Segmented Sleep — The Hour the Night Used to Have

On the sixteenth of January, sixteen sixty, a man in London sat up late at his desk, and while he was writing a sentence the bellman came along the street below and stopped under his window.

What the bellman called up into the cold was the hour and the weather together, in the manner of the trade: past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning. The man at the desk wrote it down in his diary, because he wrote nearly everything down. Nobody in that scene is doing anything remarkable. That is the whole of what makes it strange.

Tonight is a piece of everyday life that has gone missing, and the hour it used to happen in.

For a very long stretch of the human record, people did not sleep the way the modern world sleeps. They slept; they woke, in the middle of the night; they were awake a while; they slept again. The waking part was not a complaint and not an ailment. Nobody wrote to a doctor about it. It was simply a place in the night that everybody went to, the way anyone goes to the afternoon.

First the hour itself: a fire banked under its own ash so the heart of it would keep till morning, a bed built in layers worth half of everything a household owned, a rush light costed down to the minute, and a night told not by clocks but by a bird — the first cock, the second cock, three in the morning. A printed prayer set down under a heading that says simply, at midnight, if you happen to awake. A rhyme from fifteen eighty telling the maids to knead the bread and start the brewing at three. A man and his wife lying awake an hour or two, in discourse, and not one word of what was said written down.

Then how any of it is known, which is stranger than the hour. No treatise, no authority, no controversy anybody felt the need to settle — only ordinary people using the phrase in passing, for two hundred years, in five languages. Medical books dosing a remedy after the first sleep the way a modern label says with food. And a courtroom, where a child's line about her mother's night stopped a historian three hundred years later.

Then the science, which does not agree with itself. Sixteen people given fourteen hours of darkness a night for four weeks, whose sleep came apart into two pieces with a stretch of quiet waking between. Three peoples living now, measured on the wrist, who did not do it at all. An island study that found it on half the nights. Two teams, the same instrument, opposite answers, never reconciled — and a man who handed out lanterns to see whether electric light took the hour away, and found it did not.

And at the end, the middle of the night is given a name: a curve drawn in eighteen sixty-two with no gap in it, a textbook calling night waking the general opinion of the profession on page seventeen and a morbid condition on page thirty-eight, and a committee whose heading outlived the reason for it.

The hour is older than the name. It is older, by a very long way, than the eight hours it is measured against.

A calm, unhurried telling of the record, for sleep, rest, or a long drive in the dark. Nothing here will startle you or wake you.