blog on sleeping

Here is an interesting blog with a post on bimodal sleeping. This is a neat concept to me, as someone who has been labeled a "light sleeper", a.k.a. someone who wakes up in the night if something is going on (e.g. earthquakes have woken me up, babies have woken me up, dogs tick tick ticking on the hard wood floors have woken me up, lights in the hallway have woken me up...).

Bimodal sleeping is thought to be the type of sleeping our ancestors engaged in, those who lived out on the savannah before electric lights kept us up to all hours of the night. It is characterized by two sleep sessions during the night separated by a light waking time of an hour or so between them.

"With artificial light, modern humans have essentially managed to extend their daytime activities late into the night, when all other sensible creatures are busy sleeping.

As a result, we have compressed our natural sleep into artificially short nighttimes, but not all people are so easily tamed by artificial light. Some people, who may just have very strong circadian rhythms, still have this primitive bimodal sleep that they confuse with a sleep disorder."