First Sleep, Second Sleep
“To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
....To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come”
Reading Hamlet as an insomniac explains a lot. Reading Hamlet as an insomniac explains a lot, too.
Lately, I have been doing both because, well, my students aren’t.
It’s the time of year when Facebook reminds me of this clever little word problem I posted about six years ago:
The week pulls into the station on Wednesday, but since you teach 3 classes over 2 days (M/W) it’s actually Friday. 0% of 1/3 of your students is actually reading “Hamlet” and 1% of 2/3 of your students knows what a thesis statement looks like, so how much wine can you drink?
I stand behind this question. But now I might modify it to read something like
The week pulls into the station on Wednesday, and since you teach 3 classes over 4 days (T/H) it is actually Wednesday. 0% of 1/2 of your students has actually heard of Shakespeare and 1% of 5/8 of your students knows where the phrase “to be or not to be” comes from, so how much wine can you drink?
Now, one piece of advice you might be mentally offering me right now is, “stop teaching Hamlet and, instead, teach “The Lion King” with the captions on because British accents are almost as hard to understand as Shakespearean English.” But to teach or not to teach Hamlet is not the question. The question is, why are Hamlet and I not sleeping?
A few years ago, while watching the Adrian Lester staged reading of the above soliloquy, it occurred to me that Hamlet has insomnia. And why shouldn’t he? He has been asked, by a suspect ghost, to kill the king. And, if he does so, he will damn his own soul (murder) but free his father’s sinful soul (foul crimes). BUT, if Hamlet is lucky, before he dies he will get to go back to university. If you read Hamlet as a character who suffers from insomnia, it explains his seeing things, being unable to make decisions, having massive emotional regulation issues, and leaving all his inheritance to a relative stranger. I get it.
My sleep problems are less stage-worthy, but equally medieval. I am reverting back to the practice of First Sleep and Second Sleep.
I first read about this practice in the New York Times back in 2022. But since that article is paywalled, here is a similar story from The Guardian. Essentially, before modern light and modern clocks, people went to bed when it got dark, woke up a few hours later and did things like feed the animals, talk, work, and have sex, and then went back to sleep until dawn. Segmented sleep was common practice across classes and cultures in pre-modern Europe “from Homer to Chaucer.” And The Atlantic claims that this medieval sleep pattern might hold the answer for America’s insomnia—but that article is paywalled, too, so I will need to figure it out for myself.
Now that I, like Hamlet, have been released from the responsibility of studies, and can manage my own sleeping and waking times for the summer, I may allow myself to follow a practice of segmented sleep. Rather than attempting to drug myself to sleep (I’ve gone through a full bottle of ibuprofen PM in the last couple of weeks), I will, as the Guardian suggests, embrace the time that the French call dorveille as a time of “unique intimacy…, a hushed tranquility and peace. It’s almost a confessional between you and the page.” To write this blog, read some words, words, words, and, perhaps, set a mousetrap for second sleep.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
