mistymacallister
Have you heard of FIRST SLEEP and SECOND SLEEP? Neither have I until now.
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Do you wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep? I do. Sometimes I get very anxious because I have to get enough sleep or I’ll be nonproductive all day. Other times if I can’t go back to sleep, I get out of bed and do something else, like run a bath and read in the tub. Well, guess what? Without knowing it, I was doing something that long-ago people did. When there was no nightlife, people went to sleep early. No light, no nightlife, and most people couldn’t afford candles, so as soon as it got dark they went to sleep. They slept for four hours - that was called FIRST SLEEP - and then they woke up and did stuff. Among the things they did: they smoked - normal - they read - if they had candles or books - they wrote - if, again, they had candles - they visited their neighbors - yep! that’s what I read; that’s kind of odd, isn’t it? - they went to the toilet. I thought that was funny when I read it but actually that was an activity that took a long time, if you think about it. Where were their toilets? They had no plumbing so the toilets had to be somewhere outside. My grandmother in Romania had no indoor toilet, and when I spent my summers at her place I had to walk across a small field. It was quite a walk, but the toilet had to be away from the house because it was basically just a hole in the ground. So, if the long-ago people who walk up after the first sleep, which would have been around midnight, and had to go to the toilet and their toilet was outside across a small field, that counts as a physical exercise in the middle of the night. And when they felt sleepy, 1-2 hours later, they would go to bed for the second sleep.
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So sleeping 8 hours straight isn’t something people have always done. The concept of nightlife became a thing when they introduced streets lights, circa 1660, which made people comfortable about staying out after dark, and eventually sleep patterns changed.
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I’m saying all this just in case you read #charlesdickens and come across the term FIRST SLEEP or SECOND SLEEP and you don’t know what it means. Now you know.
#mistymacallister
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