Like so many of my fellow-travellers, I am always looking for ways to get around the neurologically-induced fatigue. Early morning tai chi practice remains best. I am tired, almost groggy, in the early evening hours and sometimes feel too tired to sleep without first taking a nap. Suprisingly, I’ve found a second wind between 11PM and 1AM. So, I do tai chi exercises and rowing during the wee hours. What ever works!
MS may have introduced me to a pre-industrial pattern of segmented sleep that may have psychic rewards lost by continuous sleep.
See The cultural biology of sleep - Medical Anthropology
Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, July, 2002 by Tim Batchelder
Segmented Sleep
In Western society we embrace an ideal of the 8 hour night of continuous sleep. However, cross-cultural studies show that evolutionarily, a very different sleeping pattern is the norm. Worthman notes that in contrast to current sleep recommendations people in pre-industrial societies do not keep a regular bed-time. They slip in and out of sleep all night but spend much more time sleeping (more than 10 hours a night typically) since they go to bed when it is dark. People in pre-industrial societies complain of getting too much sleep, not too little. In general, sleep is considered risky since it exposes a person to ghosts, evil spirits and witchcraft, and the sleeper's spirit may wander off too far and fail to return. In addition, in pre-industrial cultures sleep is seen as an important source of visions and altered consciousness in contrast to the view in Western societies where sleep is considered "downtime." Sleep deprivation is used ritualistically for visions and initiations. In ceremonies somnolent or ne ar sleep states are maintained to increase spiritual visions. All night dance fests and feasts are conducted about once a month.
Studies of Western Europeans by historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg show that "segmented sleep" was a common practice of rural and urban people 200-500 years ago. Each evening, exhausted from a day of physical labor, people first sank into a "first sleep," which lasted for several hours then shortly after midnight, awoke and spent 1 or 2 hours in a "watching period." A "second," or "morning," sleep followed. The watching period featured prayer, conversations with a bedfellow, sex, contemplation of dreams or the day's events, or wandering of the mind in a semiconscious state that was prized at the time.
According to Thomas Wehr of the National Institute of Mental Health, when deprived of artificial light people and other animals sleep in two periods separated by an hour or two of quiet rest and reflection. Many mammals sleep in two major bouts during the night or day. In pre-industrial people this regular awakening out of REM sleep allows them to reflect on and remember their dreams in a semiconscious state, which is not available to modern people. This pattern of awakening at night over evolution suggests that people who suffer from this tendency are not really insomniacs.
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1 comment:
Early morning works best for me, too, for walking and mediation. I've never heard of the idea of taking a nap in order to get to sleep, or being too tired to sleep, but I certainly feel that way many nights.
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