shedding some dark on vigils

An article I read recently pointed me to At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, by A. Roger Ekirch. If there's a history of nighttime in Western culture, this book is it. What particularly interested me was the last chapter, "Sleep We Have Lost: Rhythms and Revelations," which discusses the phenomenon of segmented sleep. Following are some highlights from the chapter, although I would recommend getting the book from your local library, if this subject interests you:

Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness. . . . the intervening period of wakefulness bore no name, other than the generic term "watch" or "watching." . . .

Both phases of sleep lasted roughly the same length of time, with individuals waking sometime after midnight before returning to rest. . . .

Men and women referred to both intervals as if the prospect of awakening in the middle of the night was common knowledge that required no elaboration. . . .

. . . the vast weight of surviving evidence indicates that awakening naturally was routine, not the consequence of disturbed or fitful slumber. . . .

At first glance, it is tempting to view this pattern of broken sleep as a cultural relic rooted in early Christian experience. Ever since St. Benedict in the sixth century required that monks rise after midnight for the recital of verses and psalms ("At night we will rise to confess to Him"), this like other regulations of the Benedictine order spread to growing numbers of Frankish and German monasteries. By the High Middle Ages, the Catholic Church actively encouraged early morning prayer among Christians as a means of appealing to God during the still hours of darkness. "Night vigils," Alan of Lille declared in the twelfth century, "were not instituted without reason, for by them it is signified that we must rise in the middle of the night to sing the night office, so that the night may not pass without divine praise." . . .

Although Christian teachings undoubtedly popularized the imperative of early morning prayer, the Church itself was not responsible for introducing segmented sleep. However much it "colonized" the period of wakefulness between intervals of slumber, references to "first sleep" antedate Christianity's early years of growth. . . . as recently as the twentieth century some non-Western cultures with religious beliefs other than Christianity still exhibited a segmented pattern of sleep remarkably similar to that of preindustrial Europeans. . . .

. . . 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. . . . In attempting to recreate conditions of "prehistoric" sleep, Dr. Thomas Wehr and his colleagues found that human subjects, deprived of artificial light at night over a span of several weeks, eventually exhibited a pattern of broken slumber--one practically identical to that of preindustrial households. . . .

After midnight, preindustrial households usually began to stir. Many of those who left their beds merely needed to urinate. . . . Some persons, however, after arising, took the opportunity to smoke tobacco, check the time, or tend a fire. . . .

None were more familiar than the Church with sinister forces in the dead of night. "Can men break their sleep to mind the works of darkness, and shall we not break ours," asked Reverend Horneck, "for doing things, which become the children of light?" . . . Certainly, there was no shortage of prayers intended to be recited "when you awake in the night" or "at our first waking," a time not to be confused with either dawn or "our uprising," for which wholly separate devotions were prescribed. . . .

Most people, upon awakening, probably never left their beds, or not for long. Besides praying, they conversed with a bedfellow or inquired after the well-being of a child or spouse. . . . Sexual intimacy often ensued between couples. . . .

Perhaps even more commonly, persons used this shrouded interval of solitude to immerse themselves in contemplation--to ponder events of the preceding day and to prepare for the arrival of dawn. Never, during the day or night, were distractions so few and privacy so great, especially in crowded households. . . .

In the last section of the chapter, he discusses at length the significance of this sleep pattern for contemplation of dreams. I'm only going to reproduce one small portion:

. . . Clinical experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health confirm that subjects who experienced two stages of slumber were in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep just before they awakened around midnight, with REM being the stage of sleep directly connected to dreaming. What's more, Thomas Wehr has found, "transitions to wakefulness are most likely to occur from REM periods that are especially intense," typically accompanied by "particularly vivid dreams" distinguished by their "narrative quality," which many of the subjects in his experiment contemplated in the darkness.

The gist of the section is that this period of wakefulness provides a unique opportunity to contemplate dreams, which is now largely absent in modern society.

For all you folks out there who find yourselves up in the middle of the night anyway, it might be encouraging to think that you're more normal than most of us. What interests me about the phenomenon is its implication for midnight offices and vigils. What appears to our modern sensibilities as extreme asceticism--to awaken in the middle of the night for prayer--would have been much less demanding when it was instituted. If a wakeful period in the middle of the night was normal, what better way to spend it than in prayer? Indeed, I read somewhere recently that it was considered more rigorously ascetic to abandon the practice in favor of sleeping a bit longer for one continuous block, getting up early in the morning, and staying up. I guess that means we're more ascetic these days than our ancestors were, although I'm not sure how much good that has done us.