You only sleep twice

[Skybird]

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...biphasic-sleep

After university, I worked as scientific assistant in a sleep laboratory for a bit more than half a year, I needed the money, had to overbridge some time, and the working time - nightshifts - met my biological inner clock perfectly, I am strongly a creature of the night, and I hate early mornings: I swithc of the light around 4 a.m., and sleep until 10-11 a.m. School, university and jobs in the first 45 years of my life, were not pkl,easant for me, in this regard: working day starting officially at 8a.m. is s little hell for me, sinc eI must raise even earlier, but I appreciate night shifts.

Many on my mother's family side ticked like this, were extremely night-active. My brandfather was a teacher, at that time kids were not rmeoved formt nheir fmaileis and place din state-run storage-facilties named schools, but school ended after the 6th hour, sometimes 7th, and that was it. He came back at 2 p.m., ate warm lunch - and then went to bed. He raised at around 10 p.m., did some stuff for school if need was given - and dissappeared for the night in his hobby cellar, working wiht woods, carving and turning it, building christmas pyramids and modelling on his hige miniature railroad. At 7 a.m. or so he came up again, had a coffee, and went to school. - The marriage was not the happiest one, for my grand mother was sleeping and awakening very "normally"... My mum is a later-raiser, too, so was her sister, and her grandfather.

In the lat 90s, sleep research still accepted that beside the huge group of normal sleepers there were also "owls" (night people) and "larks" (early morning people). I have no more interest in these things and am not up to date, but it seems that over the past two decades this separation was given up by some researchers. I wonder whether that makes sense, because realising that there are small groups of people deviating from the norm and being very early or very late raisers from sleep indeed is an observation you can easily make everywhere, and I see no meaning in wanting to reject this.

I think the push for announcing all people are the same in their internal clock's timing is just another face of the modern drive to define all people as being the same in their individual needs, without much differences and instead all ticking by the same rythms, criteria, identity traits and so forth - features that are designed to make the "drones" that employed peole de facto are for the economy better fit into the needs of industrial demands and economically structured contexts. That is also the reason why we all wear watches. Non-industrialised non-specialised economic societies do not need these.

Until some years ago I also had an interesting ability. I could set an internal biological alarm clock that let me wake up to a wanted time right within a 2-3 minute window, say 9:45. No matter what time of day or night, I could wake up almost precisely at the wanted time, within 2-3 minutes. That was almost a bit eerie. Family said they could correct their watches by me awakening. And I do not mean that it was always the same time. I mean a randomly set time different on every opportunity. This phenomenon is sometimes reported in literature, but it seems to be the rarer the more precise the waker could awake at the target time. In the past ten years or so I have lost this ability.