Awake in the Night

For years now, I wake up after five hours of sleep. (This usually occurs between 2 and 4 am.)

As much as I want to sleep (knowing I'll feel tired later on), my mind doesn't let me. Ideas come - thoughts more lucid than at any time during the day. I'm tempted to get up and write them down, even though part of me wants to stay in my warm bed and fall asleep again.

Years ago I read an article by a sleep expert advising that we shouldn't toss and turn in bed, sleepless, for more than 20 minutes. Instead, we should get up and so something boring - to lull us back to sleep. So I started to follow this advice, getting up and reading, sometimes doing laundry in the wee hours of the morning, forcing myself to stay awake until the clothes are out of the dryer. Then I often go back to bed and fall asleep again for an hour or two.

But recently I read something that is making me question my early morning routine.

In her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor mentions how sleep habits were different before the invention of electricity, before people could switch on a light to banish the darkness. When it got dark, people went to bed.

It appears that sleep researchers are now interested in knowing if we have lost something by no longer lying quietly in bed for a couple of hours each night before falling soundly asleep - and later, in the middle of the night, when we wake up in the dark.

Are these times of rest as important to the sleep cycle as times of sleeping? Do we need to rest in the dark as much as we need to sleep?

It occurs to me that the only people these days who experience the natural rhythm of day and night are people who go camping far from the city - and they probably take flashlights with them.  Living in harmony with nature and natural light and dark - is this one of the reasons why people find camping out so enjoyable?