The Forgotten Medieval Habit of ‘Two Sleeps’
23rd January 2022
And far from being a peculiarity of the Middle Ages, Ekirch began to suspect that the method had been the dominant way of sleeping for millennia – an ancient default that we inherited from our prehistoric ancestors. The first record Ekirch found was from the 8th Century BC, in the 12,109-line Greek epic The Odyssey, while the last hints of its existence dated to the early 20th Century, before it somehow slipped into oblivion.
How did it work? Why did people do it? And how could something that was once so completely normal, have been forgotten so completely?
Now that I’m retired I find myself doing this — I’ll go to sleep at 10:00, what I think of as my Normal Bed Time, and wake up around 1:00 or 2:00 and have a hard time getting back to sleep. At first I put it down to a habit formed from over twenty years of production support — if a data warehouse load is going to break, it will do so around 2:30 a.m. — but maybe there’s something else going on. Hm….