My sleep patterns are a mystery to me. I do not understand why they frequently change or why I so often find myself waking up in the middle of the night, usually at 3 a.m. I have difficulty falling back to sleep even when I practice the usual tricks that have helped put me to sleep in the past (quiet music, meditation, prayer). When those tricks fail me, I eventually rise from my bed to work on some boring task until such a time that my body and mind feel ready to sleep again.
Apparently I am not alone in experiencing periods of interrupted sleep. Sleep experts report that around a third of the population has trouble sleeping and difficulty maintaining continuous sleep throughout the night. I wonder if many of them, like me, have more than a passing familiarity with the 3 a.m. hour.
The author Ray Bradbury had something to say about 3 a.m. in his dark fantasy novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes:
“Three AM. Charles Halloway thought, it’s a special hour. Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men in middle age? They know that hour well. Oh God, midnight’s not bad. you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning , there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M. Doctor’s say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying.
Sleep is a patch of death, but three three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open… you lie pinned to a deep well bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – and wasn’t it true, had he read it somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time…?
Ray Bradbury, “Something Wicked This Way Comes”
Why do many people feel afraid or uneasy about the time between midnight and sunrise – especially 3 a.m.? Is it some embedded memory of the horror novels and films we consumed in the past or is it an instinct left within us from our distant ancestors who had to battle nocturnal predators for thousand of years?
For starters, 3 a.m. is sometimes referred to as The Witching Hour, the time of night when some believe the veil between life and death is at its thinnest, allowing spirits and ghosts to travel more easily between the two worlds. The time between 3-4 a.m. is also thought of by some as the Devil’s Hour. The Catholic Church in 1535 forbade activities during the 3-4 a.m. hour because Jesus was crucified at 3PM – and the inverse of that would be 3 a.m. – making it an hour of demonic activity. The number 3 can be used to make a mockery of the Holy Trinity, also making it an ideal time to carry out acts of evil.
Over time, fear of the Witching or Devil’s Hour became common amongst large groups of people, so foul meaning was attached to it. If we’re always waking up disturbed at 3 a.m. then something dark and ominous must be at fault. I have a friend who shared with me that he becomes anxious if he happens to wake up at 3 a.m. and he has to get down on his knees and pray the Rosary in order to calm his spirit . Even those who do not fear spirits or ghosts seem to believe that nothing good really happens at 3 a.m.
My background in engineering has conditioned me to look for scientific explanations to mysterious phenomenon rather than the actions of sinister spirits, ghosts and demons from the shadow world. My research into the topic has revealed that human biology and evolution may have something to do with our often confounding sleep experiences, as well as our tendencies to wake up in the middle of the night.
For most people, 3 a.m. comes along right about the time our body is coming out of a REM phase, the moment of our deepest sleep; when our heart rate slows, our body temperature drops, and our brain turns off as many functions as possible so it can repair itself and so we can get truly deep rest. If we happen to wake up suddenly at the end of an REM phase, we are going to feel very disoriented. The natural reaction to these strange feelings is fear and unease because we can’t help but feel panic when we wake up feeling unlike anything we ever feel when we are conscious.
These nighttime awakenings are distressing for most sufferers, but there is some evidence from our recent past that suggests a period of wakefulness occurring between two separate sleep periods was normal. Throughout history, various medical texts, court records and diaries mention instances of segmented sleep – commonly referred to as “first” and “second” sleep.
In Charles Dickens’ book Barnaby Rudge (1840), he writes:
“He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream.”
Anthropologists have documented that bi-modal sleeping was common in preindustrial Europe when sleep onset was determined not by a set bedtime, but by whether there were things to do. Historian A. Roger Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past describes how households during this time period retired a couple of hours after dusk, woke a few hours later for one to two hours, and then had a second sleep until dawn.
Ekirch noted that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th century as the Industrial revolution took hold. He believes the practice of consolidated nighttime sleeping started in the upper classes in Northern Europe and filtered down to the rest of Western society over the next 200 years.
Interestingly, the problems of reported insomnia start to appear in literature at the same time as accounts of split sleep start to disappear in the late 19th century. So it may be that modern society is placing unnecessary pressure on individuals to seek continuous consolidated sleep every night – even though there are natural biological tendencies in the human machine towards bi-modal sleep patterns.
Although we aspire to have consolidated sleep, this may not suit everyone’s body clock or work schedule. Perhaps some of us are more suited to the segmented sleep pattern practiced by our pre-industrial ancestors. In fact, some forms of segmented sleep are still accepted in today’s society. Cultures that allow for an afternoon siesta, for instance, acknowledge that our internal body clock lends itself to such a schedule because we naturally experience a reduction in alertness in the early afternoon.
A number of recent studies have found that split-shift sleep schedules provide comparable performance benefits as one big sleep, as long as the total sleep time per 24 hours adds up to around 7 to 8 hours. Several shorter sleeps during the course of a day can be just as beneficial for our health, performance and safety.
So my recommendation for all of you who have trouble sleeping is to forget about demons and witches, forget about manufactured sleep drugs, forget about trying to achieve what society tells you is the perfect consolidated sleep pattern – and simply find a sleep pattern that works for you and one that matches your own unique rhythm.
If you can manage to do that then maybe you will, like me, come to see 3 a.m. less as a foe and more as a friend!
Words to Live By... 
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