Two Sleeps by Dr Elizabeth
McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD
April 2012
I have always woken up
at 3am, potted around, read, wrote, even watered the garden, and then returned
to bed for my second sleep. For many years I thought this was abnormal and
worried about it, and even consulted doctors about it, until I realized that this
was, what I thought, my sleeping pattern and all I needed to do was simply
enjoy it. Research has come to light and now I discover that segmented sleep
was the usual practice for everyone until the mid-19th century.
During the 19th
century, when medical and psychiatric concerns started to dominate ordinary
thinking, a so-called condition was signposted: sleep maintenance insomnia!
Suddenly the age old practice of two sleeps was viewed as a disorder and the
idea that humans ought to stay asleep for eight solid hours was established. If we couldn’t achieve eight hours of
sleeping in bed we were made to feel anxious and depressed or just plain
neurotic. How good it is to realize that segmented sleep is how we humans have
enjoyed sleep since time immemorial.
Some very interesting
sleep research was done in the early 1990s by a psychiatrist by the name of Thomas Wehr, research that
was not actively accepted by doctors and the general population, until now.
Wehr conducted an experiment whereby human subjects were plunged into darkness
for 14 hours every day for a month. Though the subjects took awhile to settle
into some kind of sleeping routine, a distinct pattern was noted to emerge
whereby they slept for four hours, woke up for one or two hours, and then slept
again for four hours. Interesting, eh.
In 2001, Roger Ekirch,
an historian, published a paper drawn from 16 years of research that noted an
abundance of evidence that humans used to have two sleeps in the course of a
night. Drawing on diary entries,
court records, medical books and literature, Ekirch traced the evidence
through over 500 references from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account
of modern Nigerian tribes.
What did people do
between the first sleep and the second? Letters were written, sex was had (it
being advised that this period was more healthful for the purpose of love
making than going to bed tired after a hard day’s work and trying to perform
then), tea was prepared and drunk, prayers were said; people even went visiting
and attended concerts. There is an elegance in this idea. I like it. My nightly
wakings are solitary affairs.
This re-emergence of
an interest in the two sleeps (and it was mentioned recently in a comedy show
on television) comes at a time when the fifth edition of the manual of
psychiatric disorder known as the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders) is about to come out. This manual is used in the diagnosis of
people with psychological and psychosocial disorders. A considerable amount of
disquiet is being expressed by psychologists, particularly, and some
psychiatrists at the number of so-called conditions that have been
invented/identified, compared to the earlier fourth edition. I find this rather
interesting, particularly as such things as realizing what a normal sleep
pattern looks like as opposed to identifying an abnormality is also being
elaborated in the mental health community. What other normal patterns have now
“achieved” the status of abnormality, just by the process of someone’s
determination that it be so? And what so called abnormality may, further down
the track, be once more recognized as merely part of the continuum of normal
human existence?
Certainly the DSM is a
valuable book and certainly severe and debilitating psychological and
psychosocial disorders exist (they are not all figments of a collection of
experts’ minds), but caution needs to be brought to bear in the diagnosis of
disorder. It would be also really
useful if normal variation of human experience was highlighted by the
general community as normal and not issues for further anxiety and angst. Much human experience has been
commodified, as is seen in the rise in use of medications and medical
diagnoses. What is not recognized enough, is the value of conversation and
sharing of human experience with a trained listener (this is part of my job),
someone who does not turn what is said into yet another label, another
diagnosis. Such a therapeutic conversation offers respite and challenge for
reclaiming what is usual for each of us, but what we have come to feel is not
normal and cause for denial, depression or anxiety.
Sleep is a respite,
and between the two sleeps of a night we have more healing time, a time to
delight in silence, shared or alone. I quite like the idea of going to see a
friend and drinking tea at 3 am in the morning, but perhaps society isn’t ready
for that, yet.
Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell
Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell
