In a recent essay on www.aeon.co, Scottish writer Karen Emslie has been investigating her own sleep patterns and has discovered that what she thought was troublesome insomnia – waking at four a.m., lying awake for two hours, then going back to sleep – could actually be her body clock recalibrating to humans’ natural sleep cycle before the advent of the electric light. In his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, historian A Roger Ekirch argues that sleep used to be divided into two distinct segments, separated by a period of night-waking. Psychiatrist Thomas Wehr of the US National Institute of Mental Health discovered that segmented sleep returns when artificial light disappears – and that the pituitary gland excretes high levels of prolactin during night waking, which is associated with the dreamlike hallucinations we sometimes experience as we fall asleep, which in turn implies better access to the unconscious. So this an ideal time to pick up your pen.
Novelist, journalist, editor – author of Herring Girl and founder of Mslexia, the magazine for women writers
