For years, I thought I was weird. You see, I go to bed between 9 and 10 o’clock in the evening, wake up in the middle of the night (actually the early morning – between 1 and 2 am), I am wide awake till roughly 4 am, and then I go back to bed and get up around 7 am. In my early morning awake interval, I have a cup of coffee, I sometimes write a post for my blog, I may catch up on reading and replying to emails, and sometimes I just sit and have a good long think; all of these activities are aided by the silence and the calm at that hour. I have found the coffee doesn’t “keep me up;” when 4 o’clock rolls around, I’m asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. And all of this is done without alarms – it is a “built-in” feature for me, it’s just how I am.

During my working years, the early morning hours became not only my favorite time of day but my most productive. When I was coding, most of the programming for my OpsPro software was done between 2 and 4 in the morning, and when I moved into facilities and logistics, it was very useful to be up at those hours because much of my portfolio concerned our European operations in England and Italy, 8 and 9 hours ahead of Los Angeles respectively. But when I retired, I was concerned enough to start erroneously calling it insomnia and ask my doctor to give me something for it (sleeping pills). He agreed to give me a scrip based on the idea that because I’m relatively sedentary all day (on account of not being able to walk) I must not be getting tired and therefore needing much sleep.

But the pills, while they did put me to sleep and keep me asleep till roughly 7 the next morning, left me feeling groggy and fuzzy the following day. I thought sleep was supposed to be restorative and rejuvenating, so I stopped taking the pills and started reading everything I could find about sleep, and was amazed to find there’s nothing weird about me at all, at least in this regard!

Without knowing it and without knowing it had a name, I discovered I am a biphasic sleeper. This means that rather than one continuous period of sleep lasting from the night before till the morning after, I have two, with an awake interval between them. What’s more, when I came across Roger Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, researching the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the advent of electric lighting on things like work, superstition, crime, and even religion, I became aware of medieval references he discovered to something called a “first sleep.” A first sleep implies a second sleep – a night divided into two halves.

First sleeps are mentioned in one of the most famous works of medieval literature, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (~1400), and are to be found in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (1570) – a book some consider to be the first novel ever written – a Protestant satire on Catholicism whose plot features a man who learns to understand the language of a group of terrifying supernatural cats, one of whom, Mouse-slayer, is on trial for promiscuity. But biphasic sleep was not unique to England, it was widely practiced throughout the preindustrial world. Ekirch found that in France the initial sleep was the premier somme, while in Italy it was primo sonno. And the practice of twice-sleeping wasn’t limited to the Middle Ages. Ekirch began to suspect that the method had been around much longer; the first record he found was from the 8th Century BCE, in Homer’s Greek epic The Odyssey! He found references to the system of sleeping twice throughout the classical era, which suggests that it was already common by then, including from the Greek biographer Plutarch (1st century CE), the Greek traveler Pausanias (2nd century CE), the Roman historian Titus Livius (better known as Livy) in the first century CE and the Roman poet Virgil in the first century BCE.

But when Ekirch stumbled on a New York Times article from 1995 about a sleep experiment conducted by Thomas Wehr, a sleep scientist from the National Institute of Mental Health, in 1992, he had science to show twice-sleeping was not just a personal habit or a quirk but there was something evolutionary about it becoming less common – more plainly, that artificial light changed our way of sleeping.

The experiment involved 15 men. After observing their normal sleeping patterns over the course of several nights, they were deprived of artificial illumination at night to shorten their hours of daylight (meaning “non-dark” hours, whether because of illumination by the sun or another source such as a lightbulb) from the usual 16 hours to just 10. During this phase of the experiment, if it was not daylight, they were confined to a room with no lights or windows, just blackness; they weren’t allowed to play music, exercise, or otherwise occupy themselves. They could, however, sleep if they wanted to.

The initial observations at the start of the experiment found that all 15 men slept in one continuous period that lasted from the late evening until the morning, called a monophasic sleep pattern. After four weeks of the 10-hour days, their sleeping patterns had been transformed – they no longer slept in one stretch, but rather in two halves roughly the same length, and in the middle was a one-to-three-hour period in which they were awake; more importantly, measurements taken of the sleep hormone melatonin in all 15 men showed that their circadian rhythms had adjusted too, so their sleep was altered at a biological level. You could say that Wehr had created an experimental “world” in which the Industrial Revolution (and the lightbulb) never happened, and humans devolved back to a biphasic sleep pattern!

Explanations of why “extended daylight” by artificial means (lightbulbs) would affect our sleep are beyond my purposes here, but Ekirch’s book contains some fascinating descriptions of what a night of sleep used to entail in the preindustrial 17th century, including the commonplace practice of “communal sleeping” – so you might find yourself alongside family members, friends, servants and, if you were traveling, total strangers, not to mention bedbugs, fleas, and lice. A couple of hours after retiring for the night, people would begin rousing from their initial slumber. The night-time wakefulness usually lasted from around 11:00 pm to about 1:00 am, depending on what time people had first gone to bed; it was not initiated by noise or other disturbances in the night, nor was an alarm set (the first alarm clocks that we would recognize as such weren’t invented until 1787, by an American man named Levi Hutchins who needed to wake up on time to sell clocks – really, you can’t make this stuff up!). Instead, the waking happened entirely naturally, and the period of the night-time wakefulness was called “the watch.” The historical records and references he uncovered “describe how people did just about anything and everything after they awakened from their first sleep,” according to Ekirch.

The question on your mind is probably ‘what does Gordon make of all of this?’ Well, I can tell you that this morning I rose at 1:45 am. I put some coffee on – The Original Donut Shop® Coffee, Regular (Medium Roast), fired up my laptop, and set about writing this post.

I still have a stash of my prescribed sleeping pills (Temazepam) for those nights when my brain is firing on all cylinders and I just can’t get to sleep initially, but I have embraced “the watch” and most nights I actually look forward to it. Sometimes, if I turn my lights on in these wee small hours, the overnight caregiver where I live will stop in to check on me to see if I’m okay, because apparently it’s weird to be up at 2 am. I am many things, but as I have demonstrated above I am not weird.