u/Disastrous_Home2220

I've been researching sleep history and found something that blew my mind. Before artificial lighting, people would sleep from ~9pm to midnight, wake up for an hour or two, then sleep again until dawn. This "second sleep" was completely normal and documented in literature, court records, and medical texts from medieval times.

The first sleep and second sleep were separated by a quiet waking period where people would pray, have sex, visit neighbors, or just think.

If you wake up in the middle of the night wide awake — you might not be broken. You might just be ancestral.

Has anyone else read about this?