I woke up at around 8:00 am and made breakfast for my mother. What about me? No, I didn't want anything right then.
And that's all I can remember. At 9:30 pm I realized something seemed off kilter, and I went to check on my mother. She was sitting in her easy chair reading. When she saw me, she decided it was bedtime. ???? Well, OK. I was puzzled over how dark it was.
I saw from the dishes that I had made her tomato soup for dinner. How mysterious.
Now I was hungry, and I found a can of navy beans and heated them in the microwave. That was nice.
I just don't know what I did today. Weird.
In preindustrial times, Europeans typically had two blocks of sleep, each three to four hours in length, joined by an hour or more of wakefulness in the dark. There was the first sleep, often called the “dead sleep,” followed by the second, or “morning sleep.” If it was given any name, the intervening period was usually referred to as “the watch.” Reams of evidence attest to this mysterious rhythm, much of it from diaries and official documents. The eighteenth-century diarist Robert Sanderson used to sit and smoke a pipe when kicked out of his “first sleepe” by a barking dog, and students needing to work by night were advised by a Bath doctor to do so after the first sleep, when they would be “in some measure refreshed”.
ReplyDeleteThis is the first I've heard of this.
DeleteIn Mexico people work in the cool of the night and take an afternoon siesta when it's hot.
DeleteI'm going to have to move to Mexico.
Deletehttps://tedium.co/2020/10/30/segmented-sleep-history/
ReplyDelete