At the time, most historians would have readily agreed that human activity after the sun went down was reduced to “no occupation but sleep, feed and fart,” as Thomas Middleton, a playwright who was friends with Shakespeare, once so eloquently put it. But Ekirch continued the lonely work of prying open the pages of mildewing books, noting any hints that something interesting happened after the close of each day. He didn’t know he was on the path of a major breakthrough that would change our conception of how the human brain is built for sleep. He was a history professor, after all, whose only understanding of sleep consisted of knowing that he liked it. But as he searched through plays, wills, and all of the other assorted artifacts of daily life that had accumulated over the last thousand years in Europe, he realized that the sun’s fall into the horizon set the stage for a bizarre twelve hours. (p. 19)

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.” (p. 21)

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born