We Used To Sleep In Two Segments Every Night Until Electricity Was Invented

BI - Barking Up The Wrong Tree ^ | 9-9-2014 | Eric Barker

[blam]

Eric Barker, Barking Up The Wrong Tree
September 9, 2014

Roger Ekrich noticed many old books, including Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", referenced two periods of sleep being the norm in their era.

Via Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep:

...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.

So researchers did a study. When subjects had no exposure to artifical light they reverted to this 2 stage type of sleeping:

Soon, the subjects began to stir a little after midnight, lie awake in bed for an hour or so, and then fall back asleep again. It was the same sort of segmented sleep that Ekirch found in the historical records. While sequestered from artificial light, subjects were shedding the sleep habits they had formed over a lifetime.

Was this fragmented sleep bad? Far from it. Bloodwork showed that the time between the two sleeping periods was incredibly relaxing and blissful:

The results showed that the hour humans once spent awake in the middle of the night was probably the most relaxing block of time in their lives. Chemically, the body was in a state equivalent to what you might feel

(snip)

[blam]

"does getting up to pee count?"

How many times?

You know your prostate gland continues to grow your whole life, larger and larger. The problem is, you urinary 'hose' goes through the prostate and gets constrained smaller and smaller.

I asked my doctor once why we didn't just reroute the urinary track around the prostate...he said that it sounded like a good idea but he didn't know why they don't.

[Skooz]

The Aubrey-Maturin series of novels is one of the best ever written! If any other Freeper reads this I serious recommend they read these books by Patrick O’Brian. If you are truly interested in the world that led to the American Revolution and after then you need to read this series.

Agree 100%. I read them all and cannot recommend them highly enough. A masterpiece of a series.

[SunkenCiv]

:’)