While the past year has been dominated by the lead up to the November elections, a more personal focus has held my attention: getting enough sleep. In the past I’ve always been a sound sleeper, but in recent years (driven, perhaps, in no small part by my aging) (I’ve struggled to get even six hours of sleep a night. I’ve found myself going to bed earlier and earlier. I’m often dead on my feet by 7 or 8 p.m. and waking up at midnight or 1 p.m.
That sucks.
While I’m seeking medical advice from my doctors, I’m also looking at ways to better manage my sleep. One of those ways involves a pre-electric light phenomenon known as segmented sleep that involves going to bed, sleeping for three or four hours, waking for one or two hours and then going back to sleep for another three or four hours. I’m experimenting with this, using the time of night-waking to write using a pen, paper and and oil lamp.
My writing his way is different from what I’m doing just now, typing away on my laptop in my office and results in a different kind of product. Karen Emslie, exploring her own sleep patterns in Broken Sleep for Aeon, writes:
If I write in these small hours, black thoughts become clear and colourful. They form themselves into words and sentences, hook one to the next—like elephants walking trunk to tail. My brain works differently at this time of night; I can only write, I cannot edit. I can only add, I cannot take away. I need my day-brain for finesse. I will work for several hours and then go back to bed.
This may be, in part, one of the reasons that Jewish mystics, beginning with Isaac Luria in the 16th century, began the practice of rising at midnight to study. Our brains, between sleeps, may be still connected in some ways to the dreaming state. We may be better connected to our dreaming selves.
As Emslie notes, electric lights have changed civilization in ways that we may not yet understand. She continues:
Before electric lighting, night was associated with crime and fear – people stayed inside and went early to bed. The time of their first sleep varied with season and social class, but usually commenced a couple of hours after dusk and lasted for three or four hours until, in the middle of the night, people naturally woke up. Prior to electric lighting, wealthier households often had other forms of artificial light – for instance, gas lamps – and in turn went to bed later. Interestingly, Ekirch found less reference to segmented sleep in personal papers from such households.
For those who indulged, however, night-waking was used for activities such as reading, praying and writing, untangling dreams, talking to sleeping partners or making love. As Ekirch points out, after a hard day of labouring, people were often too tired for amorous activities at ‘first’ bedtime (which might strike a chord with many busy people today) but, when they woke in the night, our ancestors were refreshed and ready for action. After various nocturnal activities, people became drowsy again and slipped into their second sleep cycle (also for three or four hours) before rising to a new day. We too can imagine, for example, going to bed at 9pm on a winter night, waking at midnight, reading and chatting until around 2am, then sleeping again until 6am.
That is a pattern I would like to emulate. One of my personal heroes did so.
The third US president Thomas Jefferson, for example, read books on moral philosophy before bed so that he could ‘ruminate’ over them between his two sleeps. The 17th-century English poet Francis Quarles [After much searching, I have failed to turn up the poem from which this quote purports to come] rated darkness alongside silence as an aid to internal reflection: Let the end of thy first sleep raise thee from thy repose: then hath thy body the best temper, then hath thy soule the least incumbrance; then no noise shall disturbe thine ear; no object shall divert thine eye.
I understand what Quarles writes there. In one of my (yet unpublished) books written 20 years ago, my main character liked to play the cello during the small hours of the night in the catacombs of a a 20th century American city for just those reasons. (I confess that this was a time when I was reading a lot of Anne Rice.) Mason Currey’s work also attracted Emslie:
In Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (2013), Mason Currey describes the routines of famous writers and artists, many of whom are early risers, and several segmented sleepers. Currey found that many hit on the pattern of segmented sleep by accident. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, would wake around 4am, unable to fall back to sleep—so he would work for three or four hours, then take a nap. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Knut Hamsun would often wake after sleeping for a couple of hours. So he kept a pencil and paper by his bed, and would, he said: ‘start writing immediately in the dark if I feel something is streaming through me.’ The psychologist B F Skinner kept a clipboard, paper and pencil by his bed to work during periods of night wakefulness, and the author Marilynne Robinson regularly woke to read or write during what she called her ‘benevolent insomnia’.
And I have my pen, my paper and my oil lamp so that I might not be disannulled of [my] first sleep, and cheated of [my] dreams and fantasies.
