By Our Science Correspondent
For most of human history, an unbroken eight hours of sleep was not the norm. Long before electric light and factory clocks ruled the night, people across Europe, Africa and Asia lived by a very different rhythm: two sleeps, not one.
Known as “first sleep” and “second sleep,” the night was split into two resting periods of several hours, separated by a calm, wakeful interval around midnight. Historical letters and diaries reveal a quiet world that stirred between these two sleeps — people prayed, read, chatted softly with neighbours, tended fires, checked animals, reflected on dreams, and yes, many couples used the moment for intimacy.
Even classical writers such as Homer and Virgil casually described “the hour that ends the first sleep,” showing just how normal this pattern once was.
How We Lost the Second Sleep
The disappearance of the “middle of the night” wakefulness is a modern invention, driven by two powerful forces: artificial lighting and industrial work schedules.
From the 1700s onwards, oil lamps, gas lighting, and eventually electricity pushed bedtime later and later. Bright light also interferes with melatonin, the hormone that naturally regulates sleep, convincing the brain it is still daytime. Add factory shifts and clock-based work, and by the early 20th century, the idea of a single eight-hour sleep block became the new standard.
Yet science has quietly confirmed what history suggested. In sleep labs that remove clocks and evening light — simulating long winter nights — people often drift back into two-sleep patterns naturally. A 2017 study of a farming community in Madagascar without electricity found midnight waking still alive and well.
Why Winter and Darkness Distort Time
Light doesn’t just control sleep — it shapes how we experience time itself. Weak winter daylight makes it harder for the internal body clock to stay aligned. Morning light, rich in blue wavelengths, suppresses melatonin and boosts alertness. Without it, the brain drifts.
In time-isolation experiments — even in caves with no light at all — people routinely lose track of days entirely. Similar distortions happen in polar winters. Interestingly, one 1993 study found that Icelanders and their descendants in Canada showed unusually low rates of seasonal depression, possibly due to genetic adaptation.
Researchers at Keele University found that people experience time as longer in dim or evening lighting, especially if they feel low in mood. In other words, darkness quite literally stretches time in the mind.
A New Way to See Insomnia
Modern sleep specialists now argue that waking in the night is not abnormal at all — it’s deeply human. Brief awakenings commonly happen between sleep stages, especially near REM sleep, which is linked to vivid dreaming.
What turns a harmless awakening into misery is how we react to it. Anxiety, boredom and clock-watching make time feel painfully slow. With nothing to do at 3am, minutes swell into eternities.
Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) now recommends leaving the bed after 20 minutes awake, doing something calm in dim light — such as reading — and returning only when sleepy. Experts also urge people to cover clocks altogether. Time, once noticed, becomes the enemy.
A Remnant of the past
That 3am awakening many people dread is not a malfunction — it’s a biological echo of how humans once slept for thousands of years. The problem isn’t waking. The problem is lying there fighting the clock.
Perhaps the old rhythm still hums quietly inside us, waiting for permission to breathe again.
And maybe — just maybe — the lost art of midnight calm is not insomnia at all… but memory.