Natural Sleep, anybody?

Some may already know that I hardly need more than 4 hours of sleep every night, apart from peculiar circumstances.

Sometimes I think with appropriate training I could be able to shorten that time to 2 hours: and if I could switch to power-napping (15 minutes every 3 hours or so), I’d do it without much of a thought (but sadly, without much of a family around me either…)

Having had to deal with countless criticism about this supposedly harmful behaviour, I can only be pleased in reading this comment on one Op-Ed’s by Alex Beam on the International Herald Tribune:

In his 2005 book "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past," historian A. Roger Ekirch […] argued that the transition from old-fashioned "segmented sleep" to today's continuous sleep pattern hasn't helped mankind. "There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a provenance as old as humankind," Ekirch wrote. Up until the invention of artificial lighting, he noted, men and women went to bed earlier and woke up in the middle of the night to smoke a pipe, make love, or analyze their dreams.

Segmented sleep, that’s what’s healthy and “natural”: not 8 or 10 hours in a row