To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

My sleep habits were once described by a friend of mine as being "Victorian."

I looked up "Victorian sleep pattern," but could find nothing. 

Now comes Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article about "sleep disorders" called Up All Night.  She writes that Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, spent four years interviewing folks about sleep research and discovered that the modern practice of "consolidated sleep" lasting a single span of 7-9 hours is very much a recent phenomenon.
 

Until a century and a half or so ago, Wolf-Meyer observes, ‘Americans, like other people around the world, used to sleep in an unconsolidated fashion, that is, in two or more periods throughout the day.’ They went to bed not long after the sun went down. Four or five hours later, they woke from their ‘first sleep’ and rattled around—praying, chatting, smoking, or making love. (Benjamin Franklin reportedly liked to spend this time reading naked in a chair.) Eventually, they went back to bed for their ‘second sleep.’

This is how I do it, with a lot of research and /or blogging done in between my two shifts of sleeping which, truth be told sometimes ends up being just one, and sometimes none. 

Kolbert writes: 

Wolf-Meyer blames capitalism in general and American capitalism in particular for transforming once perfectly ordinary behavior into conduct worthy of medication. ‘The consolidated model of sleep is predicated upon the solidification of other institutional times in American society, foremost among them work time,’ he writes. It is ‘largely the by-product of the industrial workday, which began as a dawn-to-dusk twelve-to-sixteen hour stretch and shrank to an eight-hour period only at the turn of the twentieth century.’ So many people have trouble getting enough sleep between eleven at night and seven in the morning because sleeping from eleven to seven isn’t what people were designed to do.”

So I am a Victorian, and also a victim of modern capitalism. I have always suspected as much.
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