The Weirdest Things We Learned This Week: Two Sleeps Are Better Than One
27th June 2019
For the past few months, I’ve been waking up at nearly the exact same time every night: 2 a.m. Conversing with friends, I learned that plenty of people have experienced this same issue. But when I turned to the medical literature, I found something even more bizarre: Apparently, prior to the 18th Century, us humans used to split our night’s rest into two phases. One started shortly after dusk and ended at midnight, and we followed it with another that began at 2 a.m. and ended just after daybreak.
If you are following the timing, that left about two hours free in the middle of the night. By analyzing books, medical and court documents, and other texts from the time, historians have surmised that people indeed slept in two phases, and spent the middle bit of the night essentially having a blast. They socialized, read, drank, and some even worked. At least some scholars said it was the ideal time to have sex if you wanted to conceive. It seemed like a great time to be alive—and awake.
My experience has been that 2:00 a.m. is just about the time the data warehouse load breaks and somebody from the NOC calls you to fix it. Do production sjupport for ten years and, yes, you will wake up at 2:00 a.m. whether you need it or not.