Been intrigued by this report:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2017-09-21/have-humans-always-slept-through-the-night/8942062

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Eight solid hours of sleep is a goal many of us strive for. When we fail to achieve it, we end up not only feeling tired, but also a little frustrated and anxious.

But the notion that we need all of our sleep in one unbroken block, is not necessarily driven by our biology. And there’s a good deal of evidence to show we haven’t always had this approach to sleep.

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century text, The Squire’s Tale, the king’s daughter, Canacee, is described as having a “fyrste sleep,” arising in the early morning ahead of her companions, who sleep fully through the night.

And in 15th century medical texts, readers were advised to lie on their right side during a “first sleep” – and the left side for a “second sleep”, so as to aid digestion.

Indeed, references to a first and second sleep are littered throughout Western history and literature.

Sleep historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech uncovered numerous references to segmented sleep as he trawled back through centuries of writing.

“Western Europeans … referred to both intervals as if the prospect of awakening in the middle of the night was utterly familiar to contemporaries and thus required no elaboration,” Professor Ekirch wrote in his 2001 research.

He suggested going to bed when the sun went down, waking in the middle of the night for a couple of hours, then sleeping again until sunrise was a normal way of being – perhaps even the most common sleeping pattern.
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full article in link
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I have been really fascinated by this article. There was a time I was going to bed early because I felt tired and sleeping a few hours and then waking up again and not being able to go back to sleep. So I’d lay awake for hours and end up reading or watching TV till I felt tired again. Now it seems this might be a valid alternative sleep pattern – just get up and be awake for a couple of hours and do things in the middle of the night.

Does anyone do this sort of sleep pattern thing?

party_pants said:

Been intrigued by this report:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2017-09-21/have-humans-always-slept-through-the-night/8942062

————
Eight solid hours of sleep is a goal many of us strive for. When we fail to achieve it, we end up not only feeling tired, but also a little frustrated and anxious.

But the notion that we need all of our sleep in one unbroken block, is not necessarily driven by our biology. And there’s a good deal of evidence to show we haven’t always had this approach to sleep.

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century text, The Squire’s Tale, the king’s daughter, Canacee, is described as having a “fyrste sleep,” arising in the early morning ahead of her companions, who sleep fully through the night.

And in 15th century medical texts, readers were advised to lie on their right side during a “first sleep” – and the left side for a “second sleep”, so as to aid digestion.

Indeed, references to a first and second sleep are littered throughout Western history and literature.

Sleep historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech uncovered numerous references to segmented sleep as he trawled back through centuries of writing.

“Western Europeans … referred to both intervals as if the prospect of awakening in the middle of the night was utterly familiar to contemporaries and thus required no elaboration,” Professor Ekirch wrote in his 2001 research.

He suggested going to bed when the sun went down, waking in the middle of the night for a couple of hours, then sleeping again until sunrise was a normal way of being – perhaps even the most common sleeping pattern.
————

full article in link
————

I have been really fascinated by this article. There was a time I was going to bed early because I felt tired and sleeping a few hours and then waking up again and not being able to go back to sleep. So I’d lay awake for hours and end up reading or watching TV till I felt tired again. Now it seems this might be a valid alternative sleep pattern – just get up and be awake for a couple of hours and do things in the middle of the night.

Does anyone do this sort of sleep pattern thing?

I do an arvo nap about 50% of days.

I think where this subject interests me is going to bed on a full stomach and waking up for another round of porridge and going back to sleep on the other side. It seems to me back then they were trying to get the most out of a calorie.

seen the article elsewhere, it has its own bullshit genius in the absences that ought be obvious, if ideology weren’t so effective.

there’s a number of reasons people might have woken middish way through the night, or two-part-sleep etc

there’s the obvious one that probably gets a mention, by memory (haven’t reread it for ages) being to stoke the fire (literally, or otherwise),
and related to see which way the weather’s trending, you know this is before the BOM, satellites, TV, and the internet, people relied on their senses, and experience of the seasons etc. No A/C, so there’s perhaps windows to adjust.

there’s the fairly obvious one too to check babies and young children aren’t getting cold, going to get cold, or overheated, got a fever(tending ill), or the flea-ridden mutt’s not climbed on the bed and suffocated one of the kids.

another possibility, that ought be obvious, but the genius species could miss it, is that getting up a set times (earlyish) is way not natural. For the same reasons people(and many animals) sleep at night (diurnal) they may also sleep in well into the morning until light improves and temperatures increase. You’d have to be handicapped by the notion reality is a contemporary social construction not to see this, which brings me to the next possibility.

sleep is senses folded back, freedom from the immediacy of impositions of environment.

being able to variably sleep in might be good for health.

so you know two-part sleep might have been normal.

I generally go to bed facing east, and if I fall asleep quickly, will stay in that position and wake up 3-4 hours later, go to the toilet, drink some water and usually quite quickly go back to bed, facing west, for another couple hours. But sometimes after the “first sleep” I’ll be up for a while reading or writing or playing music etc. before returning to bed.

Eight hours is usually too much for me, 6 or 7 is more common.

add too that pre electric light (being widely available) there was a lot of dark, in fact the period of less-than-optimum-light, and perhaps very low temperatures, was not shortened by the flick of a switch, same of heating respectively.

vehicle lights and streets light weren’t electric, or abundant.

12+ hours of darkliness and cold, it’s a long time.

stuff to do, to tend to.

Anyway, I might go to bed now, for a full night’s sleep.

The reason I stopped going to bed early when I felt tired is that I knew I would wake up again and not get back to sleep.

I might experiment with it.

> Does anyone do this sort of sleep pattern thing?

Look at the time on this post.

Looking at the sleep patterns of those people living traditional life-styles without access to electricity would seem to be a reasonable way to research his subject.

Anyone doing that?

Fairly early in his life, Buckminster Fuller was feeling depressed to the point of suicide. Part of his problem at the time was inconsistent sleep patterns. He noticed that his dog didn’t bother about getting 8 hours sleep at a time: when it was tired it just had a sleep, so he decided he’d do the same. That was his sleep pattern for the rest of his life: when he was tired, he’d have a sleep, for as long as it took. He found that his depression improved, and his creativity increased. (See Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminister Fuller, by Hugh Kenner.)

btm said:

Fairly early in his life, Buckminster Fuller was feeling depressed to the point of suicide. Part of his problem at the time was inconsistent sleep patterns. He noticed that his dog didn’t bother about getting 8 hours sleep at a time: when it was tired it just had a sleep, so he decided he’d do the same. That was his sleep pattern for the rest of his life: when he was tired, he’d have a sleep, for as long as it took. He found that his depression improved, and his creativity increased. (See Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminister Fuller, by Hugh Kenner.)

lucky he didn’t have a cat.

ChrispenEvan said:

btm said:

Fairly early in his life, Buckminster Fuller was feeling depressed to the point of suicide. Part of his problem at the time was inconsistent sleep patterns. He noticed that his dog didn’t bother about getting 8 hours sleep at a time: when it was tired it just had a sleep, so he decided he’d do the same. That was his sleep pattern for the rest of his life: when he was tired, he’d have a sleep, for as long as it took. He found that his depression improved, and his creativity increased. (See Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminister Fuller, by Hugh Kenner.)

lucky he didn’t have a cat.

He had a wife and a young child at the time (and no money), so they’re probably even luckier he had the dog.

ChrispenEvan said:

btm said:

Fairly early in his life, Buckminster Fuller was feeling depressed to the point of suicide. Part of his problem at the time was inconsistent sleep patterns. He noticed that his dog didn’t bother about getting 8 hours sleep at a time: when it was tired it just had a sleep, so he decided he’d do the same. That was his sleep pattern for the rest of his life: when he was tired, he’d have a sleep, for as long as it took. He found that his depression improved, and his creativity increased. (See Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminister Fuller, by Hugh Kenner.)

lucky he didn’t have a cat.

Sometimes I use the cats as a guide to sleeping. I really can’t get the tight curling up with my nose up my bum and my tail over my ears.

kii said:

ChrispenEvan said:

btm said:

Fairly early in his life, Buckminster Fuller was feeling depressed to the point of suicide. Part of his problem at the time was inconsistent sleep patterns. He noticed that his dog didn’t bother about getting 8 hours sleep at a time: when it was tired it just had a sleep, so he decided he’d do the same. That was his sleep pattern for the rest of his life: when he was tired, he’d have a sleep, for as long as it took. He found that his depression improved, and his creativity increased. (See Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminister Fuller, by Hugh Kenner.)

lucky he didn’t have a cat.

Sometimes I use the cats as a guide to sleeping. I really can’t get the tight curling up with my nose up my bum and my tail over my ears.

take up Yoga.

ChrispenEvan said:

kii said:

ChrispenEvan said:

lucky he didn’t have a cat.

Sometimes I use the cats as a guide to sleeping. I really can’t get the tight curling up with my nose up my bum and my tail over my ears.

take up Yoga.

I tried, but I fall asleep in the Corpse pose.

modern life’s more dominated by clocks than’s ever been, temporal controls I call them, though not sure that’s the right term.

GDP, progress, the fruits of industrial-scale global capitalism, you know.

need clocks to make that work, they don’t look like whips