The Eight-Hour Sleep Session Is Not What You Need
12th November 2015
The historian A. Roger Ekirch has uncovered a pattern of references to “first sleep” and “second sleep,” or “morning sleep,” in sources from Homer and Plutarch to John Locke. Until the spread of artificial light in the 18th and 19th centuries, it turns out, our ancestors slept in two shifts of roughly four hours each, with a period of wakefulness in between. That interval was a peaceful time, a time for contemplation and reflection and maybe copulation. “Usually, people would retire between 9 and 10 o’clock only to stir past midnight to smoke a pipe, brew a tub of ale or even converse with a neighbor,” Ekirch wrote. “Others remained in bed to pray or make love.”
Or – dare I say it? – surf the web.
(Note the obligatory dig at ‘capitalism’ in the last paragraph — this article is in Slate, after all.)