A Short History of the Second Sleep

For most of human history, people slept twice. They went down at dusk, surfaced somewhere near midnight, and spent an hour awake in the dark before the second sleep took them. The hour had no owner. You could pray in it, or talk, or lie there and let your mind go where it goes when nobody is measuring.

Then the lights came, and the shifts, and the eight unbroken hours we now describe as natural.

My grandmother claimed to have inherited the hour anyway, the way some families inherit a nose. She woke at ten past one, most nights, for sixty years. She did not consider this insomnia. She considered it an appointment.

I asked her once what she did with it. She said she remembered people. Not deliberately, she said — the hour brought them, one or two at a time, in no particular order and with no particular purpose. Her brother, at fourteen, throwing a stone at a wall. A woman from a bus in 1961. My grandfather, before the illness, standing in a doorway with his coat still on.

She said it was not sad. She said it was more like a room filling up and then emptying again, and that the second sleep was easier for having been in company.

I inherited the nose. I am still waiting on the hour, though lately I wake at something past one and lie there in the useful dark, and the appointment book is not empty.