Published on November 15, 2024 at 7:58 p.m. / Modified on November 15, 2024 at 8:03 p.m.
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Until the 19th century, most Europeans divided their night into two blocks of sleep. In the meantime, they prayed, smoked, meditated, made love or did household chores.
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Today, biphasic sleep is experiencing a new popularity. Some extol its virtues, including the ability to perform complex tasks upon waking.
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Considered virtuous or more problematic – waking up at night could be diagnosed as insomnia – this type of sleep has no documented advantages or disadvantages.
3:30 a.m. Paris. Georges has been awake for half an hour already. However, this forty-year-old with a slender figure, proud posture, always looking busy, does not do any of these morning jobs that call you to attention at dawn. Georges is neither a baker, nor a postman, nor a fisherman. He is independent: “I try to organize my schedules as I see fit,” he says while he delicately sips his apple juice in this bistro in the 10th arrondissement of the capital where he seems to have his habits. Georges is what we call a fan of “biphasic sleep”, a form of rest where sleep is split into two blocks of approximately equal duration, the “first sleep” and the “second sleep”, separated by a period standby which lasts about an hour, dedicated to various activities.
“Until contemporary times, an hour or more of being awake in the middle of the night interrupted the rest of most inhabitants of Western Europe,” recalls the British historian Roger Ekirch, a specialist in the modern era. and author of The Great Sleep Transformation. How the industrial revolution changed our nights. Published in 2021 by Editions Amsterdam and released this year in paperback, the work, bringing together two of his articles on the subject, represents the first translation of his work into French. According to the thesis he supports, this form of sleep would not have only concerned “shepherds and lumberjacks known as nap lovers. Members of each household had the habit of leaving bed to urinate, smoke a little tobacco or even visit their neighbors. Many people stayed in bed and made love, prayed or, more importantly, meditated on the contents of the dreams that usually preceded this awakening,” continues the professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
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