Second Sleep

By Sonia Fernández LeBlanc

What if I told you that, biologically, humans are innately programmed to sleep in two waves, especially in winter time when the Sun is the farthest away from the Earth and the nights are endless? What if I told you that often insomnia is a bit of a byproduct of an industrial society that created systems where we had to ignore our circadian rhythms out of the urgency created by a “work day,” which so many of us depend on for survival?

Many of you might already be realigning your lives around the natural inclinations of our ancient DNA, but for this moment I would like you to step into some shadow contemplation of all those years of stress from awakening in the middle of the night, for a plethora of reasons, unable to fall right back asleep, and that spiral of dread anticipating the next day when you would be exhausted. You know that scenario. You may be still living it right now.

Even the best sleepers have been there a few times in their lives. Even if you don’t experience it often, I bet you know someone who often struggles to have a good night’s sleep. Enter, stage left, the pharmaceutical industry and their solutions in the form of sleeping pills, and the naturopathic industry and their natural remedies. What if we lived in a world where we could allow our natural sleep cycle to unfold? What could we learn about ourselves? What if I told you that a mere 10 generations ago, and for thousands of years before, many of our ancestors were often up in the middle of the night tending to the less intense, sometimes mundane, often deliciously meditative, bits and bobs of one’s life only to synch back into an even deeper, restful sleep until morning?