“There is nothing natural about sleeping in one go . . . . In the past, people slept in two stages, separated by an hour or so of wakefulness. The historian Roger Ekirch, who made this astonishing discovery twenty years ago, has finally been translated into French. . . . This is one of the most astounding historical discoveries of the last twenty years. There was once a 'first sleep' and then we woke up, between midnight and two o'clock. Peasants would go to their animals, tend the fire; city dwellers would sometimes go out for a bite to eat in the street. One could also stay in bed and take advantage of this hour of wakefulness to pray or meditate, and often make love. One would go back to sleep for a ‘second sleep’, less restorative, but more conducive to dreams, until sunrise.The American Roger Ekirch is the original proponent of this thesis, which he first presented in 2001 in a resounding article. He is a very serious historian at Virginia Polytechnic University, specializing in the colonial history of North America. He was not translated into French until now. This injustice has just been repaired by Editions Amsterdam, which has published The Great Transformation of Sleep, a book containing two of his main articles. According to Ekirch, our 'biphasic' sleep has been erased from the collective memory. All that remains are our sleep disorders, a remnant of this past habitus, a distant trace of this segmented sleep. . . .’Consolidated' sleep, as practiced today, is therefore not at all natural: it is a simple social construction, and not necessarily the one that brings us the most well-being. Since Ekirch's discovery, historians and other social science researchers in the English-speaking world have been fascinated by sleep, to the point where we speak of sleep studies in the same way as gender studies or racial studies.”

-Pascal Riché, “Why sleep is (also) a social construct,” L’Obs (Paris). October 3, 2021

*For a long time, humanity divided its nights into two stages; it is only with the industrial revolution, and the need to gain working time, that the norm is imposed of a continuous sleep - the awake phase becoming pathological insomnia. That sleep is a natural fact is difficult to contest: it is a biological mechanism essential to all animal life and the objective knowledge that we have of it depends essentially on the work of doctors and neurologists. This gives good reasons to think that our way of sleeping is identical to that of any other member of humanity, whatever the time and place in which we place it. However, in 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch published a surprising article questioning this proposition. . . . This discovery opened a field of research for the social sciences, whose task was to study sleep as a social practice that could vary from one era or society to another: Sleep Studies."

-Benoît Peuch, "De l’éveil à l’insomnie," La Vie des Idées, June 30, 2021

*"As far back as I can remember, sleep has kept me awake at night. For me, sleep has always seemed threatening and dangerous to enter. It wasn't until I read a book [At Day's Close: Night in Times Past] about how restlessly my ancestors slept that I found a kind of peace with my own sleep anxiety. . . . After reading it and subsequently interviewing the author, I drove people around me crazy with my preaching. I am enriched by a working life in which I often read good books and talk to many interesting people, but I don't remember either before or since having such a deep urge to shout to the whole world: ‘STOP! LISTEN! YOU SHOULD HEAR SOMETHING YOU DON'T KNOW THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE.' "

-Anna Von Sperling, “For as Long as I Can Remember, Sleep Has Kept Me Awake at Night,” Dagbladet Information (Copenhagen), June 3, 2021

*“A social history of sleep was missing. . . . The fascinating discovery of Ekirch opens promising avenues for researchers. As well as for the bad sleepers. How can we not rejoice in insomnia that offers us the opportunity to reconnect with the fruitfulness of discussions, dreams and nocturnal embraces?”

-Marie Goudot, Études (Paris), May 5, 2021

*“R. Ekirch's essay, even though it was quite brief, did not go unnoticed, and many of his colleagues consider it as the first example of a history of human sleep considered as something other than a dead time satisfying a natural need . It inaugurated a research program that soon developed, and opened a debate with multiple entries: had segmented sleep really been the norm in the West, was it the product of a particular culture, the response to a certain environment, or was it present in all latitudes in pre-industrial societies? . . . Ekirch's thesis is at the origin of the development, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, of a body of historical and sociological work on sleep (sleep studies) where discussions are going well. . . We can only pay tribute to the original work of the historian who was the first to draw on the right thread.”

- Nicolas Journet, “The Book of the Month,“ SciencesHumaines Magazin (Paris), April 2021

*"Humans have always slept. But they have not always done so in the same way. As the work of historian Roger Ekirch, whose book The Great Transformation of Sleep has just been translated into French, shows, monophasic sleeping, i.e. sleeping in one go, only became the norm at the time of the industrialrevolution, with the arrival of electricity."

-Michael Balavoine, L'illustré, April 28, 2021

*“According to historian Roger Ekirch, the nights of our ancestors were divided into two phases, before the industrial revolution and artificial light imposed a new model of sleep: the night in one that we know today. His pioneering works are being translated these days into French. Insomniacs, rejoice: waking up in the middle of the night is more normal than it looks. . . . . Some books make you dizzy. Especially when they come to question what seemed obvious, at the very heart of our routine. The Great Sleep Transformation, by the American historian Roger Ekirch is one of them: by analyzing how our nights have evolved over the centuries, it shakes up what seemed so natural that we did not even think about it. . . . Our nights therefore have a story. But there is a secondary benefit to reading Roger Ekirch's work. The idea that our midnight awakenings and insomnia, so haunting and disturbing today, are ‘rather than a pathological form, the remnant of an older, once dominant human sleep structure.’”

-Sonya Faure, “Sleeping in one go: the story of a misconception,” Libération (Paris), March 26, 2021

*“Who has never envied the sleep of past centuries, which we can readily imagine as deep, restful, after a hard day of manual labor? This is a very romantic and frankly distorted vision, replies American historian Roger Ekirch. In reality, our ancestors were cold, their bodies folded up on a rough straw mattress, eaten away by fleas and dirt. All this while constantly fearing an unexpected burglary or suffering from multiple ailments, from pneumonia to rheumatism.But above all, contrary to the ideal of a full sleep, the sleepers of the past woke up in the middle of the night. In a thesis, published in the early 2000s and reproduced in the first part of the book, the historian rediscovers the "biphasic" sleep, that is to say, cut with a first and a second nap, which was in force before the industrial era.”

-Audrey Dufour, La Croix (Paris), March 16, 2021

*“Where are we with sleep? For so long that we have lost the memory of it, we have been told the same story of rules to follow and standards to respect in order to be able to sleep well. Yet nothing is less obvious than this account. In a series of publications which made a lot of noise in the United States in scholarly circles as well as among the general public, historian Roger Ekirch, best known for his work on the transatlantic slavery trade [sic], proved that what we think of as normal sleep is just a recent creation. As the texts gathered in The Great Sleep Transformation recall, it is possible to date this normalization of sleep from the time of the industrial revolution . . . . At a time when the question of sleep and insomnia recovers its political dimension, the brilliant demonstrations of Ekirch are to be considered - preferably, between two naps.”

-“La Grande Transformation du Sommeil : Essai,” Focus (Paris), February 11, 2021

*“First of all, a surprise: sleep historians and related studies and publications remain rare. In this context, the work of Roger Ekirch, a distinguished teacher at the Virginia Tech, Virginia, is often highlighted. In an article in the American Huffington Post, the author of the book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past , explains that before the industrial revolution, the night's sleep was actually split into two parts, with a waking period in between.”

-Fiona Moghaddam and Eric Chaverou, “Was the sleep of yesteryear really better before?”, “France Culture,” Radio France, March 3, 2021

*"Recent work in the humanities and social sciences has challenged the growing dominance of models of social and economic behaviour, which assume highly disrupted or curtailed patterns of sleep while historical studies have explored previous social and cultural practices with regard to sleep, including Roger Ekirch's influential study of segmented or biphasic sleep.”

-Sally Shuttleworth and Russell G. Foster, Interface Focus, April 17, 2020

“A. Roger Ekirch's historical study At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (2005) has become an indispensable reference point for almost all sleep-related work.”

-Hillary Hinds, A Cultural History of Twin Beds (2020)

“’Professor Ekirch has made a major contribution to both the history and our scientific understanding of sleep,’ said Charles Czeisler, director of Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Medicine. ‘His findings have led to changes in the practice of sleep disorders medicine, particularly for patients with middle-of-the-night insomnia — quite a feat for a historian.’”

- “Virginia Tech Daily,” April 5, 2019

“In an influential series of articles and a book At Day’s Close, the historian Roger Ekirch has argued that the basic form of human sleep prior to the mid-19th century was biphasic.”

-Darian Leader, “Time to Wake Up,” Guardian, March 9, 2019

“Chronobiologists and neuroscientists engaged in the study of human sleep and sleep disorders have been called to put their conclusions and methodologies into critical perspective by the recent work of historian A. Roger Ekirch, whose research uncovered evidence that many pre-industrial communities in Europe and early America were fond of sleeping in two separate phases during the night, which they called their ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’. Clinical investigations of human sleep patterns, which focus on the body’s circadian rhythms and brain functions, are founded on the basis that humans sleep, and always have slept, in a single consolidated cycle of sleep each night.”

-Sasha Handley, Rohan Mcwilliam, and Lucy Noakes, New Directions in Social and Cultural History (London, 2018).

“8 Things You Should Know About Sleep and the Effects They Have on Your Body”

“#5. Changing historical patterns. In general, people tend to go to sleep at the end of the afternoon for seven or eight hours, but that was not always so. A study by Roger Ekirch, professor of history at Virginia Tech, hundreds of years ago humans in different parts of the world tended to sleep for two different periods for each night. Ekirch found that people tended to sleep a little first block after dark, then woke for a couple of hours and finally slept for a second block.The expert believes that means that the body has a natural preference for fragmented sleep.”

- BBC World News, July 11, 2018

- “At least since the publication of historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech University - a first essay was published in 2001 - we know that the now common in Central Europe sleep is only a model of the rest in one block. Ekirch had opened hundreds of sources from pre-industrial times and found that the Europeans then usually slept in two phases, interrupted by a one- to two-hour break, which was used for all sorts of things: eating and chatting, prayers and sex. Only the gas lamps and the bulbs have finished this practice.”

– Christian Weber, “Man Is an Animal that Sleeps Rather Little,” SonntagsZeitung, June 17, 2018

Experiences that were long thought to be biologically determined and unchanging turn out to have a history, or to contribute decisively to human history. Sleep, Roger Ekirch argues, became a single uninterrupted break in consciousness, only relatively recently; for centuries, it turns out, Europeans were biphasic sleepers, regularly waking in the middle of the night to read, pray or engage in other activities.”

- Alex Soojung-Kim-Pang, The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought: Mind-Wandering, Creativity, and Dreaming (2018)

“Ever since A. Roger Ekirch recuperated the almost-forgotten distinction between ‘first’ and ‘second’ sleep in pre-industrial cultures, the model of ‘consolidated’ sleep, the eight or so hours of unbroken slumber that we commonly regard as the body’s daily entitlement, has been unmasked as a modern invention. In light of Ekirch’s work the notion that sleep has a history, that it is a bodily practice whose norms and practices have been shaped and reshaped by its social contexts over time, has become a standard jumping-off point for scholarship in this field - our leading historian of sleep.”

- Michael Greaney, Sleep and the Novel (2018)

“A Roger Ekirch’s endlessly fascinating 2005 book At Day’s Close, a social history of night-time, argues that pre-industrial people slept in two phases, with an hour awake in between.”

- Oliver Burkeman, “Can’t Sleep? Tell yourself it’s not a big deal,” Guardian, April 20, 2018

“In recent years, the historicity of sleep has come to be widely recognized. This is in large part due to the pathbreaking work of A. Roger Ekirch, who has argued that preindustrial sleep was segmented into first and second sleeps, with an intervening period of wakefulness. The concept of segmented sleep has been eagerly taken up on NPR and in the New Yorker.”

- Garret A. Sullivan, Jr., Renaissance Quarterly, Fall 2017

“It was every historian’s dream. Roger Ekirch had stumbled across something hiding in plain sight that completely upended our assumptions about how human beings had slept.”

- “The Inquiry,” BBC World Service, June 29, 2017

“But what is “natural” when it comes to sleep? Reiss looks to the historian A. Roger Ekirch, who, in 2001, documented that in early-modern Europe and North America the standard pattern for nighttime sleep was “segmented.” There were two periods, sometimes termed “dead sleep” and “morning sleep,” with intervals of an hour or more when the person was awake, sometimes called “the watching,” during which people might pray or read or have sex. In some indigenous societies in Nigeria, Central America, and Brazil, segmented sleep persisted into the twentieth century. Ekirch hypothesized that segmented sleep was our natural, evolutionary heritage, and that it had been disrupted in the West by the demands of industrialization, and by electricity, which made artificial lighting ubiquitous. Reiss cites Ekirch, who asserted that the fact that many people experience insomnia in the middle of the night, after a few hours of sleep, indicates that our ancestral rhythms have been disrupted by modernization.”

- Jerome Groopman, M.D., “The Secrets of Sleep,” New Yorker, October 23, 2017

Dr Bodhisattva Kar, who teaches a course on the histories of sleep at the University of Cape Town . . . is a scholar of the everyday, focusing on the complex forces that determine the aspects of our life we're most liable to take for granted. "You miss sleep and you miss one-third of human history," he says. For a long time, that's exactly what we were doing. But this spectacular oversight has gradually been addressed, beginning with historian A Roger Ekirch. Ekirch exposed that what we now consider "normal" sleep - one compacted session, at a similar time each night - only came about in the 19th century. Prior to that sleep was commonly segmented, and responsive to seasonal fluctuations: a "first sleep", shortly after dark, followed by a couple of hours of productive wakefulness, and then a "second sleep" until dawn. The interlude was filled with every imaginable activity - reading, puttering, and praying - and was also considered the ideal time for sex; having rested, and digested dinner, and with the promise of more slumber to come. Whether this is the "natural" way to sleep is disputed, but the fact that bi-phasic sleep was once prevalent goes to show that our current mode of consolidated sleep is anything but inevitable. How, then, did we come to lose one of our cherished sleeps? Ekirch blames artificial light, which keeps us up later. Moreover, he blames the Industrial Revolution with its relentless ideologies of efficiency and productivity. What a profound inconvenience, from this vantage, that we should have to shut down into a kind of non-existence for a third of our lives. And so the stage was set: the consolidating forces of capital versus the ancient forces of biological necessity.

- Anna Hartford, “The 8-hour Compromise,” Sunday Times (Johannesburg), September 24, 2017

“Today most westerners tend to get their rest in a single block of sleep each night, but this is very much a deviation from the norm. In a landmark 2005 book called At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, the American historian Roger Ekirch showed that from the dawn of literature in ancient Greece until well into the Industrial Revolution it was customary for us to snooze for a few hours, wake and toddle around doing chores in the middle of the night, and then go back to bed until morning.

- Oliver Moody, “Forget about eight hours, you need super-sleep - Scientists are waking up to the realisation that everything we thought we knew about a good night's rest may be wrong.” The Times (London), August 5, 2017

“A. Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, argues that biphasics or ‘medieval sleepers’ get closer to nature’s intention than the sleep we aspire to today (those precious eight uninterrupted hours).‘For thousands of years until the industrial age, humans slept twice,’ Ekirch says. ‘A deeper first sleep from sunset until around 2am, followed by an interval of wakefulness, usually lasting an hour, then a lighter second sleep until around 6am, or later in the winter.’ Insomnia, the interval in the middle, was used to visit neighbours, pray, or have sex, according to Ekirch. Only with the arrival of artificial lighting in the 1820s did sleep begin to compress into the pattern we now know. For years I battled my ‘medieval’ sleep schedule, thinking it eccentric and antisocial. . . . . More recently, with a husband who’s a rock-solid sleeper and a renewed gratitude for my wakeful hour, I’ve made peace with my medieval sleep patterns.”

- Sally Howard, “Are You a Medieval Sleeper? Why It’s Time to Put the Eight-hour Night to Bed,” Telegraph, July 22, 2017

“It was every historian’s dream. Roger Ekirch had stumbled across something hiding in plain sight that completely upended our assumptions about how human beings had slept.”

- James Fletcher , “The Inquiry,” BBC World News, June 29, 2017

- “Nine Rules for a Good Night's Sleep. No one doubts the importance of sleeping well for the physical and mental health. The following are nine tips, the result of the latest research on the subject. Because if the times change, so do the rules for restful sleep.”

“ #8 Take a break. According to Professor Roger A. Ekirch of Virginia Tech University in the US, the segmented sleep, as opposed to a sleep followed, it was common to our ancestors: they slept for a while, they stayed awake for an hour (more or less) and returned to to sleep. Although it is not the case to try to force the return of this pattern, if wake during the night, do not go into stress for not getting back to sleep quickly and take the time as, concluded Roger Ekirch, was done once: read, pray, talk, make sex...”

- Visão Magazine (Lisbon), May 2, 2017

- “The sleep pattern was formerly different from today. The US historian Roger Ekirch argues that people slept earlier in two phases to four hours. Because you had between about rekindle the fire. So if you wake up at night, should not fret about it.”

- “The Unbearable Lightness of Sleeping.” Die Presse (Vienna), April 9, 2017

“8. Take an intermission Historians now know that our ancestors slept very differently from us. While most adults today go to bed and stay in bed, in the past people slept for a period, woke up for an hour or so, and then went back to sleep. Virginia Tech professor A. Roger Ekirch reported that this “segmented sleep” made for all kinds of nocturnal break activities, from reading to praying to having sex. There’s no reason to force yourself to switch from consolidated sleep to segmented sleep, but if you find that you wake in the night, don’t stress yourself out trying to doze off again—you’re following in the path of your forebears.”

- Sarah Begley, “The 9 New Sleep Rules,” Time, April 29, 2017

“I thought I was an insomniac. I was struck night after night with sudden wakefulness at 2am or 2:30am in the morning. I would fight it, I would try to go back to sleep, I’d drink tea. I would do all the things that everyone tells you to do for insomnia, but none of it really worked. Years later, I’ve learned to embrace my wakefulness instead of fighting it. A couple of years ago I read an article that completely changed my perspective. Once, people woke up in the middle of the night regularly. “Nocturnal awakenings aren’t abnormal at all; they are the natural rhythm that your body gravitates toward. According to historians and psychiatrists alike, it is the compressed, continuous eight-hour sleep routine to which everyone aspires today that is unprecedented in human history.” “The dominant pattern of sleep, arguably since time immemorial, was biphasic,” said Roger Ekirch, a sleep historian at Virginia Tech University and author of “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” (Norton 2005). . . . For me the impact was immediate. Imagine the freedom that opened when I no longer had to fight my middle of the night awakenings. No more disturbances or efforts to get back to sleep. Instead I pick up where I left off before bed or start something new based on what I was dreaming just before.”

- Aimee Michelle Haynes, Thrive Global, April 27, 2017

“Sleep deprivation often hits the headlines and we are frequently told we need 8 hours a night. But how much sleep do we really need? Are we sleeping less than we used to and is today's society really sleep deprived? A recent meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine aimed to answer these questions. Historian Professor Roger Ekirch, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA, reminded us that never before in human history should we be sleeping more soundly. Ekirch recounted the multiple ways in which sleep prior to modernity was highly vulnerable to disruption including bedding rife with house mites; frigid temperatures in poorly insulated buildings; and fear of demons and also of the peril of fire. And so while we have every reason to think our sleep has never been better, we seem to have increasing complaints of fatigue and insomnia, in particular, middle-of-the-night insomnia. But is this really a new phenomenon? The compressed, consolidated pattern of sleep is actually less than two centuries old. Previously most families experienced a broken pattern of sleep, with 'first sleep' from 9pm until midnight, an hour or so awake followed by a 'second sleep'. This biphasic pattern was rarely viewed in a negative way. The evolution into our modern consolidated sleep pattern was something that occurred over the 19th century, a time of dramatic change with reform movements and the increasing prevalence of artificial illumination. Ekirch argued that perhaps people that suffer from the middle of the night insomnia may actually be undergoing this older pattern of sleep and patients should be relieved of anxiety and their insomnia should be better termed ‘wakefulness’".

- April Cashin-Garbutt, Feb. 8, 2017, “A Royal Society of Medicine Meeting Review,” News-Medical Net

“It may bring some comfort to those who go to bed, only to wake up in the middle of the night frustratedly unable to get back to sleep. While today this is seen as insomnia, until the end of the 19th century people did it on purpose. Well after the Industrial Revolution, many people in Britain still swore by the health benefits of a ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’. Although insomnia is often thought of as a problem now, until the late 1800s, it was usual to wake up in the night and do chores before going back to bed. For centuries, according to a sleep historian, they would use the time when they woke up at night to do household chores, visit friends - or make love to their spouse. Sleeping through the night is by comparison a ‘modern invention’, according to Professor Roger Ekirch of Virginia Polytechnic and State University. Speaking yesterday at the Royal Society of Medicine, he said: ‘Middle of the night insomnia was a rare problem before the late 1800s. As early as the 16th century it was utterly normal, unworthy of comment.’ Bedtime was historically around 10pm, after which, he added: ‘Most individuals awakened shortly past midnight to an hour or so of consciousness, in which they meditated, they conversed and made love - not necessarily in that order. ‘A 16th century physician said making love was better after the first sleep, when people have more enjoyment and do it better.’ People used the gap between their first and second sleep to wash clothes, have a conversation or even to steal the neighbour’s firewood, historical records show. It was thought that lovemaking between the two sleep phases was responsible for large families, with labourers able to conceive several children because they waited until after their energy-giving first sleep to do it. It was also thought to aid digestion, if people turned from lying on their right to their left when they woke up during the night. References to two phases of sleep go back to Chaucer, with a character in The Squire’s Tale, in the Canterbury Tales, deciding to go back to bed after her ‘firste sleep’. The concept of sleeping through is a relatively modern invention and thanks to people working longer hours in the Industrial Revolution. Unless kept awake by a cold house, bed bugs or worry, most people were unconcerned about getting up in the night. It was not seen as insomnia, and ‘sleeplessness’ referred only to failing to fall asleep in the first place. But the practice of having a first and second sleep fell out of favour in the decades following the Industrial Revolution, when people increasingly worked long hours as machine manufacturing dominated British industry. The sleep historian said the shift came at the end of the 19th century, as the end of the first sleep crept later to around 3am, before it was jettisoned altogether. Suddenly sleeping in two phases was seen as inefficient and people were warned that indulging would lead to headaches and constipation. It was even feared that it might, in young men and women, cause ‘lustful thoughts’. Speaking at a Royal Society event in London on the subject of sleep, Prof Ekirch said: ‘Sleep represented a necessary evil best confined to a single interval, thus allowing someone to steal the march on the day and on one’s fellow human beings who were still enjoying their second sleep.’ As a result, today, the history professor said, many people who wake at night think they are ‘abnormal’. However research suggests this may be a normal sleeping pattern when people are away from artificial lights and the blue light from electronic devices. Prof Ekirch said: ‘Rather than the product of an implacable disorder, their sleep, viewed from the high ground of history, may just be natural.’

- Victoria Allen, “Why waking up in the night is natural: People regularly use to have two periods of sleep and do tasks in between,” Daily Mail, Feb. 7, 2017

Two hundred years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, our ancestors had, in fact, a rhythm very different from ours. The latter were sleeping in twice, with a waking phase between the two during which they prayed, made love, wondered about their dreams or shared moments with members of their community. . . . However, with the arrival of electricity, which prolongs the days, families began to stay awake later and later to delay the time of their bed, and thus to suppress the waking hour in the middle of the night. For Roger Ekirch, this change in sleep rhythm would be responsible for certain forms of insomnia, such as the night-time awakening. . . . Although his work is taken seriously by a large part of the scientific community, some dispute it. This is the case of Gandhi Yetish, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who believes that this vision is not universal and does not adapt to all societies.

- “Pourquoi Dormir D’une Traite la Nuit N’est Peut-Être Pas si Naturel,” GQ France, Mar. 24, 2017

Weirdly enough though, the way we sleep has changed drastically in the past two hundred years. In fact, our ancestors didn’t sleep through the night at all. Some scholars think they instead slept in two distinct shifts. Science of Us points to historian Roger Ekirch who says that patterns from people in early modern Europe and North America that show that humans slept in a “dead” and “morning” shift. This pattern is consistent with communities from many other cultures, including Brazil, Nigeria, and parts of Central America, leading Ekirch to believe that this might have been a universal model of sleep. What changed? As with everything, it was technology. When artificial lighting became widely available, people began realizing that tasks they had previously been unable to do in the dark were suddenly doable. Consequently, they began shifting their bedtimes later and later. As they did that, the space between the two sleep shifts shrank. Soon enough, it was just easier to sleep in one long shift through the night.

- Alanna Nuñez, This Is Why Humans Sleep Through the Night, And how to take a cue from our ancestors if you have sleeping troubles, Men’s Health, Mar. 9, 2017

“[The historian Roger Ekirch’s] essay "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles", published in 2001, has now become a classic. . . . Ekirch develops the idea that before the 1800s, in Europe and North America, sleep was divided into two parts: the "first sleep" or "deep sleep" andthe "second sleep" or "morning sleep" that makes it possible to wake up gently. The historian has demonstrated that this period of nocturnal awakening was used to pray, make love, interpret dreams, or ensure the safety of the group. Habits that disappeared in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America with the arrival of powerful artificial lights, said the magazine. For Roger Ekirch, artificial light in our modern societies has "upset our ancestral sleep cycle”, more than new technologies or the new organization of work.”

- Florian Adam, ‘Is it made to sleep in a slice or in a segmented way?”, Slate (France), March 9, 2017

“The first scholar to put consolidated sleep—today’s standard ‘one straight shot throughout the night’—under the microscope was historian Roger Ekirch. In his fascinating 2001 essay ‘Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,’ Ekirch revealed that across a wide range of nationalities and social classes in early modern Europe and North America, the standard pattern for nighttime sleep was to do it in two shifts of ‘segmented sleep.’ These two sleeps—sometimes called first and second sleep, sometimes ‘dead sleep’ and ‘morning sleep’—bridged an interval of ‘quiet wakefulness’ that lasted an hour or more. (The interval itself was sometimes called ‘the watching.’) Ekirch’s subsequent work offered evidence that a segmented nighttime pattern persisted well into the twentieth century in many non-Western locales, including among indigenous cultures in Nigeria, Central America, and Brazil. During the period of nighttime wakefulness, Ekirch showed, different cultures elaborated rituals—of prayer, lovemaking, dream interpretation, or security checks—and while the rituals varied, the pattern itself was so pervasive as to suggest an evolutionary basis that somehow became disrupted in the modern West. So why did this mode of sleeping fall by the wayside, in favor of the eight-hour, lie-down-and-die model that has become an unquestioned norm? According to Ekirch, the main culprit was the spread of powerful artificial lighting in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America, and later in other locales. As activities that were previously nearly impossible to conduct under cover of darkness became fashionable under an ever-widening penumbra of powerful light, Europeans and Americans gradually shifted their bedtimes later. And as the available space between first and second sleeps shrank, the pattern of two nocturnal sleeps—and the enchanted space between them—became untenable. So complete was the transition to consolidated sleep that an American newspaper advice column in 1911 counseled readers who couldn’t sleep well to take their sleep in two shifts—as if this were a novel suggestion! Ekirch argues that the reason so many of us experience middle-of-the-night insomnia (the kind that comes after a few hours of sleep), is that ever since electric lights reordered our sense of time, we’ve disrupted our ancestral—perhaps our evolutionary—rhythms. And while Ekirch eventually came to view the reasons for the shift from segmented to consolidated sleep as more complicated than just exposure to light—including shifts in technology, changing cultural attitudes toward work and rest, and the economic pressure to manage time more efficiently under industrial capitalism—powerful artificial lighting, he wrote, still ‘exerted the broadest and most enduring impact upon sleep’s consolidation’. . . Sleep specialists in the United States and Europe have begun to take these findings seriously, reevaluating the common wisdom that healthy sleep means uninterrupted nocturnal slumber. Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford University, saw a therapeutic value in this new view of what constitutes normal sleep: ‘Many people wake up at night and panic,” he said in an interview. “I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.’”

- Benjamin Reiss, “Sleeping Through the Night is a Relatively New Invention,” New York Magazine, March 8, 2017

“In 2005, the historian A. Roger Ekirch sparked a new conversation by reintroducing an old practice: segmented sleep. Up until the industrial era, people slept in two, four-hour chunks, separated by a late-night break, instead of the eight hours of uninterrupted rest that's become the modern-day standard. Learning of this bygone historical practice was no less than revelatory for many people who sought to revive the golden era of sleep.”

- Theresa Foster, Van Winkle’s, March 3, 2017

“We know that before the machine age, people slept in a variety of ways, including (famously) ‘segmented sleep,’ or sleep in two shifts.”

- Jennifer Senior, New York Times, March 1, 2017

“Our findings also support predictions from the sleep segmentation hypothesis. Functional linear modeling of both female and male subjects directly engaged in agricultural activities show that 24 h time-averaged actigraphy sleep-wake patters are unconsolidated, or segmented. In particular, we documented an increase in activity after midnight, which is especially pronounced in males. These data evince a pattern strikingly similar to the “first sleep” and “second sleep” pattern described by Ekirch (2006, 2016).

- David Sansom et al., “Segmented Sleep in Nonelectric, Small-Scale Agricultural Society in Madagascar,” American Journal of Human Biology, January 2017, p.10.

“Thanks to fascinating research I've recently come across, I've realized that what I'm doing is entirely natural. It turns out that I'm not an insomniac with a medical problem, but someone whose sleeping pattern harks back to an earlier time. I am sleeping less like a 21st century man and much more like our ancestors did. And knowing that has helped me conquer my anxiety so that I am sleeping better than I have in years. . . Surprisingly, the person who has done most to highlight its importance is not a doctor, but a historian, Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech in the U.S.”

- Dr. Michael Moseley, “Doctor Michael Moseley Reveals How He Defeated His Sleep Problem,” Daily Mail, Oct. 25, 2016.

“Ekirch (2001, 2006, 2016), has done important work in documenting different sleep patterns in the preindustrial world. . . . . For individuals who wake up in the middle of the night, the realization that their awakening may just be a throwback to an earlier sleep pattern may reduce some of the frustration and anxiety they feel.”

- John Cline, PhD, “Up in the Middle of the Night,” Psychology Today, Oct.1, 2016

Historian A. Roger Ekirch’s book At day’s close: night in times past describes how households at this time retired a couple of hours after dusk, woke a few hours later for one to two hours, and then had a second sleep until dawn. During this waking period, people would relax, ponder their dreams or have sex. Some would engage in activities like sewing, chopping wood or reading, relying on the light of the moon or oil lamps. Ekirch found references to the first and second sleep started to during the late 17th century. This is thought to have started in the upper classes in Northern Europe and filtered down to the rest of Western society over the next 200 years. Interestingly, the appearance of sleep maintenance insomnia in the literature in the late 19th century coincides with the period where accounts of split sleep start to disappear. Thus, modern society may place unnecessary pressure on individuals that they must obtain a night of continuous consolidated sleep every night, adding to the anxiety about sleep and perpetuating the problem. -Melinda Jackson, PhD and Siobhan Banks, PhD, “Did We Used to Have Two Sleeps Rather Than One?” The Conversation, June 15, 2016

“In At Day’s Close, historian Roger Ekrich of Virginia Tech drew together diaries, court records, anthropology, and high literature to demonstrate that many people slept in two sittings (dual sleeping). There was a first sleep, which began after dusk, followed by a waking period of one to two hours, and then a second sleeping period. During the waking period people would read, pray, have sex, and even visit neighbors. . . . All of this has profound implications for people who have trouble staying asleep at night. . . . Today advertising encourages us to medicate ourselves if we have trouble sleeping for eight straight hours. But sleeping for extended periods might not be natural at all; it might just be our bodies’ response to artificial stimuli like caffeine and lighting. So if your partner wakes you up in the middle of the night because he’s unable to sleep, spare him your wrath. After all, you’re the one with the abnormal sleep pattern.”

- Candida Moss, “We’ve Never Agreed on How to Sleep,” Daily Beast, April 17, 2016

“Until streetlights, being up late meant wandering town in butt-­clenching terror, tripping over stray animals until the wind blew out your lantern and you were set upon by armed bandits. So you went home before dark and went to bed early, waking after midnight. Much of this was forgotten until 2001, when the historian Roger Ekirch unearthed segmented sleep in the cultural history of pre-­19th-­century Europe.”

- Jesse Barron, “Segmented Sleep,” New York Times Magazine, March 31, 2016

“Ekirch’s work has been widely embraced by sleep scientists and has informed our scientific understanding of insomnia. An important implication of these historical findings is the idea that insomnia of the waking-up-in-the-wee-hours variety — as opposed to insomnia that involves struggling to fall asleep — is likely a remnant of this long-dominant pattern of sleep, rather than a disorder. People with this type of insomnia, who likely have more sensitive circadian rhythms and a greater sensitivity to light, may be better suited to biphasic rather than consolidated sleep. ‘Middle-of-the-night insomnia — the most common form of insomnia today — only becomes viewed as a medical problem in the late 19th and early 20th century,’ Ekirch said. ‘Before then, awakening in the middle of the night was thought to be utterly natural.’”

-Claire Gregoire, “Why Sleeping Though the Night May Not be ‘Natural,’” Huffington Post, March 23, 2016

“An eight-hour stretch of sleep may not even be natural. In his book ‘At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past,’ the historian Roger Ekirch cites more than five hundred references from diaries, court records, medical papers, and literature, demonstrating that our pre-industrial ancestors slept in two discrete parcels of time. After what a character in ‘The Canterbury Tales’ called the ‘firste sleep,’ you awoke around midnight for an hour or so, and might engage in, say, tending the fire, brewing ale, fooling around, committing petty larceny, praying. Then you would sleep again until dawn.”

-Patricia Marx, “In Search of Forty Winks,” The New Yorker, February 15, 2016

“Historian Roger Ekirch's acclaimed book - At Day's Close: Night In Times Past - cites over 500 historical references, for instance, in diaries and court papers, to a segmented sleeping pattern. Centuries ago, two shorter sleeps, rather than one long one, was the norm.”

- Anna Maxstead, “What Losing an Hour's Sleep will Do to Your Body, Telegraph, March 27, 2015

“Our classic eight-hour-night only dates back to the invention of the light bulb in the late 1800s. Historians believe that before the dawn of electric lighting most people got plenty of sleep, and practiced what they call “segmented sleep,” snoozing for several hours in the first part of the night, when darkness fell, then waking in the middle of the night for a few hours of eating, drinking, praying, chatting with friends or maybe even canoodling, before ducking back under the covers again until morning. The arrival of electricity, argues sleep historian A. Roger Ekirch, led to later bedtimes and fewer hours of sleep overall.”

- Betsy Isaacson, “Our Sleep Problem and What to Do About It,” Newsweek, Jan. 30, 2015

“In 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch published a remarkable study that drew upon hundreds of diaries and instructional manuals to convincingly argue that humans had historically divided their long nights into two distinct sleep periods.”

- Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (New York, 2014).

“Dating well into the 18th century, two periods of wakefulness alternating with two shifts of sleep per 24 hours is normal. During this time period, it is common for people to pray, think, reflect on dreams, brew ale, and even visit neighbors in the middle of the night."

- Harvard University Medical School, Division of Sleep Medicine, 2014

“This sleeping pattern is called segmented sleep. Historical documents across cultures show plenty of references to a first and second sleep, divided by a period of being awake in the middle of the night. . . . . But lest you think that time was just wasted when people woke in the middle of the night, there are some very well-known, very productive people who used that period of night-waking to think and to write, both before the advent of electric lighting and after - people like Thomas Jefferson and Frank Lloyd Wright.”

- Tess Vigeland, “All Things Considered,” NPR, 2014

“Ekirch’s ideas were the subject of a dedicated session at Sleep 2013, the annual meeting of the US Associated Professional Sleep Societies. One of the biggest implications to emerge was that the most common insomnia, ‘middle-of-the-night insomnia’, is not a disorder but rather a harking back to a natural form of sleep – a shift in perception that greatly reduced my own concern about night-waking.”

- Karen Emslie, “Why Broken Sleep is a Golden Time for Creativity,” Aeon Magazine, Nov. 7, 2014

“So many people have sleep problems today, so many! It's important for us to learn from history here, that it may not be all that normal to sleep through the night.”

- Anne Rice, novelist, October 2, 2014

“The anthropologist and historian Roger Ekirch believes the largest contributing factor to the adoption of monophasic sleep (sleeping once a day) has been the widespread availability of artificial light since industrialisation in the mid 19th century. He also says the arrival of electricity has triggered later bedtimes and fewer overall hours of rest. For centuries, polyphasic patterns dictated the 24-hour cycle. In the Middle Ages, adults typically slept in multiple segmented two- to three-hour periods, waking for stints of conscious restfulness, prayer, or sex before retiring again to slumber.”

- Elizabeth Paton, “Our Waking Hours Increase with the Demands of Modern Life,” Financial Times, May 18, 2014

“Our ancestors had a different solution. Homer and Chaucer both refer to the ancient practice of a short "fyrste sleep" at dusk after which people awoke – and talked, read, prayed, had sex, brewed beer or burgled – before a second sleep till dawn, the historian Roger Ekirch reveals in his book At Day's Close.”

- Paul Vallely, “We Need Real Sleep,” Independent, May 15, 2014

“Computers, phones, light bulbs…they all attack our eyes with artificial light, tricking our body clocks into living at a perpetual high noon. Temporal disorientation is an unintended consequence of technological innovation. As a result we’re missing out on true wakefulness and, in the process, creativity that sprouts from a brain that is properly rested. Waking up in the middle of the night? That’s totally natural and it might do us some good, according to sleep historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech. “Typically people went to bed at nine or 10 o’clock. They slept for three, at most, four hours, and then they rose” sometime after midnight to do “anything and everything imaginable,” he says. Then people went back to bed until dawn to rise naturally with the morning light. That was before the gaslight proliferated in factories and homes in the early 1800s. Now, few of us know true night.”

- Alex Goldmark, “Want to be More Creative? Sleep Like the Ancients Did,” Fast Company, May 14, 2014

“This obsession with eight hours of continuous sleep is largely a creation of the electrified age. Back when night fell for, on average, half of each 24 hours, people slept in phases. In “At Day’s Close,” a remarkable history of night in the early modern West, Roger Ekirch writes that people fell asleep not long after dark for the “first sleep.” Then they awoke, somnolent but not asleep, often around midnight, when for a few hours they talked, read, prayed, had sex, brewed beer or burgled. Then they went back to sleep for a shorter period. Mr. Ekirch concludes, ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind.’”

- T.M. Luhrmann, Watkins University Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University, “To Dream in Different Cultures,” New York Times, May 13, 2014

“Should sleep happen in one solid block? Many people believe that they should sleep "straight through" the night, without waking up. In reality, sleep is never continuous when measured objectively. A recent historical account of sleep presented strong evidence that until very recently, most people slept in two blocks at night, separated by about an hour or so of quiet waking time in the middle of the night (Ekirch: At Day's Close: Night in Times Past).”

- “Frequently Asked Questions,” Massachusetts General Hospital Neurology-Sleep Center, 2014

“In the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in 2013, there was a symposium dedicated to the history and science of segmented sleep and the (arguably mythical) assumption that sleep should be (or at least feel like it is) uninterrupted. Among the speakers was historian A. Roger Ekirch, author of “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” who provided intriguing context to the presentations by leaders in the field.”

- Matt T. Bianchi, “Sleep Deprivation: Practical and Philosophical Considerations,” in Bianchi, ed., Sleep Deprivation and Disease: Effects on the Body, Brain and Behavior (New York, 2014), p.16.

“And even the idea that we should naturally sleep through the night, as I so often don’t, is in dispute. According to the historian A Roger Ekirch, in pre-industrial times it was common to have a ‘first or ’deep sleep’ and a ‘second’ or ‘morning sleep’, with an hour or more of wakefulness between, sometimes referred to as ‘the watch’.

- Kate Bussmann, “The Science of Sleep,” Sunday Telegraph, April 27, 2014

"The most effective remedy for me, and one that continues to work today was history, and I don't mean the sedative qualities of history textbooks. A glance through books on the history of the night (a wonderful new field of research), shows that our idea of an eight-hour sleep is actually very recent and only came about with gas-lighting and industrialisation in the late 18th century. Before this people did what many insomniacs still do: they had two sleeps. Historian Roger Ekirch has found that in preindustrial households families would awaken in the dead of night for a period of time. Generally people would sleep for three to four hours, wake for two to three hours and then sleep again until the morning. What would they do in this interim period? Ekirch says that they'd go visiting neighbours, study, stoke fires, pray, smoke tobacco and have sex. One doctor from the 1500s said that the reason why working class people had more children is because they always have sex after first sleep. And yes, they would refer to their sleep not in terms of one eight-hour block but in terms of first sleep and second sleep.The difference, of course, is that night was a more vast and perilous period than for us. There was no electric indoor lighting or street lighting to allow for the intrusion of work and so sleep generally fell over a 12-hour period. People also couldn't travel the distances that we do today during the night for fear of bandits, screeching owls or wolves that look like hounds. When lighting made the night a site of pleasure rather than peril, and industrialisation made the day an expansive terrain of productive labour, two luxurious sleeps became one. How does this history help insomnia? For me, it proved that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the idea of an eight-hour uninterrupted sleep. If I went to bed earlier, it was OK to wake up for a few hours. It also meant that I stopped howling into the void during those few hours I was awake and instead used that time to read novels, do relaxation exercises or write. In my efforts to keep as close to my medieval forbears as possible, I never looked at my phone. The worst thing you can do when you wake up at 3am is to stress. And nothing is likely to induce panic more than the idea that sleeping uninterrupted for eight hours is necessary for mental and physical health.”

- Aleica Simmonds, “Awake in Fright: Insomnia Made My Life Unbearable,” Sydney Morning Herald, Apr. 23, 2014

“Ancient peoples, without electric lights and Twitter, slept twice: first sleep and second sleep. Homer talks about it in the Odyssey. The historian A. Roger Ekirch has suggested that before the Industrial Revolution it was entirely normal to wake up in the middle of the night for an hour or two, read or think or talk to a bedfellow or go for a walk or have sex, and then go back to sleep. I remind myself of this. It’s completely normal.”

- Naomi Alderman, “Insomnia and Me,” The Guardian, April 18, 2014

“Historical tidbit of the week: Mary’s awake in the middle of the night, referencing segmented sleep, a sleep pattern widely accepted until the last century or so, in which a sleeper experienced two four-hour periods of sleep, interrupted by a period of wakefulness in which it was common to tend to the house, visit with family, pray, and burn down your neighbor’s cabbages.”

- A.V. Club/The Onion on the second episode of the AMC television series “Turn,” April 14, 2014

“Professor Ekirch says the references are strong evidence, because the way they are worded consistently reveals this was routine and normal, nothing special or unusual - just the way things were, taken for granted. Top experts in sleep disorders, albeit not necessarily family physicians, now tell some patients not to worry if they routinely wake up for a few hours, then sleep a second shift. It may be culturally worrisome to people, but it's not necessarily harmful.”

- Telegraph Journal (Saint John, New Brunswick), Mar. 10, 2014

“One of the most profound advances that the study of sleep has turned up so far, namely Ekirch’s rediscovery of non-consolidated sleep in Europe and North America . . . .That we used to sleep differently and that consolidated sleep might be socially constructed has the potential to radically unsettle the science and medicine of sleep – and to open up possibilities for thinking about what else has been shaped so thoroughly by the civilizing process (to invoke Norbert Elias) as to totally escape notice or critique.”

- Benjamin Reiss, Emory University, “Sleep’s Hidden Histories,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Feb. 15, 2014.

“Historian A. Roger Ekirch made the remarkable discovery that up until the Industrial Age, most Europeans experienced two spans of sleep per night, with an hour or two of quiet wakefulness between.”

- Kate Duff, The Secret Life of Sleep (Beyond Words Books, 2014)

“The sleep rhythms of the human brain have fundamentally changed over the centuries. Medieval literary texts, medical manuscripts and tales make reference to a mysterious "first sleep" and "second sleep." The "first sleep" began shortly after sundown and lasted until after midnight. When people woke up, they would pray, read, have sex, whatever. The "second sleep" then lasted until sunup. In experiments, researchers have found that when people live solely by natural light, they revert back to this ancient "segmented sleep" pattern and that, chemically, the body in that interval between first and second sleep is "in a state equivalent to what you might feel after spending a day at the spa." It seems that, thanks to the light bulb, the entire industrialized world is sleeping unnaturally.”

- Maureen Corrigan, “Fresh Air,” NPR, 2013

“Before the Industrial Revolution and electric lighting it was quite usual to have a first sleep of some 3-4 hours and a second sleep of a similar length, with some 1-2 hours in between for activities like discussions, visiting, praying, or sex. So if you are wakeful in the night don’t think it automatically means you have a sleep problem that is unhealthy.”

- Dr. Dorothy Bruck, Department of Psychology, Victoria University, Australian Sleep Health Foundation, Oct. 28, 2013

“This forgotten way of sleeping was rediscovered by Professor A. Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. . . . Dr Guy Meadows, the director of The Sleep School in London . . . thinks that tackling anxiety is the key. His advice is to be relaxed about the amount of sleep that you get — and to be accepting of any problems you may have at night. Dr Meadows says that highly publicised medical concerns about insomnia mean ‘the cultural pressure for us to sleep has never been greater, while in our hurried modern lives the time available in which to sleep has never been so scarce.’ . . . He also encourages [his clients] to accept that wakefulness happens. ‘Getting up in the middle of the night to have a pee is not a disaster,’ he says. ‘Broken sleep is entirely natural and normal.’”

- John Naish, “Stop Losing Sleep Over Insomnia,” Daily Mail, October 23, 2012

“We are not computers or ‘apps’; we are human, and probably more like other mammals in having evolved to sleep in more than one opportunity across the day. The historian A. Roger Ekirch published a book (At Day’s Close) describing evidence that humans in a variety of cultures, and before the Industrial Revolution, slept in two bouts during the night, a first sleep and a second sleep. Without electricity to light up the night, first sleep began soon after dark (and is consistent with our circadian biology whereby we become sleepy as the melatonin level rises at about the time of darkness). After several hours of sleep, people awoke during the night, got out of bed, and even socialized or left the house without the apparent expectation of this as a sleep interruption or problem. A second sleep occurred in the hours before daylight. The current obsession with a consolidated single night of sleep may be a relatively recent phenomenon of our developed cultures with electricity and bright evening light.”

- Orfeu M. Buxton, PhD, Associate Neuroscientist, Division of Sleep Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, “Advice About Sleep Deficiency in Midlife, Part 2,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 2013

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“We are built to wake up after a few hours of sleep and be up and running for a while at night. Until the 1850s people slept in two shifts and were awake a couple of hours in between, says Torbjörn Åkerstedt [Director, Stress Research Institute, Stockholm.] Before the light bulb we went to bed at eight o'clock and woke up a few hours later to be on the go for a while….The idea that one should sleep eight hours without interruption, in other words, is a new invention which is colored by our values ??and modern lifestyle….The evidence suggests that we slept two shifts sleep until the Industrial Revolution. In 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch at Virginia Tech published a study based on 16 years of research that yielded strong historical evidence that we are biologically designed to sleep in two shifts.”

- Isabelle Ståhl, Expressen, Stockholm, August 3, 2013.

“Research by the American historian Roger Ekirch has revealed that the habit of sleeping in a single eight-hour block is fairly recent. Until 150 years ago we slept quite differently.”

- Martinique Still, M.D., “Science of Sleep,” Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, August 2, 2013.

“Professor Philippa Gander, director of the Sleep/Wake Research Centre, based at Massey University in Wellington, says there is growing interest in the idea that what we conceive of as normal and healthy – eight hours of solid sleep a night – is an artefact of artificial lighting. . . . An historian told the Baltimore sleep conference that the idea of two sleeps crops up often in old literature. ‘All the way back to the Greeks they talk about first sleep and second sleep,’ Gander says. About the time of the Industrial Revolution, and the advent of cheap artificial light, ‘there started to be a whole popular movement against the evils of the second sleep. It was a time for lasciviousness and laziness and all that sort of thing, and ‘real people got out of bed and got on with waking things.’ Waking in the middle of the night is now a common complaint, often diagnosed as insomnia. About 20% of people prescribed sleeping pills will pop them at that point. ‘The implication is that quite a large proportion of people may be taking sleeping pills for no good reason other than to try to cover up their natural pattern,’ Gander says. ‘One of the questions that was being discussed in that symposium is: are we making a big mistake here? Is that just people who have a normal sleep pattern and they shouldn’t be worried about it?’

- Catherine Woulfe, New Zealand Listener, July 27, 2013.

“If [Norbert] Elias casts important light on the ‘civilizing’ or ‘privatizing’ or ‘sequestration’ of sleeping bodies over the centuries, Ekirch enriches and emboldens the picture through a series of extraordinary insights into the ‘segmented’ slumber of preindustrial times. Sleep, in short, may have been no idyll in the past, and the quality of our sleep may have grown appreciably since this time, but we may also have lost something vital in the process.”

– Simon J. Williams, Sleep and Society: Sociological Ventures into the Unknown (Routledge, 2013).

“One of the most profound advances that the study of sleep has turned up so far, namely Ekirch’s rediscovery of non-consolidated sleep in Europe and North America. . . . That we used to sleep differently and that consolidated sleep might be socially constructed has the potential to radically unsettle the science and medicine of sleep.”

- Matthew Wolf-Meyer, University of California, Santa Cruz, “Longing for Sleep: Assessing the Place of Sleep in the 21st Century,” Somatosphere, Mar.19-22, 2013

“Often we perceive a good night’s sleep to be seven or eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, waking in the morning refreshed, rested, and ready to face the day. However there’s a growing body of evidence, from recent study and historical evidence, that shows that it can be perfectly natural to sleep for around four hours, wake for an hour or two, then go back to sleep. Historian Roger Ekirch published numerous papers and a book called At Day’s Close, drawn from 16 years of research, in which he revealed a wealth of evidence that we used to sleep in two distinct chunks. . . . Many sleeping problems may have their roots in the human body’s natural preference for segmented sleep, and this could be the linked to sleep interruption insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, or terminal insomnia, when they wake in the early hours and cannot get back to sleep. So if we do wake during the night it’s important that we don’t become anxious, worried that we won’t get back to sleep and will therefore suffer with tiredness and fatigue the next day. What we may be experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern of ages past. So rather than seeing it as a problem, look upon it differently, don’t panic, relax and you may soon drop off back to sleep.”

- “Get a Good Night’s Sleep,” United Kingdom Sleep Council, 2012

“One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love.”

- David K. Randall, “Rethinking Sleep,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 2012

“This bimodal sleep has been observed in many other animals. One such creature turns out to be pre-industrial man. Only recently have anthropologists and historians scrutinized the sleep of other cultures, earlier centuries and prehistoric humans. In the remarkably informative At Day's Close, Night in Times Past, Roger Ekirch unveils nocturnal life in the pre-industrial west.”

- Paul Spector, M.D., “Why You Might Have Trouble Sleeping,” Huffington Post, Sept. 21, 2012

“Some researchers are now questioning the idea of a long uninterrupted sleep, says David N. Neubauer, MD, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. There's some evidence to show that in darker, earlier times, before LEDs or wall sconces, people tended to sleep in two phases. ‘Sleep historians like A. Roger Ekirch have found that people would sleep deeply for half the night, get up and do things for an hour or so, then fall back to sleep for a few more hours,’ says Neubauer. ”

- Corrie Pikul, “Sleep Myths You Can Ignore,” Oprah.com, Sept. 17, 2012

“So why is sleep, which seems so simple, becoming so problematic? Much of the problem can be traced to the revolutionary device that's probably hanging above your head right now: the light bulb. Before this electrically illuminated age, our ancestors slept in two distinct chunks each night. The so-called first sleep took place not long after the sun went down and lasted until a little after midnight. A person would then wake up for an hour or so before heading back to the so-called second sleep. . . . It was a fact of life that was once as common as breakfast—and one which might have remained forgotten had it not been for the research of a Virginia Tech history professor named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent nearly 20 years in the 1980s and '90s investigating the history of the night.”

- David K. Randall, “Decoding the Science of Sleep,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 3, 2012

“More interesting still, the historian Roger Ekirch has done some fascinating research which suggests that before the advent of artificial light in the industrial revolution, humans typically slept in two phases: after dark, they slept for a few hours, but then woke to engage in some activities – before later retiring again for a “second sleep”. And some medical researchers and historians think that this segmented pattern might actually be more beneficial than the modern “consolidated” – or “monophasic” – ideal of seven straight hours, or the model which is now championed by western doctors or self-help books.”

- Gillian Tett, “Sleeping on the Job,” Financial Times, June 22, 2012

“In 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch, of Virginia Tech, published a seminal paper, after 16 years of research, which revealed that humans used to have two sleeps, with a period of wakefulness in-between. His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published in 2005, gives more than 500 references to segmented sleep taken from diaries, medical books, court records and literature. References to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late-17th century - a shift Ekirch attributes to improvements in street lighting and an increasingly time-conscious sensitivity to efficiency. Sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs argues that night waking is "part of normal physiology" and that trying to sleep in a consolidated block may be damaging if it makes people anxious.”

- Jessica Jonzen, “On the Trail of the Elusive Big Sleep,” London Times, June 19, 2012

“In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. . . .These references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep. ‘It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,’ Ekirch says. During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps. And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex. A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but ‘after the first sleep’, when ‘they have more enjoyment’ and ‘do it better’. Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society. By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled. Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light. This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests. The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear. ' For most of evolution we slept a certain way,' says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. 'Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology. The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too. Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view. ' Many people wake up at night and panic,' he says. ' I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.' "

- Stephanie Hegarty, “The Myth of the Eight-Hour Sleep,” BBC News Magazine, February 22, 2012

“The magazine cites research, including a paper by historian Roger Ekirch at Virginia Tech, who after 16 years of study found a bundle of evidence – in diaries, court documents and literature – that humans naturally used to divide their sleep in two, often waking up in the middle for a couple hours. In the middle wake-up, Dr. Ekirch reports, people might stay in bed, read or write, go out and visit neighbours, or even partake in some middle-of-the-night canoodling. (The research uncovered a doctor’s manual from 16th-century France that recommended couples trying to conceive had the best chance between after the 'first sleep,' as it was called.) In the 19th century, the notion of the first and second sleep began to lose favour, and by the 1920s, the pattern had pretty much vanished – snuffed out with the advent of street lighting and a surge of coffee houses, and as the amount of time people had available for lying around in bed either sleeping, or in between, shortened. But Dr. Ekirch’s argument, as the BBC explains, is that while most people have adapted to one long sleep, many sleep problems may be attributed to going against the natural preference for sleeping in segments.”

-Erin Anderson, “Not Getting Steady Shut-Eye? Don’t Lose Sleep Over It,” Globe and Mail (Montreal), February 22, 2012

“The prevailing belief that a good night consists of 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is perhaps completely wrong. . . .The British historian Roger Ekirch has delved into books and material from Homer's Odyssey to anthropological studies of Nigerian tribes to write his book: At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. . . . Roger Ekirch’s theory is backed by various researchers - among others, the renowned psychiatrist Thomas Alvin Wehr. He performed in the 1990s a study in which he showed that segmented sleep is apparently a natural sleep rhythm.”

- Esben Larsen Mikkelsen, “Tvivl om den gode nattesøvn,” Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten (Viby, Denmark), February 22, 2012

“Scientists have long argued over whether we need eight consecutive hours of sleep per night, and a look back through history seems to indicate that we may not. According to the BBC, Virginia Tech historian Roger Ekirch promotes the theory that humans have historically snoozed in two distinct chunks, broken up by an hour or two of alertness. Ekirch poured over 'diaries, court records, medical books and literature' to back up his belief in segmented sleep. Compelling evidence includes a 16th-century doctor's manual advising couples that the best time to conceive is 'after the first sleep. . . when they have more enjoyment [and] do it better.'"

- MSNBC.com, February 22, 2012

“Sleeping eight hours a night is the advice that we hear most often. Ask parents, friends and even doctors, who are worried because we are stressed or weakened. But they could be wrong. Indeed there is a myth to dispel that has stood continuously for all this time. In fact four hours at night might be enough to recharge the body, based upon a book by the historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech. Over 20 years Ekirch undertook a detailed study of the human relationship with the night, analyzing diaries, medical books, and literature, finding more than 500 references to ways in which at night people slept. The references describe sleep that began about two hours after dusk, followed by a waking period of one to two hours and then by a second lot of rest. And when they woke in the middle of the night, . . . some got up, went to the toilet, smoked tobacco, or even visited the neighbors. Most people, however, remained in bed, meditating, praying or looking through a book, certainly not in a desperate attempt to get back to sleep immediately. . . . And now, therefore, disorders such as insomnia are the result of habits that occurred only in the modern age. When we can not fall back to sleep, according to this expert conclusion, we are not doing anything but following an old habit and natural experience. And we are not suffering from insomnia."

-“Otto ore di sonno? Troppe, ne bastano quattro,” Il Mattino (Naples), February 23, 2012

“Research shows we're not resting as God intended. If it's after midnight where you are and you're struggling to fall asleep, this article is for you. In the past century, sleeping patterns in the US and around the world have fallen into an unnatural cycle, causing insomnia, affecting daily performance, and driving people towards pharmaceutical drugs to control sleep. Your insomnia may be caused by society's insistence that you sleep for a single eight-hour block at night instead of following a natural pattern.The problem likely arises from our unnatural sleep pattern. Both historical and medical studies reveal that humans have a natural inclination to sleep in two periods per day instead of one solid block at night. In 2001, Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a paper based on 16 years of historical research. The evidence he drew upon reveal a long-lost historical fact: humans used to sleep in two periods, not one as we do today. Professor Ekirch published a book based on his studies, 'At Day's Close: Night in Times Past' which was published in 2005. In the book, he presents more than 500 historical references to segmented sleep schedules drawn from diaries to literature and even court records. He also uses anthropological data from the modern tribes of Nigeria to support his claim with contemporary evidence. . . . For most adults however, falling asleep on cue in the evening and remaining asleep through the night is a daunting task that is dreaded because failure can mean difficulty in the day ahead. It also causes anxiety and stress as the individual struggles with the psychological pressure to return to sleep when their body refuses. . . . Ekirch found that in the waking period between sleep, people once engaged in many activities. One common activity was prayer and meditation. Unfortunately, by forcing ourselves into an unnatural sleep pattern and viewing quiet personal time as 'wasteful' we find dramatic increases in anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism, and drug use. Perhaps we have it wrong - for time spent in prayer and contemplation is never wasted time, something to think about as you lie awake tonight."

- “Got Insomnia? Sleep on This,” Catholic Online, February 23, 2012

“The healthy habit of sleeping seven to nine hours every night is not always the most natural way for humans to rest. Scientific studies and history demonstrate that, throughout history, people actually did not sleep at a stretch, . . . A sixteenth-century medical manual even recommended keeping sex in the middle of the night, after a 'first sleep' as 'more enjoyable' and 'done better'. According to historian Roger Ekirch, who has researched the subject for 16 years, there is numerous historical evidence to show that people slept in two phases. Today the Tiv tribe of Nigeria continues to use the terms 'first sleep' and 'second sleep' to refer to the times of the night. Ekirch's study, says the BBC, concluded that this conception of sleep at night began to fade in the late seventeenth century, coinciding with the arrival of night lighting of cities (Paris was in 1667, the first city to put lighting in all its streets).”

- “Realmente necesitamos dormir ocho horas seguidas?,” La Vanguardia (Barcelona), February 23, 2012

“According to Roger Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech University, eight hours of sleep is a fairly new invention. The most decisive change in our sleep patterns occurred when electric light was introduced. Before the Industrial Revolution, we had very different rhythms, namely what I call segmented sleep, writes Roger Ekirch. In his 20-year research, he found more than 500 written sources, dating back to Homer, that support his conclusion that we once had two phases of sleep each night. They had names such as 'first sleep' and 'second sleep' or 'morning sleep.' The first, which was seen as the most important, lasted normally from about 9 pm to midnight. One woke up and remained awake one or two hours before you fell into the second sleep.”

- Artnt Olaf Foseide, “Før sov vi to gonger kvar natt,” Framtida i Nord (Nordresia, Norway), February 24, 2012

“What is a ‘normal’ sleep pattern? This turns out to be an interesting historical question. As recently as 200 years ago, sleep patterns differed significantly from ours. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech, wrote a wonderful book on the subject called At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. Ekirch documents, through analysis of hundreds of primary sources, that our ancestors commonly had a “first sleep” followed by a period of wakefulness, followed in turn by a “second” or “morning” sleep. This pattern, a function of living in a night that was both long and dark, disappeared with modern home and street lighting systems. In other words, we all sleep abnormally, at least in historical terms, though some more abnormally than others. My cancer patients frequently complain about their sleep, or lack thereof, particularly in the months following chemotherapy. As many as 45% of cancer patients complain of sleeplessness in some series . . . . Does any of this matter from a cancer standpoint? If you don’t get a good night’s sleep, will your micrometastases wake up? We don’t really know, but if you mimic obstructive sleep apnea in mice by exposing them to intermittent hypoxia, their tumors grow at a more rapid rate.”

- George W. Sledge, Jr., MD, “Perchance to Dream,” Oncology Times, Feb.27, 2012

“An increasing number of scientists share Ekirch's belief that some sleeping problems suffered today may have been inherited from the human body's natural preference for shorter sessions of sleep. 'For most of evolution we slept a certain way,' says one sleep psychologist. 'Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology.' This is sort of good news for those of us who often wake in the middle of the night - we're just doing what nature intended. Although the fact might not really compensate for all those hours staring into darkness, it may help us avoid the waves of anxiety that such sleeplessness can cause.”

- Martin Hesp, “Why Scientists Are No Longer in the Dark When It Comes to Sleep,” Western Morning News (Plymouth, UK), March 12, 2012

“Roger Ekirch, a professor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech and author of At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, has found a wealth of evidence to suggest that the single sleep is a modern occurrence, with "first" and "second" sleeps considered the norm since the beginning of human civilisation. ‘The pattern of our sleep has changed from a segmented or bi-phasic pattern, which existed from time immemorial, to the compressed, consolidated form to which we aspire today, but do not always succeed in achieving,’ Ekirch told me. . . . Over the course of the next 250 years the trend filtered throughout the rest of Western society and by 1920 the concept of the first and second sleep had been eradicated from our collective memory. Sleep scientists today are only just starting to unpack the evolutionary underpinning of insomnia and other prevalent disorders. ‘There are some people who have adapted to modern society and are able to have this consolidated single sleep and there are others who have struggled to adapt as well and are easily distracted by noise and other disturbances and wake up in the middle of the night,’ explained Ron Grunstein, professor of sleep medicine at the University of Sydney. . . . Both Grunstein and Ekirch agree that the best thing people who have trouble staying asleep throughout the night can do is not fret about it. If you find that you can't easily drift back off you might want to take a leaf out of the pages of history and engage in some low-stimulus activity for an hour or two rather than sit there worrying about it. ‘People who awaken in the middle of the night for no explicable reason should not torment themselves about the source of their wakefulness or think themselves abnormal,’ Ekirch said. ‘Both physicians and patients have told me that this knowledge alleviates anxiety, which in itself contributes to wakefulness upon stirring in the middle of the night. Judged by thousands of years of human history, these so-called insomniacs are arguably more normal than the rest of us.’”

- Luke Malone, “Eight-Hour Sleep Unnatural, Say Experts,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 16, 2012

“And I have found evolutionary and historical precedent for my sleep cycles. Just the other day I spoke with Roger Ekirch, a Virginia Tech historian who has focused on sleep in Western cultures and has written At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. He told me that in the preindustrial era, before the proliferation of modern lighting, people routinely used to wake from their ‘first sleep’ sometime after midnight to talk with others, smoke a pipe, rob the nearby orchard or bring in the cows. After about an hour, he said, people returned to bed for their ‘second sleep’ until dawn. ‘It makes perfect sense if you accept the premise that segmented sleep was the dominant form of slumber before the Industrial Revolution,’ Ekirch said. ‘It makes perfect sense that a biological pattern since time immemorial would not relinquish its hold easily, that it would not fade rapidly into the mists of history. The process instead would be prolonged and erratic. Consolidated sleep is an artificial invention of modern life.’"

- Laura Hambleton, “An Insomniac Learns to Make the Most of Getting the Least Sleep,” The Washington Post, February 14, 2011

“But what's interesting is that in some of the research that's come out, particularly Roger Ekirch's book, his history of the night, he talks about before the invention of electric light, people slept in segmented sleep. They would sleep for a few hours, they'd be up for several hours, and then they'd be - fall back asleep again. So in many respects that sleep pattern is fairly natural.”

- Patricia Morrisroe, NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” May 4, 2010

“But is insomnia a modern problem? Are we sleeping less than we used to? Did people in prehistoric and ancient times really crash with the sunset and sleep til the cocks crowed? Is the prescribed eight hours a construct to suit industrial times? In his 2005 ground-breaking book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, American historian Roger Ekirch documented how humans slept through the ages — but not necessarily through the night. ‘He said that people slept in segmented sleep,’’ says [Patricia] Morrisroe. ‘They’d fall asleep for a couple of hours. They’d get up. They might talk. They might have sex with their bedfellows as there were often multiple people in beds because they often had communal beds. They’d pray. They would analyze their dreams. Maybe some would go out and steal livestock. Then they would go back to sleep. So this concept of segmented sleep may be very natural to us.’’’

- Antonia Zerbislas, Toronto Star, May 1, 2010

“Ekirch relates, in perhaps his most fascinating revelation, pre-industrial man slept a segmented sleep. He has found more than 500 references, from Homer onwards, to a ‘first sleep’ that lasted until maybe midnight, and was followed by ‘second sleep’. In between the two, people routinely got up, peed, smoked, read, chatted, had friends round, or simply reflected on the events of the previous day - and on their dreams. (Plenty also had sex, by all accounts far more satisfactorily than at the end of a hard day's labouring. Couples who copulated ‘after the first sleep, wrote a 16th-century French doctor, ‘have more enjoyment, and do it better’.) Experiments by Dr Thomas Wehr at America's National Institute of Mental Health appear to bear out the theory that this two-part slumber is man's natural sleeping pattern: a group of young male volunteers deprived of light at night for weeks at a time rapidly fell into the segmented sleep routine described in so many of Ekirch's documentary sources. It could even be, Wehr has theorised, that many of today's common sleeping disorders are essentially the result of our older, primal habits "breaking through into today's artificial world.’"

- Jon Henley, “The Dark Ages,” The Guardian (London), October 24, 2009

“But is it possible that such expectations are too much - that there never was such thing as a great night's sleep? In pre-industrial Europe, for example, sleeping for eight consecutive hours wasn't normal, American historian Roger Ekirch says. While in Britain to research his 2005 book, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, he discovered what he calls ‘segmented sleep.’ ‘The consolidated, seamless sleep we enjoy today was not the norm in the 19th century,’ he says on the phone from Virginia Tech, where he teaches. ‘There is no idyllic past in terms of sleep.’ Instead, people slept for two to three hours, surrounded by braying animals, people emitting terrible smells, and other environmental disturbances. They awoke at midnight for one or two hours, and then settled back down for a second ‘dawn’ slumber. In the interval, people stoked the fire, made love, prepared the next day's meal, stole apples from the neighbours, prayed, meditated or reflected upon their dreams. ‘Basically, they did anything and everything imaginable,’ Prof. Ekirch says with a chuckle. His findings resonate with those of scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington D.C., who have conducted clinical research into segmented sleep and found that, without the interference of artificial light, many people naturally slept in two phases.‘Insomniacs may simply be experiencing this pre-industrial, once-dominant pattern of sleep,’ Prof. Ekirch says."

- The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Nov. 15, 2008

“But to alter and really shake up our expectations - as one might renew a flattened eiderdown - we need the historian A Roger Ekirch to come to our aid. He explains (in At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime) that before the industrial revolution, it was the norm for people to sleep in two parts (a sort of sleep sandwich). In the middle - the filling - all manner of things went on. 'Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbours. Many others made love, prayed, and, most important, historically, reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness.' It is an upbeat idea: the night as opportunity. But it is easier to imagine than to achieve.”

- Kate Kellaway, “Is Anxiety about Sleep Keeping Us All Awake?,” The Observer (London), April 27, 2008

“. . . fascinating historical and scientific research that challenges the consensus view of sleep as a continuous, consolidated 8-hour block of time. When University of Virginia [Virginia Tech] historian A. Roger Ekirch began researching sleep in pre-industrial societies he was surprised by hundreds of references to something called "first sleep" and a second or "morning sleep." It seems as though before the advent of mass artificial lighting - with its attendant suite of late-night consumption opportunities - much of the Western world slept in two sections: once in the early evening, and once more in the early morning. In between our ancestors woke for several hours to a curious state of consciousness that had no name, other that the generic "watch" or "watching." Ekirch's historical evidence aligns with scientific findings from the respected National Institutes of Health chronobiologist Thomas Wehr. For one month Wehr had a group of volunteers spend the full duration of a 14-hour winter's night in bed. Every one of the volunteers lapsed into a segmented sleep pattern. Although it took a succession of long winter nights to provoke this kind of sleep, when Wehr published his findings he speculated that segmented sleep may be the default physiological pattern for humans in general - certainly it matched similar patterns observed in modern forager cultures.”

- Jeff Warren, Huffington Post, April 25, 2008

“Research by Professor Ekirch revealed that in pre-industrial times, before electricity and gaslights, people typically slept in two bouts of four hours. There would be a gap of wakefulness in-between lasting about two hours. A similar result was found by sleep researchers in the nineties at the National Institute of Mental Health, when people were exposed to light that mimicked natural variations of day and night. So it may be comforting to know that your experience may not necessarily be abnormal, but possibly a remnant of normal mammalian evolution. Indeed some animals like chimpanzees and giraffes are reported to share the same sleep patterns.”

- Neel Halder, M.D., Royal College of Psychiatry, Manchester Evening News, March 3, 2008

“In ancient times, according to two recent histories of sleep, people probably slept no better than we insomniacs - they woke frequently to tend their animals or children, all snorting and snoring in the same sleeping space. Night was often a ghastly time. In some societies, sleep was broken into two four-hour shifts, with singing or other activities in-between. So people who wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back to sleep easily may be reverting to ancient patterns. ‘It's the seamless sleep we aspire to that's the anomaly, the creation of the modern world,’ Roger Ekirch, author of At Day's Close, told The New York Times recently.”

- Adele Horin, “Unravel the Sleeve of Care for a Decent Night’s Sleep,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 23, 2008

“It is interesting to note, as Roger Ekirch wrote in his fascinating book At Day’s Close, that centuries before the discovery of light and electricity, night sleep habits of mankind were different from the consolidated sleep we seek nowadays. In the days past there were two periods of sleep….”

- Sudhansu Chokroverty, M.D., Questions and Answers About Sleep Apnea (Jones and Bartlett, 2008)

“There was a time when deep night would have seen most Westerners, too, up and about or in a state of semi-wakefulness. Not much was known about past patterns of sleep or nighttime activity in Europe until A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, brilliantly remedied the ignorance.”

- Jennifer Ackerman, Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body (Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

“In a provocative article last year in Applied Neurology, Dr. Walter Brown reviews historical descriptions of pre-industrial sleep and suggests that sleeping in two nightly shifts separated by an hour or two of quiet wakefulness is completely normal. I encourage you to read it. He proposes that the advent of inexpensive artificial light allowed us to stay awake long after sundown and has led us to be so chronically sleep deprived that we usually sleep for 7 uninterrupted hours nightly. This uninterrupted sleep pattern has now become the new norm. When our natural pattern of sleeping in two shifts reasserts itself, we find it abnormal and distressing. We are sure something is wrong, and a whole industry has sprung up to reinforce our anxiety and help us sleep the way we think we should. Our expectations about our bodies go a long way toward shaping what symptoms we find distressing and what we ignore. Many patients are quite alarmed about entirely normal symptoms and refuse to be reassured. But patients alone are not to be blamed. Many forces have pushed modern medicine to pathologize normal symptoms. After all, pharmaceutical companies sell prescriptions, not reassurance.”

- Albert Fuchs, M.D., Beverly Hills, California, Dec. 13, 2007, www.albertfuchs.com

“More surprising still, Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night -- divided into a ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ -- also included a curious intermission. ‘There was an extraordinary level of activity,' Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took 'cold-air baths,' reading naked in a chair. Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness -- mimicking the duration of day and night during winter -- fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence -- just calmly lying there -- in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, 'may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself,' Ekirch told me. 'It's the seamless sleep that we aspire to that's the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.’''

- Jon Mooallem, “The Sleep-Industrial Complex, New York Times Magazine, November 18, 2007

“There seems little doubt that our sleep patterns have changed over the centuries, partly in response to technology. Research by Virginia Tech history professor A. Roger Ekirch suggests most western Europeans before the industrial revolution enjoyed ‘segmented sleep’ - they woke midway through the night to reflect on their dreams, smoke tobacco and even visit neighbours."

- Peter Barber, “Snooze Function,” Financial Times (London), May 25, 2007

“Segmented or fragmented sleep appears in early times to have been the rule rather than exception, writes the American writer Walter Brown in a fascinating article in Scientific American Mind (January 2007). He cites the research of the historian Roger Ekirch, who in early literature discovered that before the invention of gaslight and electricity, most people in the evening and at night slept in two episodes. They called the episodes "first sleep" and "second sleep". In effect, most people after sunset went to sleep for four hours and then woke up. They stayed awake a few hours and then went to sleep for four hours until sunrise. What did they do in the dark night hours? Everything, according to the literature. Household tasks that could be done by candlelight. Talk. Sometimes they even went to visit others. The hours were also often used for prayer, contemplation and reflection on the dreams of the first sleep. . . . Many people [today] awake in the middle of the night and then lie and worry about their loss of sleep. They try desperately to get back to sleep and even swallow sleeping pills to sleep through the night. Maybe they should do what their ancestors did: early to bed, awaken to do something useful or pleasant, and after a few hours go back to bed for the second sleep.”

- Elsevier (Amsterdam), March 14, 2007

>“A recent discovery and a reexamination of some classic sleep literature suggest that for some people the perfect eight hours of sleep remains elusive for a very simple reason: our need for such uninterrupted slumber may be nothing but a fairy tale. The source of this new assault on conventional thinking comes not from a drug company lab or a university research program but from a historian.”

- Walter A. Brown, “Ancient Sleep in Modern Time,” Scientific American Mind, December 2006/January 2007

“The American historian A. Roger Ekirch recently documented in an impressive way the differences between today's sleep behavior and that in pre-industrial times, with a preferred segmented night sleep.”

-H. Schulz, “The Role of Behavior in the Regulation of Sleeping and Waking,” Somnologie, 2006

“Recently I had reason to think about varieties of sleep and dreams – historians’ dreams of the past, writers’ dreams of their subject, dreamers in the past. The occasion was a conference that included sleep researchers in neuroscience; and the inspiration was a marvelous essay on the history of sleep by the early modern historian A. Roger Ekirch. It’s not a subject that comes naturally. Ekirch points out historians’ generic preference for vigorous actors: ‘our entire history is only the history of waking men’. . . . Ekirch explicates this historical ‘bias’ in favour of active, animated protagonists and against dull sleepers: ‘Whereas our waking hours are animated, volatile, and highly differentiated, sleep appears, by contrast, passive, monotonous, and uneventful’”.

- Christine Stansell, History Workshop Journal, Autumn 2006.

“The American historian A. Roger Ekirch recently documented in an impressive way the differences between today's sleep behavior and that in pre-industrial times, with a preferred segmented night sleep.”

-H. Schulz, “The Role of Behavior in the Regulation of Sleeping and Waking,” Somnologie, 2006.

“The study fits what may be an ancient human pattern, according to findings of historian A. Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech, author of At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. "The dominant pattern in the Western world until the Industrial Revolution was not seamless sleep, but segmented sleep," he says. Diaries and literary references going back to Homer referred to ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep,’ each about four hours. In between, in the dark of night, people would talk, use the chamber pot, slap at fleas and lice, be on the alert for predators and have sex, he says. Most people’s real lives no longer allow for that human pattern of natural sleep.”

- Susan Brink, “After You Close Your Eyes,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2006

“Before the invention of the electric light and the normalization of clock time, humans slept quite differently. In a review of Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, David Wooton notes how the sleep of our ancestors was divided each night into two separate periods. After the “first” sleep people woke, read, talked, prayed, made love and so on. Wooton observes that ‘everyone knew the difference between first and second sleep, and no-one expected to sleep right through.’ By contrast, our own sleep, mediated by artificial rhythms and technological stimulation, all too often requires medicinal or narcotic supplements to get us through the night.”

- Simon Cooper, Arena Magazine (Victoria, Australia), June-July, 2006

“Everyone who reads and writes about Ekirch's book seems very taken by his re-discovery of the fact that our notion of one continuous, seamless nighttime sleep (leaving our people in our pictures and our teddy bears free to play in peace) is just a modern trend and an artificial, unnatural imposition against the wills of our bodies and minds.”

- I. Warden, “Warden’s World,” Canberra Times, June 30, 2006

“The discoveries of Ekirch and [Thomas] Wehr raise the possibility that segmented sleep is ‘normal’ and, as such, these revelations hold significant implications for both understanding sleep and the treatment of insomnia.”

- Walter A. Brown, “Acknowledging Preindustrial Patterns of Sleep May Revolutionize Approach to Sleep Dysfunction,” Applied Neurology, May 2006.

“One of the many revelations in A. Roger Ekirch’s historical investigation of night-time, At Day’s Close, is the demonstration that until the modern age, segmented sleep was more common than the straight eight-hour stretch. Premoderns used to go to bed at nightfall for their “first sleep,” then rise again around or after midnight for a tenebral intermezzo of reading, talking, sex, or, if they were unlucky, household chores, before retiring again for another few hours of slumber.”

- Harry Eyres, Financial Times, May 13, 2006

“So here's a question: Is the proverbial good night's sleep really the Holy Grail of human well-being? In his 2005 book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, historian A.Roger Ekirch said no. He argued that the transition from old-fashioned "segmented sleep" to today's continuous sleep pattern hasn't helped mankind. ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind,’ Ekirch wrote. Up until the invention of artificial lighting, he noted, men and women went to bed earlier and woke up in the middle of the night to smoke a pipe, make love, or analyze their dreams. Now we sleep when we want to and fitfully, at best.”

- Alex Beam, “Perchance to Sleep,” Boston Globe, April 10, 2006

“A recent article by A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history and author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, caught my eye. In it he challenges the concepts of the patterns of sleep which we now accept as normal. . . . We now find ourselves battling against nature to get what we see as our rightful share of sleep. Forced into an unnatural sleep pattern, many people seek refuge in the sedative effects of alcohol and hypnotics to restore this artificial pattern may in fact just be a more natural form of segmented sleep, just as nature intended. . . . So perhaps it’s time to re-educate ourselves and our patients about what is ‘normal’ when it comes to slumber.”

- Muiris Houston, M.D., Medicine Weekly (Dublin), March 15, 2006

“Sleep patterns around the world have undergone a revolution over the past two centuries as the spread of artificial lighting profoundly changed the shape of human lives, first in cities and now even in many remote villages. Throughout most of history sundown brought an end to the activities in most homes, with people crawling into bed soon afterwards. A. Roger Ekirch—author of a magisterial history of nighttime, At Day’s Close (Norton)— argues that the very nature of a night’s rest has changed since the Industrial Revolution. Sleep for our ancestors was often divided into two shifts of roughly four hours, with a period of wakefulness lasting an hour or longer in between. A study conducted by the U.S. government’s National Institute of Mental Health appears to confirm Ekirch’s thesis.”

- Jay Walljasper, Ode Magazine, November 2005

"Ekirch's research on nighttime led to the surprising discovery, laid out in his recent book, At Day's Close: Night In Times Past, about humanity's frequent nightly pastime, sleep. Ekirch learned that, before artificial light, humans had a "first sleep" of two to three hours, followed by a one- to two-hour long period of wakefulness and then several more hours of sleep. He found references to this pattern of segmented or broken sleep in numerous references, even the Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey. ‘So it was for hundreds, probably thousands of years,’ he said. ‘Beginning in the late 17th century, segmented slumber gradually grew less common’ with the increasing popularity of artificial illumination and a goal of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. This ‘altered circadian rhythms as old as humanity itself.’"

- A.J. Hostetler, “Is the Nighttime Losing its Identity,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 28, 2005

“But surely sleep itself, when it did come, was just like our sleep, wasn't it? In one of the most fascinating sections of a fascinating book, Ekirch demonstrates how differently our forebears slept their eight hours a night. After "breeches-off" time, the "customary term for nine o' clock in parts of Germany," the sleepers fell into their ‘first sleep,’ which usually lasted till midnight or so. Then they roused to urinate, have sex, mull over their dreams and share intimate conversation with their spouses. The educated might use the time to read and study by candlelight, while farmers might check on their livestock and women might get up to ‘rock the cradle, also to card and comb wool, to patch and to wash, to rub flax and reel yarn and peel rushes.’ Others, industrious after a different fashion, found it a good time to slip out and poach game, steal firewood, rob orchards and perhaps practice magic. Most people, though, probably talked a while, performed a task or two, and then slipped into their ‘second sleep’ till cock-crow. This two-part pattern of sleep is, Ekirch says, still typical in the part of the world where artificial light has not arrived.”

- Andrew Hudgins, “Laughter in the Dark,” Raleigh News & Observer, July 31, 2005

“A wonderful section, for example, describes the practice of segmented sleep: before the industrial age, people often slept for a few hours after dinner, then woke after midnight to engage in restful contemplation and prayer, conversation or sex, and then resumed sleeping until daybreak. 'Regenerate man finds no time so fit to raise his soul to Heaven, as when he awakes at mid-night,' wrote the author of 'Mid-Night Thoughts'' in 1682.’”

- Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York Times, July 24, 2005

“The discussion of sleep patterns is especially interesting. ‘There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind,’ Ekirch writes. People went to bed early and awoke around midnight. Some got up for awhile; most probably lay in bed thinking, dozing, or talking with their bedmate, before falling asleep for another four hours or so. This interval of wakefulness may have boosted birth rates among the laboring classes, Ekirch says.”

- Fritz Lanham, “Nighttime as Fright Time,” Houston Chronicle, June 26, 2005

“Perhaps the strangest revelation of Ekirch's book is the fact that our forebears, far from enjoying a dark night's sleep uninterrupted by neighbours' security lights or car alarms, found themselves prey, not only to shouts of ‘murder’ in the streets and fears of thieves or the more spectral intruders of their imaginations, but also to waking regularly at midnight - their rest being separated into ‘first sleep" and "second sleep’. It was a habitual but natural division of the night which only modern lighting would change (by keeping us awake until late), and it is just one of the many facts in this engrossing book that illuminate the darker recesses of the past.”

- Philip Hoare, Sunday Telegraph (London), June 19, 2005

“We no longer sleep as nature intended us to - in two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of wakefulness, asserts Ekirch. In the older age more attuned to inner clocks, not only was sleep segmented but that fragmentation of sleep made us more responsive to the our subconscious, he aver; people apparently awoke after midnight and, instead of tossing and turning, they regularly got up to talk, study, pray and do chores. The historian has dug up literary and epistolary references to the so-called first sleep or primo somno and the second sleep, which is sometimes referred to as 'morning sleep'. Worse, he warns that by substituting this episodic sleep with a shorter, seamless slumber, we have committed a crime against nature. "By turning night into day," he writes, "modern technology has helped to obstruct our oldest path to the human psyche."

- Lola Chantal, “Is ‘Wakeful’ Sleep More Soulful?” Economic Times (Mumbai), May 30, 2005

“Strikingly, [Ekirch] addresses at length the once commonly accepted notion of "first sleep," an initial and distinct period of deep and restful sleep that was fully expected to be followed by an interval of wakefulness before the remainder of the night's sleep, referred to as "second sleep" or "morning sleep." This pattern of sleep was widely recognized, as is demonstrated by Ekirch's compendious list of medical, literary, and popular sources referencing the term in English, French, and Italian from before the 13th century through the 19th century. This was considered a normal and unproblematic sleep pattern. There is no particular mention in print of waking in the middle of the night as undesirable or pathologic. Quite the contrary, Ekirch located scores of references in journals and diaries to the peacefulness and meditative appeal of this waking period.”

- Oskar G. Jenni and Bonnie B. O’Connor, “Children’s Sleep: An Interplay between Culture and Biology,” Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, January 2005

“Studies of Western Europeans by historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg show that “segmented sleep” was a common practice of rural and urban people 200-55 years ago.”

- Tim Batchelder, “The Cultural Biology of Sleep,” Townshend Letter for Doctors and Patients, July 2002

“But there is magic, too, in the unlit night, a loosening of the temporal and physical boundaries that bind us by day. Ekirch uncovered multiple references to ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ in historical records; he theorizes that once we slept in two roughly equal interludes, split by a period of quiet wakefulness in which dreams were contemplated and prayers offered. This creative window closed gradually during the 19th century, as gas lamps became common and human sleep patterns consolidated.”

- Kate Terwilliger, Denver Post, April 6, 2001

“One of Ekirch's discoveries surprised him: in the pre-electric centuries, people slept differently. We assume it is normal to slumber more or less continuously through the night. We think of wakefulness as a disorder--insomnia. And common sense suggests that, without electric lights, our preindustrial ancestors must have slept from sunset to sunrise. But Ekirch has found that was not so. Preindustrial people's sleep was segmented. They might lie an hour or more before falling asleep. About four hours later, they would awaken. For another hour or so, they would lie meditating on their dreams or praying. They would talk with bedmates. They might even visit neighbors, similarly awake. They might pilfer or poach. Then they would sleep another four hours or so. People, as a matter of course, routinely referred to their first sleep and their second sleep.”

- Joyce and Richard Wolkomir, Smithsonian, January 2001

“Our ancestors, living before electric lighting, probably didn't get that sleep all at once. Waking with the sun and retiring for the day when darkness fell, they had plenty of time in bed, and historian A. Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech has found that they slept in two segments. References as far back as Virgil and Homer called it ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep.’ In between was an hour or two of quiet wakefulness that our ancestors sometimes called ‘the watch.’ It was a time to ponder dreams and plot wars.”

- Susan Brink, “Sleepless Society,” U.S. New and World Report, October 8, 2000.

“In other times, what is more, people may have slept differently. Roger Ekirch, a history professor at Virginia Polytechnic in the US, is currently finishing a book about nocturnal British life between 1500 and 1850. He has discovered ‘hundreds’ of references, he says, in people's diaries and letters and court statements, to sleeping routines that now sound quite alien. ‘Most households,’ he says, ‘experienced a pattern of broken sleep.’ People went to bed at nine or 10. They awakened after midnight, after what they called their ‘first sleep' stayed conscious for an hour, and then had their ‘morning sleep’. The interlude was a haven for reflection, remembering dreams, having sex, or even night-time thievery. The poorest, Ekirch says, were the greatest beneficiaries, fleetingly freed from the constraints and labours that ruled their daytime existence. By the 17th century, as artificial light became more common, the rich were already switching to the more concentrated - and economically efficient - mode of recuperation that we follow today. The industrial revolution pushed back the dusk for everyone except pockets of country-dwellers.”

- Andy Beckett, Guardian, August 10, 1999