Our Ancestors Slept Twice a Night
Articles about the old habit of sleeping twice a night were put out by Bodvar Bjarke on Facebook so I read it, but fb is “too small” for a long reflection upon it so I write it here:
Here are his links:
http://disinfo.com/2013/08/how-our-ancestors-used-to-sleep-twice-a-night-and-highlighting-the-problem-of-present-shock/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783
These articles say that 8 hour sleeping is a modern invention.
The wise scholars speculate about the reason for sleeping twice a night and say that people used these hours for having sex, having a coffee, making some prayers or reading or so...
Maybe the writers and the artists in Paris were thinking in this way in 1700, but mainstream did not drink coffee in their homes and they could not read.
It feels like a lot of guessing and it just talks about ”having some fun in a spare time”. OK, but why did they have this spare time in the night/morning.
If we had this habit for millions of years out of biological reasons or just for some thousands of years from having formed a habit or maybe in just some cultures is maybe not possible to find out.
So the door is open for more speculations.
The time 2:30 in the night is a time when it is extra easy to wake up, I have also noticed that.
I have also noticed that we have the ability to know what time it is. The animals also know this, they can repeat the same behavior at the same time every day.
If I eat a piece of chocolate I will automatically suddenly start thinking about chocolate at the same time the next day. The thought just pops up. The brain is very clever in learning a new thing – it just has to be touching the system of the neurotransmitters.
And if you keep a habit a long time it will get stronger and influence even more and finally it will produce effects and a changing on the genes.
Keep a habit for thousands of years and your children will be born with such a tendency.
So, why only sleep four hours when the whole night is dark? Is there any good practical reason for developing such a habit?
We don´t know? Or...?
First we can think about the length of the dark night. Near the equatorial line the night is mostly around 12 hours and it can be difficult to sleep for 12 hours so you will have to invent something to be able to be awake in the darkness so why not do something fun or useful?
In Sweden we have in winter a night that can be 17 hours (or more) and it is not possible to sleep so much.
If I go to bed at 9 pm I also wake up at 2 or 3 am and it is impossible to fall asleep again. If I go up and I do something I will get tired and fall asleep again after some hours.
So why not just be up the whole evening till midnight and then sleep 8 hours till morning comes?
Isn´t that easier? As we do today! It is an easy option so why did they not do so?
Well, actually there is a good way of finding out and it is to live in the same way. Then you will discover things that you never thought about before.
All those modern scientists that speculate about the old sleeping habit may never have experienced the old fashioned life in winter in a house without electricity.
If you, just for a short period, live in this way you will see that life becomes so much more easy to handle if you never sleep more than four hours at a time.
Why not? Well, try to think about it first and see what idea you find!
The problem with darkness does not exist in summer when the sun is up all the time, so we can think about winter when there is a real duality between light and darkness.
Imagine that you find yourself in this old way of living! You are in an old house.
The experiment requires that you have not brought any modern tools, so you do not have any flashlight with battery and you do not have a lighter and no lightning fuel and no paper and the house does not have any modern isolation. There is absolutely no electricity.
It can be very cold in the night, in Sweden it was sometimes more than -40C and at new moon it is totally dark! You cannot see anything.
Great! You are now back in the 1500 or so.
To be able to live in the house you must have a stove with a fire and to make the fire in the old way you have flint, fire-steel and some fluffy material, which can easily catch fire. If you do not have that you are dead.
So... now is the first day and you have made your fire in the stove and the fire has been burning the whole day and you feel that everything is working well.
Ha! That was easy! So you think!
In the evening you just leave the fire and you fall asleep.
And... ?
Early in the morning you wake up because you have to pee, just as you are used to do at home (in modern time) where you have a bathroom and lamps everywhere in an oil-heated house.
But now, here in your “ancient time”, you find that the house is so ice-cold that you can hardly get out of the bed. The clothes that you have put beside the bed are so cold that you cannot take them on. First you will have to keep them close to your body in the bed to make them warm.
Having got some clothes on, you will find that you cannot move because it is totally black. You do not see anything at all so to be able to go up you must light some kind of "grease-candle" (?) but in this darkness you cannot find your fire-steel.
You wait till the sun comes up and you put new woods into the stove and start the job with your flint and steel. It takes a while to get a small fire burning and after a while the fire goes out again.
You start all over again and the same thing happens again.
Why?
It has also made the stove quite cold and it is difficult to make a fire in a cold stove when the circulation of air has slowed down too much.
The smoke fills the room and the fire goes out. Again and again.
In this very cold place you now have to be working with your flint and steel for quite a time and then there is a risk that you will finish all the fluffy material that you had, which would be quite dangerous because you can probably not so easily get any new.
People usually do not end up in this situation because today we have flashlights, candles, matches, lighters and if any problem arises there is also a telephone, a car and a shop.
In ancient times people did not end up in this situation because they knew how to handle this kind of life.
After a week in this old house you will also know!
There are two ways of making this situation better.
One is to let the fire go out totally in the evening and then you close the damper. This will prevent the air from blowing through the house the whole night making it ice-cold.
It will also prevent the stove from getting too cold. So now it is easier to make a new fire in the morning, but you will still have to be sitting there with your flint and steel.
You can not easily go up in the night unless you have big windows and the full moon is shining.
You will still get the problem of making a new fire every morning and then also wasting your fire-making material. So it is not the best way.
What you can do to get away from all these problems is to let the fire burn all the night!
Before you go to bed you set the damper on low to prevent the fire from burning to quickly.
After four hours you go up and you put some more woods on the small glowing coals that are still hot. After 30 minutes they will catch fire by themselves.
In this way the fire will burn constantly and there will not be any trouble with a dark night and an ice cold black morning.
As long as there is any glow left you can quickly light a grease-candle on it so you can go up in the dark night if you want to. You just have to know the way to the stove!
You never have to go through the trouble of making a new fire with your flint and fire-steel in the darkness. And there is no risk of using to much of the fluffy fire-material, which was maybe quite precious in the old times.
And... just imagine that something unexpected happens in the night, something that you have to deal with at once. The possibility always exists! Then you cannot be sitting there with your fire-making tools for half an hour before you can move.
I would think that it has been important to keep the fire constantly alive, because it makes life much, much more easy. So it is not so strange that people were sleeping just four hours, which is the time for a fire to burn down. It was practical to do it this way!
Then we have the symbolism.
The stove with the fire was the center of the house, it was the heart of the house.It was the spirit of the house and the stove with the smoke going up to heaven could be seen as a channel to god.
It was the altar where the holy fire had to be constantly burning.
Your heart should keep you alive also during the night so for the heart there is no sleeping time.
The house should be alive also during the night and there should be no sleeping time for the fire of the house. As long as the holy fire is burning the house is alive and protected.
A house that has a fire burning has a spirit - in the same way as you can be in your body as long as the heart is keeping it´s metabolism alive.
The worshiping of the fire and the Fire God is found in many ancient cultures.
Wikipedia:
The earliest known traces of controlled fire were found at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel and dated to an age of 790,000 years and religious or animist notions connected to fire must be assumed to reach back to such early pre-Homo sapiens times.
In Vedic disciplines of Hinduism, fire is a central element in the Yajna ceremony, with Agni, "fire", playing the role as mediator between the worshipper and the other gods.
In the Vaishnav branch of Hinduism, Agni or Fire is considered the tongue of the Supreme Lord Narayana
Fire worship in Graeco-Roman tradition had two separate forms: fire of the hearth and fire of the forge.
Hearth worship was maintained in Rome by the Vestal Virgins, who served the goddess Vesta, protector of the home, who had a sacred flame as the symbol of her presence in the city
Celtic mythology had Belenus associated with fire.
In Slavic mythology, Svarog was the spirit of fire.
End of quotations from Wikipedia
On the Red Indian Medicine Wheel fire and spirit have the same place.
The Church prescribes that at least one lamp should continually burn before thetabernacle (Rit. Rom. iv, 6) http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01354b.htm
A sanctuary lamp, altar lamp, everlasting light, or eternal flame is a light that shines before the altar of sanctuaries in many denominations of Jewish and Christian places of worship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_lamp
A special lamp must burn night and day before the tabernacle in which the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, to indicate and honour the presence of Christ'
http://jloughnan.tripod.com/whylamps.htm
Many different religions but the same idea behind them.
The concept of the living spirit or god represented by the holy fire.
Sanctuary: the Sacred Space around the altar and tabernacle
There was a “sanctuary” also in a normal house and that was the space around the stove.
I asked Lucia from Russia about the fact that all the Russian laquer boxes are red on the inside. She said that the red color was symbolic of the fire and the “God´s Angle”, the space by the stove.
Then I looked again at these boxes and I saw that they all were like small symbolic stoves, red inside and black on the outside. they are also similar to icons.
The pictures that are painted on them are the spirits that you can see also among the red flames in a real iron stove. If you just use your imagination.
We lost our connection to spirit
when we lost our connection to fire.
It is not strange that a practical habit forms a tradition that all people follow. The tradition is in the same time religion.
And then it is not strange that this tradition gets into our genes and then it influences us also when the practical need for it is gone. And then, slowly, we change again into something else.
It is not difficult to see the similarity between the stove and the black PC with the bright screen, which works in the same way as your brain and the old ceremonies and concepts in various religions:
The old magicians said:
You get what you focus on!
Today´s technicians say:
You get what you clic on!
You get what you focus on!
Today´s technicians say:
You get what you clic on!
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