There is much recent discussion in popular media about the importance of a good

night s sleep, most often defined as at least eight hours of uninterrupted peacefu
l slumber. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that maintaining a sleep
pattern called segmented sleep or divided sleep may be important in regulating stre
ss. In segmented or divided sleep, two or more periods of sleep are punctuated b
y a period of wakefulness. Along with a nap or siesta during the day, it has bee
n argued that this is the natural pattern of human sleep.
An experiment conducted in the 1990s by psychiatrist Thomas Wehr, in which he se
questered a group of people and created a 14-hour period of darkness every day f
or a month, supports this argument. It took some time for their sleep to regulat
e but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping
pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before
falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Following up on this experiment, the historian Roger Ekirch argues in his 2005 b
ook At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, that before the Industrial Revolution,
segmented sleep was the dominant form of human slumber in Western civilization.
He draws evidence from documents from the ancient, medieval, and modern world, w
hich he studied over the course of 16 years of research. Other historians, such
as Craig Koslofsky, have endorsed Ekirch's analysis.
According to Ekirch's argument, individuals typically slept in two distinct phas
es, bridged by an intervening period of wakefulness lasting approximately one ho
ur. Peasant couples, who were often too tired after field labor to do much more
than eat and go to sleep, awoke later to socialize or visit neighbors for a meal
. Educated people used this time to pray and reflect, and to interpret dreams, w
hich were more vivid at that hour than upon waking in the morning. This was also
a favorite time for scholars and poets to write uninterrupted.
Part of Ekirch s evidence is his compilation of more than 500 references to a segm
ented sleeping pattern in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, fr
om Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. Th
e two periods of night sleep in Ekirch's theory were called "first sleep" (occas
ionally "dead sleep") and "second sleep" (or "morning sleep") in medieval Englan
d. Ekirch finds that words for first and second sleep also existed in the Romanc
e languages, as well as in the current language of the Tiv of Nigeria. In French
, the common term was premier sommeil or premier somme; in Italian, primo sonno;
in Latin, primo somno or comcubia nocte. He found no common word in English for
the period of wakefulness between, apart from paraphrases such as first waking
or when one wakes from his first sleep and the generic watch (in its old meaning
of being awake). In French an equivalent generic term is dorveille ("twixt slee
p and wake").
Circadian rhythms regulate the human sleep-wake cycle of wakefulness during the
day and sleep at night. Ekirch suggests that it is due to the modern use of elec
tric lighting that most modern humans do not practice segmented sleep. The moder
n assumption, that consolidated sleep with no awakenings is the normal and corre
ct way for human adults to sleep, may lead people to consult their doctors feari
ng they have maintenance insomnia or other sleep disorders. But if Ekirch's theo
ry is correct, their concerns might best be addressed by reassurance that their
sleep conforms to historically natural sleep patterns.
Ekirch suggests that because members of modern industrialized societies, their l
ate hours facilitated by electric lighting, mostly do not practice segmented sle
ep, they may misinterpret and mistranslate references to it in literature: commo
n interpretations of the term "first sleep," for example are "beauty sleep" and
"early slumber." A reference to first sleep in The Odyssey was translated as suc
h in the 17th century, but, if Ekirch's theory is correct, was universally mistr
anslated in the 20th.