This may be a bit to the left or right of our subject but since so many of us have some form of sleep insomnia and there are so very may treatments for it, well, I've wondered if our notion that to keep our healthy we need 8 or more hours of uninterrupted sleep a night is just wrong! Our ancestors may not have had the lifestyle or expectation that they would sleep the whole night through. Perhaps it's not in our genetics to sleep all those hours. Maybe some food or conversation or changing watch was the ideal. The term Biphasic Sleep means that a person sleeps, wakes up, and goes back to sleep.
BBC FUTURE : MEDIEVAL SLEEP by Zaria Gorvett
Fascinating article from the BBC Future citing the work of Roger Ekrirch, a professor-researcher at Virginia Tech.
EXCERPTS: For a start, first sleeps are mentioned in one of the most famous works of medieval literature, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (written between 1387 and 1400), which is presented as a storytelling contest between a group of pilgrims. They're also included in the poet William Baldwin's Beware The Cat (1561) - a satirical book considered by some to be the first ever novel, which centers around a man who learns to understand the language of a group of terrifying supernatural cats, one of whom, Moue-slayer, is on trial for promiscuity.
But that's just the beginning. Ekirch found casual references to the system of twice-sleeping in every conceivable form, with hundreds of letters, diaries, medical textbooks, philosophical writings, newspaper articles and plays.
The practice even made it into ballads...
... Ekrirch wonders if today people might remember fewer dreams than our ancestors did, because it's less common to wake up in the middle of the night...
