[Skybird]

From Die Zeit:
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My girlfriend's cough hammers mercilessly on my eardrums. How long has it been going on? Fifteen minutes, two hours? I don't know, I just know that I won't fall asleep again. I get out of bed and plod barefoot toward the kitchen, yank open the window, pull my sleep shirt over my head, and as the cold, crisp, damp air comes in, my skin tightens and my hair stands up, I think: Benjamin Franklin, co-inventor of American democracy and the lightning rod-his genius must have something to do with this feeling.

Ever since I can remember, I've had trouble sleeping. I never have trouble falling asleep, but from about four in the morning I'm wide awake in bed. In a web of thoughts I rush around, get tangled up, stumble. Again and again I try to get out of it, but I don't succeed. Hours pass before I fall asleep exhausted or the alarm clock rings.

It was always clear to me that millions of others have the same problem, no need to make a big deal out of it. Until a novel opened my eyes. The book is called Harlem Shuffle, written by Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead. In sixties Harlem, a dirty world full of pimps and small-time hoodlums, a certain Ray Carney is trying to stay clean. That's why he's studying. A professor of business administration explains to him when is the best time for bookkeeping: his father preferred the "midnight leisure hour." Before the invention of the light bulb, it was customary to sleep in two stages. The first began shortly after dusk, because "if there was no light, (...) what was the point of staying up?" After four hours, one was brought out of sleep by an inner alarm clock - for about two hours, then one lay down again and slept through until morning.

Could what I was reading really be true? I began to do some research. On the Internet, I came across a historian named Roger Ekirch and an essay he had published in 2001, Sleep we have lost. In it, Ekirch reported that he had evaluated hundreds of diaries, novels and newspaper articles from the pre-industrial era and found repeated references to biphasic sleep.

The hours in between were called the watch by the British and dorveille by the French, a portmanteau word meaning "waking sleep." This dorveille was considered a window of leisure, of fantasy. In Cervantes' Don Quixote, the hero once berates his faithful squire Sancho Panza for sleeping through the night in a play - and not waking up after the "first sleep," as is generally the case, to discuss the great questions of humanity with his don. Benjamin Franklin is said to have taken "cold air baths" in the middle of the night - a nice way of expressing the fact that he sat naked at an open window - and then tinkered with inventions with a fresh head. Others simply had sex between sleep and sleep.

A thought grew in my head: Could it be that in reality it is not my sleep that is disturbed, but the society in which I live? Electricity, messenger of modernity, which brought light to man, the Thermomix and Internet porn, had it slammed the door on the mystical world of dorveille?

My body, at any rate, seemed programmed for biphasic sleep. Unlike Franklin or Don Quixote, I didn't wake up at midnight but four hours after, but I also went to bed later. If I stopped thinking of my wakefulness as an enemy and instead saw it as a friend - would it take me by the hand and lead me to another state of consciousness?

Three o'clock in the morning, my first dorveille night. I went to bed at eleven, as usual. After a franklin air bath, I sit at the kitchen table. What now? I decide to feel my way slowly in this new, strange world. First I want to understand what's going on inside me. The cold air has ventilated my cerebral convolutions, and yet my arms and legs are numb. Fatigue and wakefulness blur into a diffuse state. I close my eyes, hear the wind rustling through the treetop. No screaming children frolicking in the yard. No rattling washing machine in the neighboring apartment. If it weren't for the quiet hum of the refrigerator, there would be only the sounds of nature. After an hour, the first birds chirp, still isolated, a tentative announcement of the beginning of the day. The world awakens, I stagger to bed, tired - and content.
I wake up at ten in the morning. I haven't slept for a long time. At lunchtime, I'm sitting in my office. On the laptop, I continue reading Ekirch's essay about an experiment conducted by sleep researcher Thomas Wehr in the early 1990s. An experimental group was deprived of electric light for an extended period of time, spending 14 hours a day in complete darkness. The test subjects decided for themselves when and how long they wanted to sleep. After one month, a biphasic sleep was established. The test subjects reported great relaxation, a feeling like during meditation. Wehr found that they had increased levels of prolactin - a hormone that stimulates milk production in women and is also released more frequently after orgasm; in other mammals, it promotes brood care behavior.

The following night, I am a child. I'm sitting by a lake, leafing through a car quartet. As the playing cards blur, I wake up. The cell phone display shows 03:28. Kitchen, windows open. The wind is stronger this time, a dark drone. I slip into my jacket. Then it's out into the night.

Now is in-between

Outside the front door, lanterns cast warm light on the sidewalk. The fluffy soft cloud of tiredness carries me to a park. I've often walked home around this time, tipsy and euphoric after nights of partying at the club. This time it's different, I'm tired but fresh. Sober and intoxicated at the same time. What we call "nightlife", it's just the continuation of the day, I think. While standing at the bar or on the dance floor, we always carry the successes and defeats of the day within us. Only sleep makes it possible to process what we have experienced, only through it does the day become a cohesive unit. Now, on the other hand, is neither yesterday, today nor tomorrow. Now is in-between.

Over the next few days, a routine sets in: I go to bed before midnight, wake up between three and four, take my air bath, read or go for a walk. Then I sleep on, sometimes until ten, sometimes until half past eleven, which is possible because I work as a freelancer. In the afternoon, I read that Ekirch's thesis is controversial. In 2015, scientists led by neurobiologist Jerome Siegel studied the sleep of three indigenous peoples who live as they did before industrialization. And cultural scientist Gerrit Verhoeven studied court records from 17th- and 18th-century Antwerp. Siegel's research group and Verhoeven found no evidence of bipartite sleep. On the other hand, there are diaries and newspaper articles, Don Quixote and Benjamin Franklin.

In any case, I will not be deterred in my self-experiment. On my fifth night, I want to use the dorveille experience, my newly discovered state of consciousness, to become creative. In the shopping center I get myself a wedge canvas and acrylic paints. The last time I painted was several years ago; I never thought of myself as particularly talented. But maybe it's different now.

After the obligatory air bath, I listen to the soundscapes of an Icelandic dream-pop band. Like Jackson Pollock, I want to be. I squeeze the violet out of the tube, spread it around. Then blue, a hideous streak emerges. I correct, reapply, correct, reapply, an hour, two hours. At some point the result seems passable, I want to go to bed. The problem: I am wide awake. I don't fall asleep again before six o'clock.

The next day, overtired, I call Hannah Ahlheim. Like Ekirch, she is a historian and has written a book about the history of sleep. I ask her if she thinks Ekirch's theory is plausible. "Scientifically, it's difficult to assess," Ahlheim says. That's because sleep research is a very young discipline, she says, having been conducted only since the last century. Therefore, not much more is known about the sleep behavior of earlier generations than what is written in novels, diaries and medical treatises from the time.

"I'm not sure that natural sleep ever existed," Ahlheim says. When we go to bed, how long we sleep, depends on what is modeled. Even today, sleep rhythms differ from one another around the world: In southern Europe, people take a siesta; in Japan, many people also sleep for short periods during the day. Sleep is always socially constructed. Ahlheim warns against romanticizing the past: "I don't know if people who shared a room with five or ten others really slept better."

Still, has something gotten lost in our oh-so-restless times? "We've certainly lost our appreciation for doing nothing," says Ahlheim. Sleep, he says, is an economic resource today: we need it to function. There is no time for dozing off, loafing, daydreaming. Yet it is precisely these experiences that allow contact with the subconscious.

The next night I sit there, close my eyes and listen to the sound of the wind. A phrase from Ahlheim echoes in my head: "We have lost the appreciation for doing nothing." Even the dorveille I have wanted to use for my own purposes, to increase my supposed creativity.

Before I go to bed, I read a little in Don Quixote. The hero sets out on his first adventure, in the distance an inn that seems to him like a castle. Two prostitutes are standing in front of it, he thinks they are fair maidens. "Your Grace does not want to turn to flight," he says, armed with spear and cardboard visor, appeasing them. But they only laugh at the ancient language. I think: The fight of Don Quixote is mine. Like him, I try to live the life of an era whose time has passed. Perhaps it is true that we have forgotten the natural rhythm of sleep. But even if it were - it would completely disconnect me from the rhythm of my fellow human beings. For true dorveille, I would have to go to sleep at eight o'clock. I would always be well-rested and terribly lonely.

Meanwhile, I sleep in one piece again. Eight hours, sometimes uninterrupted, sometimes I wake up in between. As before, I stay in bed. But I no longer fight my wakefulness. Instead, I read two or three pages, then I fall asleep.

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