Meanwhile, while we wait for KC to burn her house down with 19th century lamps, i read this interesting article about the night and how living in the dark back in the day wasn't all bad. Prior to the lighted age, people had 2 sleeps every night, first sleep till midnight when they got up for a bit before going back to bed for remainder of the night. Turns out that is the natural sleep pattern for humans so if you have sleeping issues, it could be related to our ancient natural sleep pattern being interrupted by the modern world.
"Once there, Ekirch relates in perhaps his most fascinating revelation, pre-industrial man slept a segmented sleep. He has found more than 500 references, from Homer onwards, to a "first sleep" that lasted until maybe midnight, and was followed by "second sleep". In between the two, people routinely got up, peed, smoked, read, chatted, had friends round, or simply reflected on the events of the previous day – and on their dreams. (Plenty also had sex, by all accounts far more satisfactorily than at the end of a hard day's labouring. Couples who copulated "after the first sleep", wrote a 16th-century French doctor, "have more enjoyment, and do it better".)
Experiments by Dr Thomas Wehr at America's National Institute of Mental Health appear to bear out the theory that this two-part slumber is man's natural sleeping pattern: a group of young male volunteers deprived of light at night for weeks at a time rapidly fell into the segmented sleep routine described in so many of Ekirch's documentary sources. It could even be, Wehr has theorised, that many of today's common sleeping disorders are essentially the result of our older, primal habits "breaking through into today's artificial world".
Of all this have we been robbed by the onward march of industrial lighting. (By we, of course, I mean most people in the developed world. It's worth remembering that there are still large parts of the globe where it's still up at sunrise, and to bed pretty soon after sundown.)
In the west, the ongoing elimination of the night through the 19th and 20th centuries may have performed miracles for economic activity, encouraging the development of an entire nocturnal sector of clubs, bars, restaurants, even supermarkets now open 24/7, not to mention all-night TV. But in some ways, argues Ekirch, rather than making night-time more accessible, we are actually risking its gradual extinction.
City-dwellers, and many others, have now all but lost their view of the heavens, a source of awe and wonder since the beginning of time. And since affordable artificial lighting now allows all of us to go to bed so much later, consolidating our sleep into one more or less continuous spell, our dreamlife has been disrupted and our understanding of ourselves impaired. "With darkness diminished," he says, "the opportunities for privacy and reflection are lessened." Which is perhaps not entirely a good thing. So thanks, William Murdoch."
