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

Where Too Much Sleep Is Perilous for the Soul

Heavy, uninterrupted sleep is dangerous, reports Roberto Romero Ribeiro, a Brazilian ethnographer who lived with the Maxicali (aka Tikmũ’ũn) of Minas Gerais. [1] In common with most if not all indigenous peoples, the Maxicali believe that in dreams the soul (koxuk) goes wandering. It can fall into bad company, or get lost, or even be taken captive. You don’t want to wake a sleeper because the soul may still be out there and could have a hard time getting back.
     On the other hand, you don't want to sleep like white folks who go out for the count for seven or eight hours. If your soul is away too long, you’ll get weak and sick. The ideal is to sleep lightly and wake several times and share the dreams that are with you with those close to you. 
     When Roberto, exhausted by native rituals, grabbed a few hours' extra sleep, his hosts were worried about him. "Are you sick?" they asked when he stirred. “Get up, get up! You’re going to get sick! ã yok, ã yok! ã pakut ax!"
     The striking vocabulary of dreaming among the Maxicali reflects the view that in dreams the soul is projected from the body. Their word for "dream" is  yõnkup The root yõn means “to throw”.It also appears in the verb mõ’yõn, “to sleep",  a combination of mõ, “to go” and yõn. During lively football matches in the villages, you hear all the time: Nũy ã yõn!  So, to sleep is to go throw the soul. The Maxicali say the dream soul exits through the mouth. It may follow dangerous paths that lead to the villages of the dead. They are uneasy about encounters with the dead, because the departed may be eager to get surviving family or friends to live with them - which would mean that the soul would not return to the body.
      In its excursions, the dream soul may meet many other spirits, of the forest or the waters, of sorcerers or allies. Forgetting your dreams is bad because you lose track of your soul and miss what it can show you from the future. You need t remember where your dream soul went because this can reveal sources of illness and potential for healing.     
      When you tell a dream to relatives or shamans, they will want to know whether you heard singing. The spirit people called yãmĩyxop are famous for their songs. They can be wonderful allies, but they may also demand rewards for their favors, for example in the form of feasts and rituals. The language of debt and payment is used by the Maxicali to describe their relationship with spirits. Someone who is cured by the shamans “owes” a debt to the spirits and must “pay” by performing a new ritual. In this context the shamans are called “collectors “for the spirits. 
     Early chroniclers noted that the habit of sleeping light related not only to the need to keep track of the wandering soul but to scan whatever was going on in the external environment at night. "The sleep of these people is not like, in general, that of civilized people, continuous and long...They sleep poorly and their precautions are constant, whether day or night, throughout the occupied area. A dry leaf that falls, a branch that breaks off from the trees, as soon as the care is heard, it is carefully observed, examined; Stopping what you are doing, you listen while the incident lasts.” [2]

 

[1] Roberto Romero Ribeiro Júnior “Numa terra estranha: sonho, diferença e alteração entre os Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali)” Revista de Antropologia. vol. 65 no.3 (Nov. 2022).
[2] Jacinto Pallazollo. Nas Selvas do Mucuri e do Rio Doce (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1973) p. 118

Picture: Text-to-image, RM with DALL-E 3

Wrestling a dream report from the Undertoad

Just for fun, here's a note from my journal on what it took to bring home a report from a dream excursion in the early hours today:

To bed after 3 am still fizzing with excitement over all my discoveries in a late night reading binge. I am in bed less than two hours before I shoot up to the surface from a dream I nearly lose because sleep still grips me like a powerful undertow, trying to pull me back down. I also need to go to the bathroom.
    Torn between the call to the bathroom, the tug of sleep, and the fading brilliance of the dream, I choose the dream. I will myself to peck out the details of my dream excursion on my phone, fighting with sleep, eyelids closing after every few words, making endless typos, hauling myself back. In that other world

I am wearing a white terrycloth robe with a dark blue bird, wings spread in flight, over the pocket. It’s just a bathrobe but people think I am a wizard in professional garb.

When I’ve captured the essential scenes, I flop back against the pillows. The bathroom can wait. And it does, until I surface with another dream after another hour, eager to get that down too and see if my earlier efforts were worthwhile. They were. My journal report runs to three typed pages and contains many leads and research and creative assignments. I am energized and delighted, with further first-hand confirmation that in dreams, we can travel without leaving home.
     I reflect on my relationship with the undertow of sleep. I want to call it the Undertoad, a word John Irving gave us in The World According to Garp. Let me be clear that I am not opposed to sleep. I have simply never needed or wanted to conk out and sleep like the dead for six or seven or eight hours at a go as some recommend. All of my life I have been a biophasic or polyphasic sleeper, resting and dreaming in two or more periods within the diurnal cycle,avoiding set routines as far as I can manage. In these lockdown times, when I don't have to get to an airport to catch a plane or start an in-person workshop on time, I am more than ever master of my own cycle. I don't recommend that anyone should try to follow my cycles unless you receive a strong direct calling and your metabolism can sustain it.
     When I have to sleep it may be because my body demands some industrial rest and I listen to my body more often than not. On some occasions I have to lie down  because something or someone in another reality is calling me. Robert, we need you now. When I heed this summons I may find myself back in a continuous life drama that has been unfolding over years in an alternate reality. Sometimes I find myself on assignment, called to help someone who is in trouble on either side of physical death. Often I am called to lead workshops (this was going on again this morning), to play teacher and healer, or commune with colleagues in the scholar city of Anamnesis or in the astral realm of Luna. Again and again, I find the ancestors calling, calling. Ancestors of my bloodlines,and of the lands where I have lived or traveled  and of spiritual lineages connected to mine.

     How much I can bring back from these excursions sometimes depends on how willing I am to wrestle with sleep or routine signals from the soft animal of the body. My ability to satisfy the wishes of the body, and of sleep, and dream, is greatest when I can trip lightly trough the twilight space between awake and sleep, and sleep and awake, and greatest of all when I can sustain continuity of consciousness through all the transitions. But sometimes the transits are sudden and bumpy, like Jake Sully jolting in and out of his glorious blue body in Avatar, or Ed Harris coming up from The Abyss, or David Bowie’s landing in The Man Who Fell to Earth. It’s all good.

    One more time: please do not attempt try to follow my example-and definitely not,my polyphasic relationship with sleep! - unless you find this natural and irresistible. To riff on a saying of the dream shamans of the Daur Mongols, everyone has their own dream road, everyone has their own sky to fly.

Drawing: "The Man Who Fell to Earth" by Robert Moss

Books that were life rings: Seth Speaks

“You must read Jane Roberts!” the lively, voluble Latin woman shouted at me on my doorstep before she had even crossed the threshold, on August 5, 1988. I had met her in Brazil, a couple of years before. We shared a taste for caipirinhas and spiritual adventures, and when she told me she was visiting a daughter who lived half an hour south of me, I naturally invited her to visit us at the farm.
    I had heard of Jane Roberts, and was aware that I was living in her neighborhood, since she came from Saratoga Springs and later lived in Elmira, New York, whose other familiar presences included my beloved Mark Twain. But I had never opened one of her books. I was wary of psychic mediums, maybe because one in the family had foreseen my death (accurately) when I was three years old. I was usually unimpressed by channeled material, which sometimes seemed to come through in overly pompous, foggy or inelegant forms.
    I could not resist the archetypal cameo of the messenger on the doorstep. I went to a bookshop and purchased everything by Jane Roberts that they had in stock. I started reading Seth Speaks, as Romelia suggested, and discovered one of the books that became life rings for me in a period of psychic storms and shamanic trials.

Who is Seth? In describing himself, he prefers not to use the word “spirit”. He jokes that he is a “ghost writer”. He says, “I am an energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical matter...     To write this book…I adopt from my own bank of past personalities those characteristics that seem most appropriate.” He can communicate through Jane Roberts because she is a "window". Within her psyche is “what amounts to a transparent dimensional warp that serves almost like an open window through which other realities can be perceived.”

    Where is Seth based? Not in what we think of as the afterlife. “You must die many times before you enter into this particular plane of existence.”

    The plot thickens when, quite late in the book, Seth makes room for an entity called, for convenience, Seth Two, a personality operating on a level above his. In her introduction, Jane Roberts speculates  that “Seth may be as much of a creation as his book is.” A form of the Speaker generated by a multidimensional intelligence to communicate in her time, and ours.
     As a former journalist, I am trained and disposed to check on the reliability of any source. But the true test for a source of this kind is the quality of the material that comes through. And the Seth material is extraordinary. Here are the main things that Seth Speaks confirmed for me, while helping me to grow my ability to explain the rules of engagement in the multiverse to myself and others:

We live in many times, and it is all happening Now

“You live many existences at one time." We are connected to personalities living in the past and the future and in parallel realities. Their gifts and their dramas are relevant to us. And it is all happening Now.
     Reincarnation is for real, but only one of many after-death options, and we mustn't get trapped in linear conceptions of karma and in past-life "passion plays" because any past or future is a probable reality that can be accessed and changed Now.

    “You may draw upon knowledge that belongs to other independent selves.” We can tune into parallel selves by switching consciousness and by above all by waking up to what is going on in our dreams. Great creativity is "multidimensional art", in which the creative mind is able to draw on the gifts and the energy of many selves, In ordinary life, we may be able to borrow physical strength and skills from other selves who developed differently from our present self by drawing on "latent layers" that are traveling close to us.

    You can tune in to parallel selves by switching consciousness “They are a part of the same river of your identity.” Great creativity is multidimensional. “Its origin is not from one reality, but from many, and it is tinged with the multiplicity of that origin.” 

Wake up and dream

Seth is one of the really great dream educators. He is crystal clear about the important things that go on in dreaming. Consciousness travels outside the body, every night, in dreams. Dreaming, we travel to other realities, no less real (maybe more so) than the physical world.  Dreaming, we choose from an infinity of probable events those which will become physical. As we become conscious dreamers, we can not only shape reality on other planes, but can engage in reality creation on the physical plane. Thus:

“You can learn to change your physical environment by learning to change and manipulate your dream environment.” 

“Each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states” 

“This sleeping self of yours is far more knowledgeable than the waking self of which you are so proud.” 

“As there is continuity in your daily life, so there is continuity in your sleeping life...Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your waking life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned. You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams.” 

If we want to become better dreamers, and thereby more conscious citizens of the multiverse, Seth insists we much change our relationship with sleep. He recommends two sleep periods in the 24-hour cycle, each of about three hours. He notes that oversleeping results in sloth and fogged memory because consciousness or spirit has been away from the body too long. All of this becomes clearer is we grasp the simple fact that consciousness leaves the body during sleep.

We are in the afterlife now

Seth tells us, that in sleep and dreams we are already engaged in the same dimension in which we will have our after-death experiences. 

“You are already familiar with all conditions you will meet after death.”

“When you dream you are flying, you often are. In the dream state you operate under the same conditions, more or less, that are native in a consciousness not focused in physical reality. Many of your experiences, therefore, are precisely those you may meet after death.” 

As for ghosts, well, the living manufacture ghosts all the time.

“You yourselves appear as apparitions to others, particularly when you send strong thought-forms of yourself from the sleep state, or even when unconsciously you travel out of your physical body...Your rooms are full now of thought forms that you do not perceive.” 

 How multidimensional teachers are made

What thrilled me most in Seth Speaks was the account of the training and functions of a true teacher in the multiverse.

“In my work as a teacher I travel into many dimensions of existence, even as a traveling professor might give lectures in various states or countries. Here, however, the resemblance ends, largely, since before I can begin to work I must set up preliminary psychological structures and learn to know my pupils.” 

“When I enter your environment, I turn my consciousness in your direction...

When I contact your reality…it is as if I were entering one of your dreams."

A multidimensional teacher is trained to monitor and engage with all “probable selves” of a subject in different times and dimensions. (In her Oversoul Seven trilogy, Jane Roberts gives a simplified and engaging version of how this work).

    A teacher of this kind opens paths and doors in the multiverse where none were perceptible before. “The pathways we make continue to exist and can be used by others.” 
     This kind of ambassador of the multiverse remembers enough of life and death to have developed a cosmic sense of humor.

"When one has been born and died many times, expecting extinction with each death, and when this experience is followed by the realization that existence still continues, a sense of the divine comedy enters in."

I jotted in the margin, I want that job! 

Art: Rob Butts, Jane Robert's husband, made this picture of Seth, which Seth (in channeled session 168 in which he called Rob "Joseph", as he called Jane "Ruburt" ) pronounced an excellent likeness.

    

Nights with the daimon

My creative daimon is the most demanding of the spirits I seek to entertain. I use the word “daimon” as Yeats did, to describe a spirit that is forever driving me to do the most difficult things “among those not yet impossible.” Real angels (not the greeting cards kind) are forever saying, Get Up, Wake Up, Get On With It.
    My creative daimon operates the same way. He has never heard of a body clock. He has no interest in what time it is, or how much sleep I get, and knows that what I most need to do with this body is to create with passion, entertain the spirits, ignite creative and healing fire in others... and marry the worlds. 
    I felt the wind of his wings in the middle of the night in Paris in May, 2013. I was staying in a studio on the Street of the Moon Man and the Sun Woman, as I renamed this section of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis because of the statues a couple of blocks away. After a long day leading an Active Dreaming workshop, followed by dinner at a pleasant brasserie opposite the Gare de l'Est, I rose at 1:00 a.m. and sat at a table to write some of the book that was published as The Boy Who Died and Came Back.
    In France, it seemed natural to write about my "far memories" of other lives lived here, and to narrate how I have used the tools of dream archaeology - marrying shamanic dreaming to scholarly research - to investigate one life in particular: that of Charles d'Orléans, the medieval poet-prince in whose name Joan of Arc went to war. Three hours later, I was satisfied with a fresh 3,000 word draft and had written a couple of shorter pieces, so I thought I might put my body back to bed in order to be rested for the morning workshop session.

   Flat on my back around 4:00 a.m., I found my body was nowhere near flirting with sleep. I considered my situation from the perspective of a greater entity I felt was with me in the space. I sensed the wind of his wings. I rose from my body to join him and look down at the Robert body sprawled under the sheet.
   From this perspective, I had no concern, no worries, about how much sleep the body in the bed might get, or what might be done with it, as long as it served my creative purpose. I agreed with the daimon: let’s get that body up. Let’s get on with the new book. So I did, and turned out another 2,000 words. When the time came to shower and dress and get myself to the workshop, I was charging on all cylinders. Writing is a workout, and the creative act is energizing and healing. And the extraordinary becomes easy when we entertain our creative spirits and borrow their wings.
     I have learned this:

* When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen.

* We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges. 

* Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by that creative spirit that that Yeats called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and withdraws its presence when we choose against the grand passion and our life Work, the “talent that is the call”.

* The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt what is all but impossible, and may be perceived as quite impossible by the daily trivial mind.

- adapted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: On the Street of Moon Man and Sun Woman (Rue du Faubourg St. Denis) by RM.

I dreamed I woke up

I dreamed I woke up.
In this waking life my thoughts
are agate points and deep lagoons
that make ancient cities and heroes
and bust dakinis out of lunch boxes.

Everything is alive when I am awake.
I remember to swim in air
and fly in water, and ride moon-tigers
to the Moon Cafe, and the light in my head
is the light of the blue-white star.

- from my poem "I Dreamed I Woke Up" in my collection Here, Everything is Dreaming.

Are we asleep in regular life and awake in the dream world? Sometimes it feels like that, and I play with the fluctuations in our sense of reality in “I Dreamed I Woke Up”.
     When I close my eyes, I often have the sense of waking in another landscape, among people who may have been waiting for me. Then there is that phenomenon of “false awakening”. Within a dream, you sleep and wake up, to find later that you were in another level of the dream, not yet back in the body in the bed. Such experiences mark transits from outer to inner courtyards of dreaming, and when we learn to recognize what is going on, this deepens our practice of conscious dreaming.

"Return from Earth Mountain". Oil crayons. (c) Robert Moss