constant state of flux

I am awake blogging at 2 a.m. and I want to know why. I searched on the internet and found out it is called segmented sleep, divided sleep, bimodal sleep or interrupted sleep and I have slowly started to experience it since coming here to live in the mountains.

Bimodal sleep is composed of two periods of sleep during the night, with a wakeful (or half wakeful) hour or two in the middle. I have unearthed some fascinating documents about pre-industrialized people sleeping every night in this way. In medieval England, the first (or dead) sleep and the second (or morning) sleep was well-known and the wakefulness in between (named dorveille – meaning ‘twixt sleep and wake – in French) was highly valued for its meditative and semi-dreamstate qualities. This was the time of quiet conversation, love-making or dream interpretation and soothsaying; a period of deep contemplation that we, with our electric lighting and 24-hour lives have all but lost.

I go to sleep with my children before 9 p.m. I try to stick to the hours of light (more difficult in winter) and not use too many electric lights after dark (although staring at this screen is not too healthy right now). We go to bed at this time of year when the embers of the fire have died down and we all sleep. At about 12 or 1 a.m. I usually wake up and have an hour or two quietly talking with Jules or sitting by the fire. I never find it hard to sleep again and it never affects me in the morning. At this time, in the dead of night, things take on a supernatural feeling. At this end of the valley, nothing is heard outside whatsoever. We listen to the children shifting in their sleep and in autumn we can hear stags bellowing in the forest.

It is a peaceful time, a time of half-waking, non-thinking yet creative time and it is just amazing to step outside and see stars on clear nights.

Until the modern era, up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness midway through the night interrupted the rest of most Western Europeans, not just napping shepherds and slumbering woodsmen. Families rose from their beds to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors. Remaining abed, many persons also made love, prayed, and, most important, reflected on the dreams that typically preceded waking from their “first sleep.” Not only were these visions unusually vivid, but their images would have intruded far less on conscious thought had sleepers not stirred until dawn. The historical implications of this traditional mode of repose are enormous, especially in light of the significance European households once attached to dreams for their explanatory and predictive powers. In addition to suggesting that consolidated sleep, such as we today experience, is unnatural, segmented slumber afforded the unconscious an expanded avenue to the waking world that has remained closed for most of the Industrial Age.

`Sleep We Have Lost’ by A. Roger Ekirch

We still sometimes all share a bed all night and if I am sleeping when Jules works late, I always sleep with the girls. They sleep better this way and so do I, the comfort of another small body nestled up to yours makes for relaxation of the highest order. I still lie down to get both girls to sleep every night, hence the fact I normally go to sleep when they do. In pre-industrialized communities, this was also a common practice; to conserve heat and for reasons of safety. Our nights always include one or even two bed-shifts and wakeful periods.

Infants in middle class American homes, who usually sleep alone, may not learn to ground their sleep and waking cycles in a flow of sensations that include bodily contact, smells and background noises. In fact, babies forced to bounce back and forth between the sensory overload of the waking world and the sensory barrenness of dark, quiet bedrooms may find it difficult to relax, fall asleep, wake up or concentrate.

‘Slumber’s Unexplored Landscape’ by Bruce Bower.

Thomas A. Wehr, of the National Institute of Mental Health conducted a study which put volunteers under the same conditions as prehistoric man. Fifteen healthy men and women were asked to rest for 14 hours in the dark every night. They were not allowed any artificial light and after a few nights when they caught up on sleep, they all soon settled into a pattern of sleeping in two shifts waking up for an hour in between. This hour was spent in quiet reflection.

If prehistoric people slept in two nightly periods, then regularly waking out of REM sleep may have allowed them to reflect on and remember their dreams in a semi-conscious state that is generally unavailable to modern sleepers, sleep compressed into  a single stint may thus encourage modern humans to lose touch of dreams myths and fantasies.

‘Slumber’s Unexplored Landscape’ by Bruce Bower.

But now, I think it is time to sleep. Good night.

Read another post on light pollution at night in: Dark Skies, Moon and Star Skies.