Inside View from Ireland: My Nights of Late

PERHAPS CONCERNED about my mental state, or merely passing judgment on my tendency to start microblogging at 3AM on some mornings, James Corbett pointed to Pre-Industrial Sleep, a concept I saw in the Sunday edition of the New York Times and an idea posted by Stowe Boyd. Historians know all about "old sleep" because journals recorded the pattern of life enjoyed by pre-industrial people. It differs markedly from the way we mark out our days from nights today. If I switch on my study before 5AM, at least one neighbour will ask me about my work-life balance sometime during the following week. Yet my morning clocks have always rang in the sunrise, perhaps as a remnant of my Iowa farmer genetic set.

Historian A. Roger Ekirch reports that "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 says in his book. "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." I have two biographies of Benjamin Franklin that speak of his “cold-air baths,” reading naked in a chair.

Flight surgeons used to discuss my ability to stay awake and at the flight controls for more than eight hours at a time. That was unnatural because most men need to relieve themselves at least once every four hours. I didn't drink coffee or carbonated beverages while flying international crossings, so my bladder held out for hours and hours. And with nothing to process except cardboard meat, I stayed awake as well.

The New York Times relates "an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, (when) men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between.

Historian Ekirch believes "the seamless sleep that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.”

I have a little one who interrupts all seamless sleeping patterns around our house. I don't mind that because I prefer my sleep in three hour packets. Between deep sleeps, I do stuff, perhaps commenting on Jaiku discussion threads. Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University who is one of the first to look at how other societies sleep, thinks "sleep and wakefulness are rarely seen as an either/or, but rather as two ends of a wide spectrum, and people are far more at peace with the fluidity in between." She points to the Efe in Zaire when revealing that if someone in that culture wakes up in the middle of the night and cannot sleep "may begin to hum, or go out and play the thumb piano," I listen to the PlaylistMix podcast when the late night hum reflex kicks in.

Worthman says, "In our culture, quality sleep is going into a dark room that is totally quiet, lying down, falling asleep, doing that for eight hours, and then getting up again." She calls it the "lie down and die" model. "But that is not how much of the world has slept in the past or even sleeps today."

I've long past the time when I let someone else decide whether it's time for me to sleep. From discipline cockpit routines, I know when the urge hits, you need to sleep. Except you shouldn't succumb to that urge within 30 minutes of landing. You stave off the tendency by rolling your eyes to the rest position prior to descending for landing. Sleep should support waking time but doesn't have to be relegated to night time routines that come baked into modern culture.

So even though I know my 0300 microblogging may unsettle some readers, I think it's my right to assert my independence from the cultural mores surrounding day-night sleep patterns. After all, who am I to impose my work routines on a two-month old who needs to eat every four hours?

A. Roger Ekirch -- "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" ISBN 978-0393329018
Stowe Boyd -- "Another Clue to Old Time"
Jon Mooallem -- "The Sleep Industrial Complex" in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, 18 November 2007.
Eluned Summers-Bremner -- Insomnia: A Cultural History ISBN 978-1861893178