Imagine waking at midnight not to an alarm or a crying baby, but because your body simply wanted to. You'd lie there in the darkness, perhaps chat quietly with your spouse, say a prayer, or shuffle to the kitchen for a snack. Then, after an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness, you'd drift back to sleep until dawn.

This wasn't insomnia. This was how humans slept for thousands of years before Thomas Edison ruined everything. The practice of segmented sleep—two distinct periods of rest with a wakeful interval between them—was so universal that your great-great-grandparents would find our obsession with eight uninterrupted hours completely baffling.

When historical references mention "first sleep" and "second sleep," they're describing a pattern so ordinary that writers rarely bothered explaining it. Court records from 16th-century England casually note crimes committed "after the first sleep." French medical texts advised couples that the best time for conception was "after the first sleep" when bodies were rested but not groggy. Everyone knew what this meant.

The wakeful period between sleeps—typically lasting one to two hours around midnight—became sacred family time. In an era when daylight hours meant backbreaking labor, this quiet interlude offered something precious: unhurried conversation in the dark. Couples discussed finances, children's futures, and village gossip. Parents checked on sleeping children. Prayers were said with unusual sincerity, perhaps because midnight felt closer to the divine than harried morning devotions.

Household tasks filled these hours too, but gentler ones. Women might nurse infants or tend fires. Men reviewed the next day's work in their minds. Some people simply lay in companionable silence, a luxury almost unimaginable in our notification-addled age. The darkness created intimacy that bright mornings never could—no distractions, no urgent tasks, just two people sharing warmth under quilts their grandmothers had stitched.

Takeaway

Our ancestors built their deepest family connections during a time of day we now consider wasted. Intimacy often flourishes not when we schedule it, but when we stop filling every conscious moment with activity.

Here's something that would horrify modern suburbanites: your ancestors thought nothing of visiting neighbors at midnight. The wakeful interval wasn't just for family—it created an entire nocturnal social world that operated parallel to daytime society. After first sleep, people would wander between houses, smoke pipes together, share news, or conduct business too sensitive for daylight hours.

Village night-watchmen's logs reveal a surprisingly busy midnight landscape. Midwives were summoned during these hours (babies, inconveniently, don't respect sleep schedules). Lovers conducted secret courtships. Thieves, admittedly, also found opportunities—but so did legitimate traders who preferred privacy for certain transactions. The darkness offered a kind of social freedom that daylight, with its rigid hierarchies and watchful eyes, never permitted.

This nocturnal community served practical purposes too. Fire was a constant terror in wooden villages, and someone awake in every household meant faster responses to smoke. Sick neighbors could be checked on. Livestock could be monitored. The staggered waking pattern created an informal neighborhood watch that required no organization—just the natural rhythm of human sleep doing what it had always done.

Takeaway

Community safety and social connection once emerged naturally from how we slept, not from apps or organized programs. Sometimes the best systems are the ones nobody had to design.

The death of segmented sleep didn't happen overnight—though ironically, it happened because of what we did with our nights. As artificial lighting spread through the 19th century, people began staying awake later, pushing first sleep further toward midnight. Coffee houses and theaters extended evening entertainment. Street lamps made nighttime commerce possible. Gradually, the quiet midnight interval got squeezed out entirely.

By 1920, references to "first sleep" had virtually disappeared from English writing. A pattern that had shaped human life for millennia vanished in roughly three generations. Factory schedules demanded workers arrive at fixed times, making the leisurely segmented pattern impractical. Sleep became something to optimize, not experience—eight efficient hours crammed between work shifts, preferably uninterrupted.

What we lost wasn't just a sleep pattern but an entire culture built around it. The midnight prayers, the whispered conversations, the neighborhood wanderings—all casualties of the lightbulb. Modern sleep science now suggests our epidemic of insomnia might partly reflect bodies still expecting that wakeful interval, confused by a world that insists consciousness between midnight and dawn is a disorder requiring medication.

Takeaway

When we wake at 2 AM and can't fall back asleep, we call it insomnia and reach for pills. Our ancestors called it Tuesday and reached for their spouse's hand. Perhaps the "problem" is partly that we've pathologized a natural human rhythm.

Understanding segmented sleep doesn't mean we should abandon modern schedules and start visiting neighbors at midnight (please don't). But it does reveal how much of what we consider "natural" sleep is actually a recent industrial invention.

Our ancestors weren't better sleepers—they simply lived in a world that accommodated human rhythms rather than demanding humans accommodate machines. The next time you wake at 2 AM, maybe skip the anxiety. Your body might just be remembering something your calendar forgot.