was approximately 12 hours long, and kicked off with a sleep of several hours, wakefulness of around three hours, then sleep again until morning.
Some Odd Sleep Facts
REM sleep has been observed in the pilot whale, which is actually a species of dolphin. Real whales do not seem to have REM sleep, nor do they seem to have any problems because of this. One reason REM sleep might be difficult in marine settings is the fact that REM sleep causes muscular atony; that is to say, a functional paralysis of skeletal muscles that can be difficult to combine with the need to breathe regularly in a liquid environment.
There are obvious differences in the percentages of men and women that snore. The reason for the difference involves the size of a person’s neck, typically an effect of being overweight. Men tend to have larger necks than women do, and having a neck of 17 inches or larger makes it likely a person will snore. Surveys indicate that 80 percent of men that snore do not consider themselves to have a problem and in fact consider their spouses to be light sleepers.
Getting enough sleep depends on your lifestyle and your needs, as some people need more sleep than others. In these days of stressful living, it is often a sad fact that we tend to sacrifice our sleep in favor of competing some task or other. This is okay in the short term but if it continues over along period of time, your health and looks will both suffer. In terms of health, poor sleep patterns can result in heart disease, diabetes and abnormal blood pressure levels.
When experiencing microsleeps while driving an automobile, from the perspective of the driver, he or she drives a car, and then suddenly realizes that several seconds have passed by unnoticed. It is not obvious to the driver that he or she was asleep during those missing seconds, although this is in fact what happened. The sleeping driver is at very high risk for having an accident during a microsleep episode.
Counting sheep actually works if you want to find a method for falling asleep! This is due to a simple fact about concentration and relaxation. The mind tends to become focused and relaxed over an extended period of concentration and counting sheep tends to make a person concentrate and relax at the same time.
Learning how to stay asleep is another aspect of combating sleep disorders. You can start by checking out your bedroom. Is it a mess? Does it look busy? Is the room representative of general chaos? If so, take stock: a messy room will stimulate your mind. Simple fact. Your ironing in the corner, a messy pile of books and magazines, clothes that need putting away could be keeping you awake.
[easyazon-link asin=”0393050890″ locale=”us”]At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past[/easyazon-link]
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Mentions are spread all throughout literature, court records, private papers, and the short term records of history. What is amazing is not that people fell asleep in two periods, but that the concept was so incredibly common. Two-piece sleeping was the standard, recognized plan to sleep.
“It’s not only the quantity of mentions– it is the manner in which they speak about to it, just as if it was normal know-how,” Ekirch says.
An English physician published, for instance, that the most suitable period for learning and meditation was somewhere between “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Chaucer speaks of a character in the Canterbury Tales that goes to bed after her “firste sleep.” Plus, discussing the reason why working people gave birth to more children, a physician from the 1500s published that they usually had intercourse 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.
As we know, this practice ultimately disappeared. Ekirch associates the change to the development of neighborhood lighting and ultimately electric indoor light, as well as the popularity of coffee houses. Author Craig Koslofsky gives a fresh hypothesis in his book Evening’s Empire. Along with the growth of more neighborhood lighting, night time stopped being the domain of crooks and sub-classes and turned into a time for business or socializing. Two sleeps were eventually regarded a wasteful way to spend these hours.
In spite of why the shift happened, shortly after the turn of the 20th century the notion of two sleeps had disappeared altogether form common knowledge.
Until about 1990.
The ScienceTwo sleeps per night might have been the choice of classical times, but inclinations towards it still remain in modern man. There could be an innate biological desire for two sleeps, given the right circumstances.
In the early ’90s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr of National Institutes of Mental Health conducted a study on photoperiodicity (being exposed to light), and its effect on sleep patterns.
Instead of keeping up and busy the usual sixteen hours per day, they would stay up just ten. The additional fourteen hours they would be in a sealed, unlit room, where they would relax or fall asleep as much as possible.
At first, the participants would sleep enormous lengths of time, likely counterbalancing sleep debt that’s typical among contemporary people. As soon as they had caught up on their sleep though, a strange thing began to happen.
They started to have two sleeps.
Over a twelve hour duration, the subjects would typically sleep for about four or five hours in the beginning, then wake for several hours, then sleep once again until morning hours. They slept not more than eight hours total.
The middle hours of the night time, between two sleeps, was marked by unusual calmness, equated to meditation. This was not the middle-of-the-night toss-and-turn that many of us experienced. The individuals did not worry about falling back asleep, but used the time to relax.
Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford, identifies that despite having conventional sleep patterns, this night waking isn’t always cause for worry. “Many people wake up during the night and panic,” he says. “I advise them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.”.
Beyond a scientific environment, this kind of sleep pattern is still achievable, but it does require adjusting our modern, electric lifestyle. Very cool person J. D. Moyer did just that. He and his family members intentionally survived an entire month with no electric light.
In the winter season months, this represented a great deal of darkness and a lot of sleep. Moyer writes “… I would go to bed very early, like 8:30, and then awaken around 2:30 am. This was alarming at first, but then I remembered that this sleep pattern was very usual in pre-electric light days. When this occurred I would finish up reading or writing by candlelight for an hour or two, then going back to bed.”.
Moyer didn’t intend to reproduce our forefathers sleep habit, it only happened as a result of a great deal of dark hours.
Should We Restore Two Sleeps?
Keep in mind too that two sleeping needs a lot of darkness– darkness that is just possible naturally throughout the winter months. The greater levels of daylight throughout summer and other seasons would make two sleeping difficult, or even impossible.
Maybe two sleeping is simply a coping feature to get through the long, cold, monotonous nights of the winter. Today, we don’t really need to cope. As long as we give our sleep the time and recognition it needs, 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 every night.
About the author: Sue Tamani is an expert when it comes to Sleep Patterns. To find out everything about Sleep Patterns, visit her website at http://www.empowernetwork.com/suetamani/before-the-1800s-people-slept-in-a-way-that-modern-sleepers-would-find-bizarre/ .
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