My understanding of life as a human was shaken up again recently (which I love by the way) by Robert Ekirch's book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. He brought to my attention the change in the human sleep pattern caused by industrialization. Studying night in medieval Europe he discovered that the sleep pattern before artificial light (and in non-industrial countries today) was a 14-hour pattern of two sleep periods divided by a semi-wakeful state in which people did a bunch of things, most interestingly processing their dreams.
That's an amazing thing to discover so late in life - we've forgotten how we used to sleep.
I've come to the conclusion that dreaming is one of those areas modern science knows little about, and what we know will be completely different in 100 years.
I can't tell you how interesting that is to me, because I am a natural segmented sleeper, and I have had great luck arranging my day into 'two days' - I like to get up early, have a really good morning and early afternoon, then go back to bed for at least two hours (four, when I've had 2 jobs that both ran 6 - 10, am and pm, as I did when I was in my early 20s), then get up and do it again. My first 4 hours awake are generally my most productive; resetting just makes sense. Plus I had 'night people' jobs for years, but I'm actually pretty much a morning person. Anyway, it feels perfectly natural, which has surprising other people who know me who express that it sounds really hard. It's not. Not at all.
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Wikipedia article on segmented sleep.
That's an amazing thing to discover so late in life - we've forgotten how we used to sleep.
I've come to the conclusion that dreaming is one of those areas modern science knows little about, and what we know will be completely different in 100 years.
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