DELANCEYPLACE.COM 12/18/12 – WE USED TO SLEEP TWICE EACH NIGHT
In today’s selection – for most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives. Then came the lightbulb. This unexpected “two sleep” phenomenon was uncovered by historian Roger Ekirch when he began to do research for a history of the night:
“Something puzzled [Roger] Ekirch as he leafed through parchments ranging from property records to primers on how to spot a ghost. He kept noticing strange references to sleep. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, one of the characters in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ wakes up in the early morning following her ‘first sleep’ and then goes back to bed. A fifteenth-century medical book, meanwhile, advised readers to spend the ‘first sleep’ on the right side and after that to lie on their left. And a scholar in England wrote that the time between the ‘first sleep” and the ‘second sleep’ was the best time for serious study. Mentions of these two separate types of sleep came one after another, until Ekirch could no longer brush them aside as a curiosity. Sleep, he pieced together, wasn’t always the one long block that we consider it today.
“From his cocoon of books in Virginia, Ekirch somehow rediscovered a fact of life that was once as common as eating breakfast. Every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the first sleep that kept popping up in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning – the so-called second sleep. The time between the two bouts of sleep was a natural and expected part of the night and, depending on your needs, was spent praying, reading, contemplating your dreams, urinating, or having sex. The last one was perhaps the most popular. One sixteenth-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive several children because they waited until after the first sleep, when their energy was replenished, to make love. Their wives liked it more, too, he said. The first sleep let men ‘do it better’ and women ‘have more enjoyment.’ …
“About three hundred miles away, a psychiatrist was noticing something odd in a research experiment. Thomas Wehr, who worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was struck by the idea that the ubiquitous artificial light we see every day could have some unknown effect on our sleep habits. On a whim, he deprived subjects of artificial light for up to fourteen hours a day in hopes of re-creating the lighting conditions common to early humans. Without lightbulbs, televisions, or street lamps, the subjects in his study initially did little more at night than sleep. They spent the first few weeks of the experiment like kids in a candy store, making up for all of the lost sleep that had accumulated from staying out late at night or showing up at work early in the morning. After a few weeks, the subjects were better rested than perhaps at any other time in their lives.
“That was when the experiment took a strange turn. Soon, the subjects began to stir a little after midnight, lie awake in bed for an hour or so, and then fall back asleep again. It was the same sort of segmented sleep that Ekirch found in the historical records. While sequestered from artificial light, subjects were shedding the sleep habits they had formed over a lifetime. It was as if their bodies were exercising a muscle they never knew they had. The experiment revealed the innate wiring in the brain, unearthed only after the body was sheltered from modern life. Not long after Wehr published a paper about the study, Ekirch contacted him and revealed his own research findings.
“Wehr soon decided to investigate further. Once again, he blocked subjects from exposure to artificial light. This time, however, he drew some of their blood during the night to see whether there was anything more to the period between the first and second sleep than an opportunity for feudal peasants to have good sex. The results showed that the hour humans once spent awake in the middle of the night was probably the most relaxing block of time their lives. Chemically, the body was in a state equivalent to what you might feel after spending a day at a spa. During the time between the two sleeps, the subjects’ brains pumped out higher levels of prolactin, a hormone that helps reduce stress and is responsible for the relaxed feeling after an orgasm. … The subjects in Wehr’s study described the time between the two halves of sleep as close to a period of meditation.
“Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn’t artificial light – and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows – people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep. … [Yet] almost two decades after Wehr’s study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers – not to mention your average physician – have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time in the middle of the night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing that they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years. Patients, meanwhile, see waking up as a sign that something is wrong.”
I was researching this a couple months ago! Here are some other links about it:
Steve: [after bar fight Steve came to pick them up from the police station] Nice cell. Bucky: It’s not much, but we call it home. Tony: We’re thinking of redoing the kitchen.
my new roommate’s best friend literally says “we’ll just go out for one drink” on a weeknight, goes to a club, has ONE drink while everyone else is getting to it, and then tells everyone when it’s time to go home so they can actually make it to class in the morning and I’m genuinely terrified by the amount of self control she has
saying you’ll just have one drink at the club on a school night and then following through and getting up for class the next day demonstrates the exact level of resolve it took to amputate your own arm on an 18th century battlefield
I know that in the original idea for Coco there was some talk about Héctor being a tour guide through the land of the dead. That he worked for low pay in basic customer service and hated his job.
Well, I’d like to post an alternative.
Instead of a tour guide for adults, he works with newly transitioned children, because for some reason, he would be the only guide able to calm the little ones down when they first appeared.
The other tour guides had tried their luck- but all returned with crying, terrified little ones, with too many questions and far too many tears, hiding behind volumes of law and stacks of baggage claim papers from the scary skeletons that loomed above them.
It was their lowest paid worker who crouched before a shaking eight year old boy and carefully reached out to pass a hand through black, unruly locks. “Ay, niño, it’s alright! Hey, hey, heyheyhey- it’s alright.” Bigger hands folding over little ones, pushing up a face, carefully reaching behind to the counter besides the stacks of papers stamped with the Bureau seal to pick out a few tissues. “Oye, it’s alright. Estas bien, chico.”
Héctor had always been a tall man, and so sliding down to the floor, back against the desk, his long legs disrupting the social workers moving to and fro and pointing glares in his direction, was no easy feat. Still, he pulled the child close enough to hum old, unfinished ballads and let the child experimentally toy with his skeletal fingers. He’d flex them. Watch the child’s eyes widen. Watch the child observe their own new hand do the same.
“See?” he’d always say with a gentle laugh, adjusting little cotton shirts and wiping runny noses. “Not so scary, am I!”
Héctor always got a name (Tomás) and always got an age (tengo ocho años, señor) and always made them laugh at some absurd joke while the guide from before watched slack jawed and envious.
“How about you and I go to explore la ciudad. I know a place that makes el pan dulce más maravilloso and then you and I will go find your family, ey?” The boy (or girl, whatever child it was, and there would be many, many children) clung tight to his hand and nodded fiercely and followed along, the eyes of the unsuccessful watching them retreat.
It would be jealousy that would fuel the anger of his coworkers. “Héctor the Spector,” they’d call him behind his back. “Seen to the children, but never by his own family.” And another would make a sound rife with ire in agreement and say “he’ll never cross the bridge anyway. Might as well be of some use here.”
Héctor just clenched his fists and focused on his work. Because through the jeers and barbs, he still managed to find children’s families- to relocate and rehome without much trouble.
No one ever knew why Héctor was so good with the children.
No one ever cared to ask.
@slusheeduck So…when you said you wanted someone to give you tour guide
Héctor, this is what you were asking for right?
@chaossee and @slusheeduck and @im-fairly-whitty (tagging you because apparently you wanted tour guide Héctor and I’m totally into that, as you can see!)
He does this all while wearing a bright green vest with his name pinned to the right breast pocket. It was meant to be humiliating in some ways; the more senior tour guides don’t need the stupid vest or pins. But he makes it work. He finds a little store down near the stadium that sells stickers and he keeps them in the vest pockets for emergencies (boats and fish and guitars and little yellow marigolds).
He carries round chocolate coins and some days when he knows they’ll be an influx of arrivals (a forest fire had overtaken a village by Oaxaca one late June evening and Héctor had rushed through to clock in on unpaid overtime) he politely requests the rental of one van from his good friend to make sure he can transport every child safely and carefully to where they need to be.
(it would be on the return trip that Héctor would completely lose all resolve. Bent over the steering wheel, body halved and heaving, pulling on air and choking on his daughters name. So many children in one night. Too many children on one night. And he cared for them all enough to reignite a long since calcified heart.
The van would crash into a ruin off the side of an old abandoned Shanteytown, and he’d apologize to Señor Chicharrón later: “I left it running, amigo, and the engine died. my mistake.” – “oy, Héctor, how many times…”)
Héctor cares an absurd amount. A stupid amount. An unreasonable amount.
That’s what coworkers would sat.
But Héctor ignores them. Dries his tears. Collects himself. And then starts again.
One last addition (who am I kidding, it’s me, there’ll be five more of these before sunset): @im-fairly-whitty and I were talking about Tour Guide Héctor and the subject came up on my end about orphans. About children who have no picture on an Ofrenda.
They’d have to go through another department. Relocation and Rehoming
(a fancy, nicer term for “lost and forgotten”)
They were the children who would never cross the bridge, who would most likely fade away before their fifth year in the Land of the Dead. Who were transferred over to the Shantytown mass housing communities and orphanages that had been set up by the city so long ago; all in disarray.
Héctor never lets it stand.
Twice a week, through his exhaustion of work and overtime, he volunteers at these housing projects; reading books to the children while the nuns who are posted daily watch over and nod in approval. Some days he even brings his guitar.
It’s after Ernesto himself had made an offhand comment to a stand hand (heard in passing as said stagehand accepted a cigarette from the skeleton who always hung around Ernesto’s practicing rooms, as if waiting for something) that he finds out the man is not so fond of forgotten children.
It’s that week that he wears his best tour guide vest some days, lining the children up, snapping his fingers and having them follow him round the city like a trail of ducklings after their mother, laughing and letting out little grito’s as they passed by Ernesto’s studio all day. “Louder Chicos!” Héctor encouraged, watching a window on the top floor slam closed. “I don’t think he can hear you!”
Those are the best days.
Not all days are best days.
It’s always hard for Héctor to see one of them leave. He collects pictures of them for his own little Ofrenda at home- stacking them behind the cracked glass of an old tea cabinet and lighting the occasional candle.
It’s when Miguel arrives that things change. And that every so often, a stack of pictures arrives under the boys pillow with a note, instructions, pages and pages of recognizable handwriting from lyrics in journals, telling him who the children are, how incredible they are, how unique and talented and oh so wonderful.
All their pictures are put into the land of the living. In Miguel’s Ofrenda. His family is fine with it, and accept it without much question (his Mamá kisses him and tells him she’s so proud- everyone needs to be remembered, after all)
Héctor continues to work at the center even after he finds his family. Though by then, with Miguel receiving letters, he never has to see a child go. Not ever again.
And I’m absolutely convinced that it’ll be with Rivera donations, that the new orphanage (Centro de Coco Para Niños Encontrados) is built in place of Ernesto’s long desecrated statue.
After all- every child deserves a family.
And Héctor somehow winds up becoming a Papá to every forgotten child who passes through.
I’ll go ahead and slap our resolution on here 🙂
After Ernesto-the-trash-monster is dethroned, his palace-house and everything in it is given to the Rivera family as restitution, and Hector quickly sets about modifying it into the BIGGEST PLAYGROUND WONDERLAND ever seen in either the land of the living or the dead.
This is no orphanage, oh no, this is a place where every kid is able to forget about whatever worries they had in their short life and have real fun for perhaps the first time ever.
Oscar and Felipe put their heads together and go crazy inventing all sorts of fantastic playground equipment, building fabulous play-zones of all kinds, from trampoline rooms and ball pits to exciting jungle gyms or even colorful rooms full of stuffed animals and books. The guitar shaped pool is taken full advantage of every day, especially by the kids who are fascinated by the fact that they can now breathe underwater.
They’ve built roosts for all the alebrijes that the kids drag in with them and with the high vaulted ceilings they’re able to fly them around, Pepita giving rides to anyone who wants one as long as they don’t pull her feathers.
Imelda helps the place run smoothly, helping take care of paperwork and making sure the kids know there’s a higher power to be reckoned with should they stray too far out of line, but all the children love her, especially since most of them have never had a strong mother figure to look up to.
Rosita cooks, endlessly. All kinds of food are available all the time, and for many of the children this is a big deal, most of them having gone hungry during their short lives, after all, some of them even having died of starvation on the streets. But Rosita makes sure even those children soon forget it, since no one is allowed to say “no” to more tamales.
Coco and Julio make sure that everyone is properly dressed and has a good pair of shoes on their feet, especially those who arrived by way of disaster and have only rags left that have been charred by fire or ripped by rubble.
And Hector runs an adoption program with his new-found fame in the Land of the Dead to place the children in loving homes, and there’s so many of the dead with holes in their hearts who are eager to welcome children of all ages into their homes. (young mothers who died in childbirth, parents who left behind their children in car accidents, grandparents who miss their grandchildren)
There’s so much love to go around in the Land of the Dead. After all, the dead know the real value of love and family in a way that the living don’t yet.
So glad we had this chat. It was too perfect and wonderful.
Now you can all go through heartbreak and happiness with us.
And it should be noted that kids in the orphanage, every year, travel with Papá Héctor across the bridge. It’s one of the favorite times of the officers who check ID- to see their former scapegoat corralling the mass of children while Imelda scolds and fixes newly sewn blouses and starched shirts and tells them to be on their best behavior while Héctor signs them all out.
And if that isn’t the perfect way to spend the Day of the Dead, I don’t know what is.
Excuse me while I lie in a puddle and cry non stop for the rest of eternity.
The bureau is in shambles because Taako and Lup have started what they call “Project Runway: Moonbase Extravaganza”.
In reality, they just sit in the base’s kitchen – fashionably lounging on the barstools with authority and faux disinterest – and critique the ensembles of the friends and colleagues that walk through the door.
Angus is complemented on the bold style of his feathered cap, but the twins agree he could use more color and a complementing accessory. Lup tosses him a feathered boa and he cautiously retreats from the kitchen, juice box in hand.
Barry comes in with a “Reduce, Reuse, Reanimate” t-shirt and his iconic bluejeans, eyeing the twins and starting some coffee as Taako, mouth agape, struggles to form a coherent criticism.
Lup says he looks sexy.
Taako kicks Lup off the judges panel.
Taako and Kravitz sit on the kitchen barstools now. Taako strikes down their prey while Kravitz points out their aesthetic strengths and suggests improvements, but Kravitz isn’t as thrilled as Taako thinks he should be. He accuses him of not taking this seriously.
Kravitz looks up from his crossword puzzle. “Hmm?”
Taako kicks Kravitz off the judges panel.
Taako and Merle are stylishly sprawling across the kitchen countertops. Taako has a pop-funk playlist blasting as loud and as far as his magic can make it. Lucretia enters, directing a pointed glance at the two chucklefucks littered across the kitchen. Merle vogues, and then accuses her of failing to blend her eyeshadow. Lucretia informs him that he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and crocs, flipping him off with both hands.
Taako and Lucretia now lounge at the barstools. After sending a confused but undaunted dog-shirted Magnus away with a flick of his wrist, Taako turns to Lucretia. It looks like something’s bothering her, and he asks her to spit it out.
“I don’t want to insult my dear, fellow judge” she hedges. She finally turns and looks him in the eyes, the edges of her smile twisting into cruelty. “But you’ve got lipstick on your teeth.”
Taako’s eyes blow wide with horror. Without breaking eye contact, he pulls out a compact mirror. Taking a deep breath, he opens it.
theclumsiestninja 