According to discoveries made in the 1990s by a Virginia Tech historian, Robert Ekirch, before the 20th century, our ancestors used to dabble in a kind of sleep called "biphasic sleep." This meant that instead of sleeping for one long, eight-hour period, they instead slept for two four-hour periods with a few hours of ...
Victorians would typically sleep for around five hours then wake back up and use their time for cleaning, reading or relaxing before settling down for the second round of sleep, otherwise known as a biphasic sleep pattern.
Before the days of Tempur-Pedic mattresses and Casper, humans slept on makeshift sleeping surfaces like piles of straw. As society advanced, primitive mattresses were fashioned out of stuffed fabrics, and down was introduced. Bedframes came much later but have still been around since the ancient Egyptians era.
Arguably from time immemorial to the nineteenth century, the dominant pattern of sleep in Western societies was biphasic, whereby most preindustrial households retired between 9 and 10pm, slept for 3 to 3 ½ hours during their “first sleep,” awakened after midnight for an hour or so, during which individuals did ...
Most writers agreed that the optimum quantity of sleep lay somewhere between seven and nine hours and that its health-giving benefits were many and varied. The medical literature of the time however suggests that people – then as now – were often plagued by slumber's elusiveness.
They found that average time the members of each tribe spent asleep ranged from 5.7 to 7.1 hours per night, quite similar to the reported sleep duration in more modern societies.
Ancient Sleeping Patterns
During and before the 15th Century, we used to sleep in two shorter periods over 12 hours. Due to a lack of artificial lighting and candlelight, our ancient ancestors went to bed at dusk for around four hours, woke in the middle of the night and were active, then slept again until dawn.
For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning.
Typically, they went to sleep three hours and 20 minutes after sunset and woke before sunrise. And they slept through the night. The result of these sleep patterns: Nearly no one suffered from insomnia. In none of their languages is there even a word for insomnia.
Prior to the industrial revolution and the invention of the electric light, most of our ancestors actually slept in two shifts, spending the time in between awake. It's known as biphasic sleep.
Sleeping positions were also vastly different to what most people do today. Lying flat in bed was associated with death, so medieval people would sleep in a half upright position. Andrew Boorde even suggested that daytime naps should be taken standing up, and leaning against a wall.
Each block of sleep would be around four hours, with most people staying awake for an two to four hours in between. This in between waking period was often seen as a good time for those nocturnal arts, such as procreation and pillow talk.
The First Pillow
The history of the sleeping pillow all started in Mesopotamia. Around 7,000 BC, pillows were made of stone. While not the best start to the current comfortable designs, these pillows were actually used to avoid insects crawling into individuals' mouths, ears and noses.
Perhaps the creepiest of these peculiar Victorian sleeping arrangements, for those too poor to have a fixed place to sleep, were the four or five penny coffins. Thankfully they weren't actually coffins. Instead they were small wooden boxes that bore a striking and unpleasant resemblance to coffins.
If you've ever been on a tour of an upper-class historical home or castle, the docent probably made a point of telling the group that beds of the past were so short because people used to sleep sitting upright, leaning against the headboard.
People would first sleep between around 9pm and 11pm, lying on rudimentary mattresses generally filled with straw or rags, unless they were particularly wealthy and could afford feathers. People normally shared beds, alongside family members, friends and, if travelling, even strangers.
Well, not a bed exactly, but more like a mattress made of grass. What Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of Witswatersrand, found were mats of grass and sedge piled half an inch thick on the floor of a cavelike rock shelter in South Africa. The oldest bedding is 77,000 years old.
The first human ancestors appeared between five million and seven million years ago, probably when some apelike creatures in Africa began to walk habitually on two legs.
Our sleep is much more efficient than that of our closest animal relatives, a new study has found, allowing us to spend less time in the light stages of sleep, so we can drift more quickly into the deeper states that work so well at restoring our bodies and minds.
Homo sapiens are the only species that deliberately deprives itself of sleep; all other mammals sleep at multiple points during the day when their bodies urge them to. Infants nap vigorously, which confirms that a bit of sleep during the day is perfectly natural - and necessary - for humans.
The longest time a human being has gone without sleep is 11 days and 25 minutes.
Einstein Slept Only 3 Hours a Year.
More sleep is natural in the wintertime, according to the National Sleep Foundation. The normal range is an extra 1.75 to 2.5 hours per night. The key thing is to limit your sleep to between 7-10 hours per night (for healthy adults).
1. Sleeping. A good night's sleep is vital for every human being to survive. Given that an average a person sleeps for 8 hours in a day, that means that an average person will sleep for 229,961 hours in their lifetime or basically one third of their life.