mossdreams.com
FEATURES & ESSAYS
 

Rene Magritte, The Empire of Light II

The Night Watch

 "All men sleep by intervals", said John Locke (Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This, alas, is not the understanding of our current society, with its sleep meds and artificial lighting, fighting back the fertile dark.

     Across most of history it was not only Benedictines (obliged by their order to rise after midnight to recite psalms and pray) who have been in the habit of rising from a "first sleep." A seventeenth century Scottish legal deposition that describes a weaver as “haveing gotten his first sleip and awaiking furth thairof.” It seems that “segmented sleep” was the norm for our pre-industrial ancestors, as for some indigenous peoples today. Like Virgil and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Tiv of central Nigeria speak of "first sleep" and "second sleep". They wake at any time during the night and will talk to anyone in the hut who is also awake - often about their dreams.

    Sleep historian Roger Ekirch says that “until the modern era, up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness midway through the night interrupted the rest of most Western Europeans” - and presumably most other people - so that “consolidated sleep, such as we today experience, is unnatural.” I think this is exactly right, and may help to explain the extent to which so many of us in our urbanized society are out of nature and out of touch with dreaming.

     Experiments by Dr Thomas Wehr's team at National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda have supplied compelling evidence of how our technology has ripped us from our natural cycle. Deprived of artificial lighting for several weeks, the typical subject evolved the following pattern: lying awake in bed for an hour or two, then four hours sleep, then 2-3 hours of "non-anxious wakefulness" followed by a second sleep before waking for the day's activities. This was the paleolithic plan rather than (say) a seventeenth century one, since candles and fires and other forms of pre-industrial lighting were also missing. One of the most exciting findings in Wehr's study involves the endocrinology of the night watch. The interval between first sleep and second sleep is characterized by elevated levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone best-known for helping hens to brood contentedly above their eggs for long periods. Wehr concluded that the night watch can produce benign states of altered consciousness not unlike meditation.   

      In Ekirch’s beautifully written book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, we learn how the virtues of the night watch were appreciated by pre-industrial physicians. Dr. Tobias Venner counseled, in Georgian Bath, that students who needed to work at night should do so “after their first sleep”, when they would be “in some measure refreshed.” Sixteenth century French physician Laurent Joubert judged that this was the best time for intercourse, at least for the laboring classes. Most interesting, the state "twixt sleepe and wake" that the French called dorveille was widely regarded as an excellent time to birth new ideas. In 1769, the artful London tradesman Christopher Pinchbeck advertised a device called a “Nocturnal Remembrancer”, a parchment tablet inside a box with a slit to guide the writing hand in the dark to enable “philosophers, statesmen, poets, divines and every person of genius, business or reflection” to secure the “flights and thoughts which so frequently occur in the course of a meditating, wakeful night.”

     It is possible that in our modern culture, through our suppression of ancient and natural circadian cycles, we have rendered ourselves “disanulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies.” (Thomas Middleton, “The Black Book”)

A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. Norton. 447 pages. Paperback $16.95. Also in hardcover