Nature came back

In previous item I linked a 2015 piece about sleep improving memory. At that time I was going through a ‘phase change’ without knowing it:

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Since the end of paid work project in early Feb, I’ve dropped into a bad broken sleep pattern, and can’t seem to pop out. I’ll get 4 hours of solid sleep at the usual time. No matter how hard I try to distract and relax, sleep refuses to resume. So I get up after wasting an hour on futile resumption, then after 6 hours of activity the remainder of sleep finally clicks in, at an inconvenient time wrt regular mealtimes and dumptimes. Net result: Semi-functional all the time. Wasted “overhead” of ramping up and down and futile resumption.

Every 10 days or so the pattern is interrupted by a normal 6-hour sleep. This morning was one of those blessed normals, and I was able to observe two step-like differences.

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I was automatically shifting from short Industrial Sleep to the much older Split Sleep pattern. Gradually I stopped fighting the tradition and regularized it. At first I agreed with the ancient pattern without knowing the ancient pattern. 9 PM to midnight for first segment and 2 AM to 5 AM for second. Gradually I pulled it earlier. Now first segment starts at 6 PM and ends between 9 and 10 PM.

During the intersegment interval I make coffee, eat, and do dull routine chores like laundry or clipping fingernails. (I’m following phonetics and Morse tradition when I call it the ISI.)

Second segment starts (less strictly) around midnight and ends between 4 and 5 AM.

When not interrupted by weather or worry, each segment is about 4 hours in bed and 3.5 hours of actual sleep, totalling 7.

In other words, I naturally rediscovered the old pattern, complete with the typical occupations in the ‘watch’. When the monstrosity imposed by the 1700 sweatshoppers went away, Nature came back.

The linked BBC article about historian Ekirch rediscovering the old pattern in old legal records and plays and songs demonstrates the totality of the sweatshopper propaganda. The evidence was right there in plain sight, and in our own lives, but we couldn’t SEE the evidence because the meritocrats and sweatshop slavers had utterly destroyed our traditional knowledge. When Nature was trying to reassert itself in 2015, I called it a bad broken sleep pattern.

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Old Soviet joke:

A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and start talking. The Russian says he’s heading for America to learn American propaganda techniques.

The American is offended. “What American propaganda techniques?!!”

“Exactly,” the Russian replies.