2nd sleep

It is 2am on the west coast of the United States, and I should be asleep. I fell asleep at 9:30pm and popped awake around 1am, feeling tired now but my mind is racing. I heard actually about some historians that have found a lot of evidence for something people used to widely and commonly call "2nd sleep". It seems that before the advent to electrical lighting in the house, people regularly went to bed around dusk, and then would wake up in the middle of the night for several hours, before going back to sleep a second time. The midnight waking hours were productive times especially for leisure pursuits, like writing and composing music, in other words the progress of the humanities. Its been hampered, I suppose one could say, by the fact that we now are so efficient at using technology to keep ourselves awake to do practical, required work well past our natural time to sleep, rarely leaving ourselves an opportunity to explore our creative side in the middle of the night like we used to.

I'm not using my midnight awake period for anything fun however. Instead an hour ago, I started thinking about the worst 3 months of my life, January through March, 2009. My brother died in February 2009. I had told my husband I wanted a divorce in January. I was harassed by a frivolous legal matter in March. And of course, on top of all of that, the financial collapse in Iceland meant that everything I had been planning in terms of the opening of Vikingaheimar for April 2009 had to be totally reworked during these 3 months with one-tenth the budget. I'd like to be able to tell you that I had fabulous support from friends and family to make it through all that, but that wouldn't be true. In fact, January started off with a facebook block that still hasn't been lifted. Iceland is Niceland, except when it isn't.

OK, 2nd sleep, you can come anytime now.