Ticket 05 of 07

I wake at some point and drift off again. Is a night in two halves wrong?

In one line. A waking that passes on its own is a common shape of the night, not a broken one; what tends to turn it into a problem is the phone that gets picked up in the gap.

The man describing this at the counter is usually a little embarrassed, as if he were confessing a fault. He goes to bed at a reasonable hour, sleeps soundly, surfaces somewhere in the dark for twenty minutes or an hour, and then sleeps again until the alarm. He wants to know if the gap means something is wrong with him.

Historians have turned up diaries and court records from centuries before electric light in which people spoke of a first sleep and a second sleep as the ordinary order of things, with a quiet stretch in between used for prayer, a pipe, a word with the person beside them. Research since has looked at what happens when volunteers spend weeks with long, dark nights, and a split pattern tends to reappear on its own. The two-halves night, in other words, has a long pedigree.

What the pedigree did not include was a bright rectangle held eight inches from the face. The gap becomes a problem when it is filled with the phone, because the screen's light and the small alarms of e-mail tell the body that morning has come, and the second half of the night is then spent chasing a sleep that has already left. The same goes for checking the time: knowing it is ten past three helps no one and starts the arithmetic of how little is left.

Some men find the gap closes faster when they treat it as weather: lie still in the dark, breathe slowly, and let the thoughts pass without answering them. If twenty minutes go by and sleep is clearly elsewhere, a dim lamp and a dull book in another room beat the phone every time. Keep the bedroom cool, the curtains closed and the clock turned to the wall.

Where the desk stops. This page describes an ordinary pattern. Waking that comes with pain, with gasping or choking, with a pounding chest, or that leaves a man exhausted through the day for weeks is not a habit question and belongs with a physician.