Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. I used to fret about it, but ever since reading about first sleep and second sleep, I sort of roll with it. Sometimes I go back to sleep, but usually I just go ahead and get up. Last night was one of those and resulted in most of a new chapter. I went back to sleep when I got drowsy and woke up at a reasonably normal time.
I find that I enjoy the quiet of the wee hours. This morning/middle of the night, the snow was coming down thick and heavy outside. It was one of those snows where it looked like someone was shaking a feather pillow out the window. Being inside, all cozy with some fiction was quite nice.
It’s different from insomnia, where you wake up tired. This is waking up, being alert, and getting up even though it’s dark out.
Do you do ever practice segmented sleep?
It happens to me a lot recently. I also tend not to fight it — I’ll read or plot. It helps that generally speaking I get to make my own schedule, so I don’t have to worry about being late to work.
True, which is one of the joys of being a freelancer.
I’ve wondered if the first sleep/second sleep thing is a product of aging or just that I’ve read an article about it and so have a tidy box to put the experience of middle-of-the-night wakefullness into.
I do it more now that I am older (I also seem to need less sleep). I will admit that like you, since I heard it was an actual thing, I tend to stress about it less. If it was good enough for Ben Franklin, etc.
I had an odd class schedule for a couple of semesters that led to me practicing a 4 asleep – 4 awake – 4 asleep – 12 awake cycle. It was weird, to say the least.
Wow. That IS strange. Did you feel tired during it?
It took a couple of weeks to get used to. I think that would have gone faster if I hadn’t taken weekends off of the schedule, actually. But once I was in the swing of it… Well, it was odd. I didn’t feel tired, but I did feel like the days were passing me by much more quickly. Seems like four hours is enough to trigger the “it’s a new day” reaction rather than the “that was a nap” reaction, so I was constantly forgetting which day it was. Small price to pay for not having to go to bed at 8pm every night, though.
Back in college, when I had a more flexible schedule, I would simply sleep when I was tired, and I loved it. I figure sleep is like food, and when left to its own devices the body knows full well how much it needs.
Someday, when I’m not working two jobs to make ends meet, I hope to do that again.
Yeah, I’m incredibly lucky to work as a freelancer.
I often have segmented sleep patterns when I travel internationally. This summer, when Ginny and I were in Finland for two weeks, I settled into one after the jet lag wore off.
My sleep patterns were unpredictable for many years, but now that my life has settled down I’m on a reasonable (for me) schedule.
When I read Ekirch’s original article (the first to look at this historically), it ruined so many scenes from fantasy novels for me. I keep thinking in the back of my mind that it’s not accurate for the heros to sleep all in one go. I can’t shake that idea.
I like to teach with the article, because it’s a great example of different kinds of primary sources. If you haven’t read it already, it’s worth reading how people spent the intervals between first and second sleep:
A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 343-386.
It’s scary to think that industrial society changed the way we slept for millennia.
Just to check – Does this article cover societies around the world, or just English/European society?
I have always encouraged my children to follow their own sleep cycles, and matched mine to fit, and both of them, from just several weeks old had an eight-to-ten-hour period where they WANTED to be asleep. Of course as infants they woke several times in that stretch, but they did not wake rested, they woke fussy and wanted to be put back to sleep.
I personally have always needed ten consecutive hours of sleep to feel rested. So I don’t know if divided sleep is the “right answer” any more than straight-through sleep is.
This is why I love university libraries.
Segmented sleep is how I’ve been able to write my past two novels. Hoping for a good dose of this gift to finish my third novel.
The description you shared is spot on. You wake up as if the Muse is near your bed, beckoning you to come create. At this time of night, there truly is something magical, while the majority of the world around you sleeps, you are busy creating a new world.
Thanks for the post. Fun to hear your account of how sleep is affected in order to capture a story.
I do a bit of segmented sleep, in that I frequently wake up in the middle of the night. But I don’t usually stay awake long enough to do anything productive.
Regarding weird sleep patterns – on US nuclear submarines, they stand 6-hour watches. This leads to everybody running an 18-hour “day” 6 hours sleep, 6 on watch, 6 for eating / exercise / other personal activities. After a while, they have to look at their watches to see what day it is.
Not exactly — I sometimes accidentally wake up earlier than I meant to, putter for an hour or so, and then, if it’s my day off, go back to sleep, but it’s rarely mindful activity.
The weirdest sleep cycle I ever had was during one summer in grad school when I didn’t have any classes, just thesis research. It was mainly math and computer programming, so it didn’t matter what time I did it — no library hours or other constraints. I gradually drifted into a pattern of staying up for a full 24 hours, then sleeping for 12 hours. So I was still getting an average 2:1 proportion of waking hours to sleep, but it was stretched out. This lasted for a couple of months, and seemed to do no harm. When classes started up again in the fall, I switched back to waking 16 and sleeping 8 again, and after a few days of setting my alarm, it felt natural again.