{"id":5708,"date":"2013-08-24T21:50:36","date_gmt":"2013-08-25T01:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=5708"},"modified":"2013-08-24T21:50:36","modified_gmt":"2013-08-25T01:50:36","slug":"we-want-to-sleep-like-cavemen-not-like-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/08\/we-want-to-sleep-like-cavemen-not-like-the-dead.html","title":{"rendered":"We want to sleep like cavemen, not like the dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"-<\/a>Few people sleep today the way most humans did for all of our evolution before the introduction of artificial lighting. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans thought that what the pushers of sleep meds promise \u2013 an uninterrupted night of seven or eight hours\u2019 sleep \u2013 was an unnatural and undesirable thing.<\/p>\n

Experiments by a team led by Dr Thomas Wehr at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda have supplied compelling evidence of how our technology has ripped us from our natural cycle. Deprived of artificial lighting for several weeks, the typical subject evolved the following pattern: lying awake in bed for an hour or two, then four hours sleep, then 2-3 hours of \u201cnon-anxious wakefulness\u201d followed by a second sleep before waking for the day’s activities.<\/p>\n

One of the most exciting findings in Wehr\u2019s study involved the endocrinology of the night watch. The interval between first sleep and second sleep is characterized by elevated levels of prolactin, a pituitary hormone best-known for helping hens to brood contentedly above their eggs for long periods. Wehr concluded that the night watch can produce benign states of altered consciousness not unlike meditation.<\/p>\n

Wehr and his team put their subjects on the Paleolithic plan, without alternatives to electrical light such as candles or fire or oil lamps. The Paleolithic two-sleeps cycle wasn\u2019t only a stone age phenomenon; it was characteristic of how people spent their nights until gas lighting and then electricity became widespread. A seventeenth century Scottish legal deposition describes a weaver as \u201chaving gotten his first sleip and awaiking furth thairof.\u201d Sleep historian Roger Ekirch\u00a0says that \u201cuntil the modern era, up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness midway through the night interrupted the rest of most Western Europeans\u201d – and presumably most other people – so that \u201cconsolidated sleep, such as we today experience, is unnatural.\u201d<\/p>\n

This may help to explain the extent to which so many of us in our urbanized society are out of nature and out of touch with dreaming. \u201cSegmented sleep\u201d\u00a0was the norm for our ancestors until quite recently, as it remains for some indigenous peoples today. Like Virgil and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Tiv of central Nigeria speak of \u201cfirst sleep\u201d and \u201csecond sleep\u201d. They wake at any time during the night and will talk to anyone in the hut who is also awake – often about their dreams.<\/p>\n

Most interesting, the state \u201ctwixt sleepe and wake\u201d that the French called dorveille<\/em> was widely regarded as an excellent time to birth new ideas. In 1769, the artful London tradesman Christopher Pinchbeck advertised a device called a \u201cNocturnal Remembrancer\u201d, a parchment tablet inside a box with a slit to guide the writing hand in the dark to enable \u201cphilosophers, statesmen, poets, divines and every person of genius, business or reflection\u201d to secure the \u201cflights and thoughts which so frequently occur in the course of a meditating, wakeful night.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is\u00a0possible that in our modern culture, through our suppression of ancient and natural circadian cycles, we have rendered ourselves \u201cdisanulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies,” as Thomas Middleton wrote in The Black Book\u201d.<\/p>\n

In short, we don’t want to sleep like the dead. We want to sleep and dream like cavemen. When you wake up in the middle of the night, don’t tell yourself you have a problem; recognize you have an opportunity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming<\/em> <\/a>by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few people sleep today the way most humans did for all of our evolution before the introduction of artificial lighting. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans thought that what the pushers of sleep meds promise \u2013 an uninterrupted night of seven or eight hours\u2019 sleep \u2013 was an unnatural and undesirable thing. Experiments by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,20,6],"tags":[1664,1089,1663],"class_list":["post-5708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancestral-traditions","category-history-of-dreaming","category-sleep","tag-biphasic-sleep","tag-prolactin","tag-second-sleep"],"yoast_head":"\nWe want to sleep like cavemen, not like the dead - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2013\/08\/we-want-to-sleep-like-cavemen-not-like-the-dead.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"We want to sleep like cavemen, not like the dead - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Few people sleep today the way most humans did for all of our evolution before the introduction of artificial lighting. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5708"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5710,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5708\/revisions\/5710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}