Waking in the Wee Hours
January 31st, 2009
Samual Awaking Eli, George de la Tour
2:48 am. For no apparent reason, we’ve awakened. “Four more hours,” we think, then toss to our other side. If lucky, sleep overtakes us for the rest of the night. If not, we lay there fretting about the loss of sleep, thus cheating ourselves – not of sleep, but of the wee hours.
Segmented sleep may be more natural to us than a continuous eight hours. In his book At Day’s Close, historian A. Roger Ekirch writes, “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.”
Anthropologist Carol Worthman studied the sleep patterns of non-Western populations where artificial light is minimal, if not absent all together. From the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Africa to the Swat Pathan herders in Pakistan, Dr. Worthman documented a pattern of communal sleep in which individuals drifted in and out of sleep throughout the night. Other anthropologists have found that in some African villages, Tiv, Chagga, and G/wi, for example, life after midnight is surprisingly lively with newly roused adults and children.
Could it be that there was an evolutionary advantage to segmented sleep? Life in the open savannas was brimming with nocturnal predators. Periods of nightly awakening may have been crucial to our survival.
The Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau
Dr. Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health conducted a landmark experiment in which he placed a group of normal volunteers in 14-hour dark periods each day for a month. As part of the experiment, he let the subjects sleep as much and as long as they wanted.
By the fourth week, subjects averaged 3-5 hours of solid sleep, followed by an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness. Then, they returned to sleep for another 3-5 hour sleep period. Such a pattern of interrupted sleep has been observed in other wild animals.
What did our pre-modern european relatives do during that time of our first awakening, or as some would call it, the watch? First of all, few of us fretted. We viewed that time as natural to our nocturnal stirrings. We’d smoke tobacco. Tend a fire. Pray. Study. Talk with our bedmate. Copulate. Some of us would leave our beds; some would not. Benjamin Franklin would take “cold air baths” or sit naked in his chamber and read, or write.
Godfried Schlalcken (1643-1706)
It was a time for magic, for mischief, for light domestic work, or for reflection. This time “twixt sleepe and wake” is semi-conscious. As Nathaniel Hawthorn insisted in The Haunted Mind, it was a time “where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly present.” In 1692, the Hammersmith minister John Wade complained it was a time of “unsettled independent thoughts,” “vain unprofitable musing,” and “devising mischief.”
Dr. Wehr likens this intermittent period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness with a physiology all its own. In the wee hours, silence is magnified, our thoughts concoct schemes and plans, we pull together far reaching connections, and our minds seem as if primed for self- reflection.
Maria Magdalena, George de la Tour
Next time you awaken in those wee hours – slip out of bed, wander the darkness of your house, sit in your favorite chair, perhaps light a candle, or brew a cup of tea. Take out that notebook and draw, or write in your journal. Soak in the sensibility of that forgotten segment of time lost to our age of time schedules, computer screens, i-phones, 24-hour cable news, and artificial light. Tell yourself that it’s not a time of lost sleep, but merely the night’s first awakening.
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Read: Ekirch, A. Roger, At Day’s Close. W.W. Norton & Co. 2005.