First sleep, second sleep

In a New York Times article on the "sleep industry," Jon Mooallem summarizes A. Roger Ekirch, author of At Day's Close, on an interesting and little known detail of sleep in times past:

For many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a “first sleep” and “second sleep” — also included a curious intermission. “There was an extraordinary level of activity,” Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking  a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin  took “cold-air baths,” reading naked in a chair.

Via Improbable Research.

According to Wikipedia, this phenomenon is called segmented sleep:

Segmented sleep, divided sleep, bimodal sleep pattern and interrupted sleep are modern Western terms for a polyphasic sleep pattern found in medieval and early modern Europe and many non-industrialised societies today, where the night's sleep is divided by one or more periods of wakefulness. This is particularly common in the winter.

Comments

[Scott P]

I read that a while back and sent it to Julie. I'd love to know how the idea of sleeping in one perfect eight hour chunk came to pass.

[HA HA HA]

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas talks about the Bushmen in the Kalahari doing that, back when they were still living the old way. In camp, nobody slept through the night; everybody'd be up for a while at one time or another, so there was always a little group awake sitting around the fire.

With division of labor, we've now got night watchmen, police, late night DJs, David Letterman, suicide hotline operators, and EMTs.

[Melissa]

Now I'll never get the mental image of Benjamin Franklin nekkid out of my head, heh.

Seriously, though--it sort of explains the waking up at 2:00 phenomenon, if we're hard-wired for segmented sleep patterns.

[gail]

All moms can relate

[ken]

Dads too. Although sometimes there is more than two segments.

Strange, I was just thinking about first and second sleep Saturday night. (I have walking pneumonia, and my sleep patterns had been falling into this archaic one.)

I imagined myself in days of old, in mob cap and linen shift, getting up and sitting by the fire for a while and rocking an infant in a chair, and making my husband somethng to eat.

It was kind of weird. Instead I got up and looked at blogs, then went back to bed.

[SarahW]

See, I'm not really with it yet. That was my post above.

[gail]

Hope you're feeling better soon, Sarah. I had that once and it really knocks you for a loop.