Confessions of a polyphasic sleeper

I confess that I am a biphasic and often a polyphasic sleeper. I have never really tried to sleep for six or more hours at a stretch, the widely recommended mode in our predominantly monophasic sleeping culture. Typically, I sleep (or at least lie dormant) for two distinct periods of 3-4 hours and two hours in a 24-hour cycle, sometimes adding a short lie-down of 30-60 minutes. The shorter sleep phase may be an afternoon or evening nap before a long overnight period of reading and study, to be followed by 3-4 hours in bed starting around dawn.

Now I am at home much of the time, with a tolerant family and only a few external deadlines, I sleep, wake and dream almost whenever I feel like it and the hours are completely unpredictable. I do not suffer insomnia because I don't try to sleep unless I feel like it. Since my school days, I have almost never needed an alarm clock or a wake-up call. Traveling between time zones did not bother me in the pre-pandemic era when I did that every week. In any time zone, I am nearly always awake between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., one of my favorite hours. I am told this is the time, actuarially, when more people die and more are born than in any other hour in the cycle of 24.

    When resting in bed, I spend as much time as possible in a half-sleep or half-wake state, in the hypnagogic zone (approaching sleep) or the hypnopompic zone (after sleep). This liminal state of consciousness is immensely fertile. It presents spontaneous images that can be the portals for lucid dream adventures. It opens psychic perception and is a place of encounter with inner guides. It is a state in which we hatch new ideas and creative connections. My approach to sleep and dreaming may seem exotic to many in a society that is suffering serious dream deprivation and in general does not reward its members for recalling and sharing dreams. However my habits would be recognized and approved by most of our ancestors, cross-culturally.

    For hundreds of thousands of years, humans thought that what the pushers of sleep meds promise – an uninterrupted night of seven or eight hours’ sleep – was an unnatural and undesirable thing. Experiments by a team led by Dr Thomas Wehr at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda have supplied compelling evidence of how our technology has ripped us from our natural cycle. Deprived of artificial lighting for several weeks, the typical subject evolved the following pattern: lying awake in bed for an hour or two, then four hours sleep, then 2-3 hours of “non-anxious wakefulness” followed by a second sleep before waking for the day's activities.

     One of the most exciting findings in Wehr’s study involved the endocrinology of the night watch. The interval between first sleep and second sleep is characterized by elevated levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone best-known for helping hens to brood contentedly above their eggs for long periods. Wehr concluded that the night watch can produce benign states of altered consciousness not unlike meditation. [1} Wehr and his team put their subjects on the Paleolithic plan, without alternatives to electrical light such as candles or fire or oil lamps. The Paleolithic two-sleeps cycle wasn’t only a stone age phenomenon; it was characteristic of how people spent their nights until gas lighting and then electricity became widespread. A seventeenth century Scottish legal deposition describes a weaver as “haveing gotten his first sleip and awaiking furth thairof.”

    Sleep historian Roger Ekirch says that “until the modern era, up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness midway through the night interrupted the rest of most Western Europeans” - and presumably most other people - so that “consolidated sleep, such as we today experience, is unnatural.” [2] This may help to explain the extent to which so many  in our urbanized society are out of nature and out of touch with dreaming.

     “Segmented sleep” was the norm for our ancestors until quite recently, as it remains for some indigenous peoples today. Like Virgil and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Tiv of central Nigeria speak of “first sleep” and “second sleep”. They wake at any time during the night and will talk to anyone in the hut who is also awake - often about their dreams.[3] Most interesting, the state “twixt sleepe and wake” that the French called dorveille was widely regarded as an excellent time to birth new ideas. In 1769, the artful London tradesman Christopher Pinchbeck advertised a device called a “Nocturhnal Remembrancer”, a parchment tablet inside a box with a slit to guide the writing hand in the dark to enable “philosophers, statesmen, poets, divines and every person of genius, business or reflection” to secure the “flights and thoughts which so frequently occur in the course of a meditating, wakeful night.”

    Biphasic or polyphasic sleep might help us to recover the "perceptual diversity" that anthropologist and economic development specialist Tara Lumpkin observes is woefully lacking in contemporary mainstream Western cultures. "When a culture restrains perceptual diversity, that same culture reduces human adapatibility, which, in turn, leads to human beings living unsustainably...Coming from developed Western cultures, which highly value monophasic consciousness and the scientific method, we may not even be aware of what we are losing. It is altered states of consciousness, which speak through symbols and intuition such as dreaming, imagining and meditating, that often allow us to grasp the whole in a way that the scientific method can never provide."[4]

    Modern culture, through the suppression of natural circadian cycles and a disregard of dreaming, may have fulfilled for many Thomas Middleton's complaint that we have rendered ourselves “disanulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies.” [5]
     Perhaps you, too, will find it helpful to wake up to the fact that it's okay to be awake in the middle of the night. While sleep deprivation can be a serious problem, we do better when we stop confusing being awake in the middle of the night with "insomnia" and learn to have fun when the rest of the world is sleeping (and thinks we should be asleep). And then, whenever possible, plunge back into dreaming.


References

1. Nathalie Angier, "Modern Life Suppresses Ancient Body Rhythms", New York Times, March 14, 1995.
2. A. Roger Ekirch, "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles",American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001) pp. 343-386.
3. Paul Bohannon, "Concepts of Time among the Tiv of Nigeria", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, no. 9 (Autumn, 1953) p. 253.
4, Tara W. Lumpkin, "Perceptual Diversity: Is Polyphasic Consciousness Necessary for Global Survival?" Anthropology of Consciousness vol.12 nos. 1-2 (2002) pp. 37-70.
5. Thomas Middleton, "The Black Book", in The Works of Thomas Middleton ed. A.H. Bullen (New York: AMS Press, 1964).

Journal drawing: "Swinging Across the River" (c) Robert Moss