Welcome. I'm Sally Shuttleworth and I'm here to introduce a further episode in our podcast series,
brought to you by The Sleep and the Rhythms of Life Network of the University of Oxford.
This time we'll be extending our horizons,
reaching back in time and also across the globe as anxieties about sleep and our own culture become more pressing.
Interest in sleep in other periods and cultures as growth is sleep the same worldwide and across time periods,
or rather different cultural practices and attitudes to sleep at various historical periods and in diverse cultures.
With me to discuss these issues. Operator. Stagger, associate professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge,
who studies sleep both in contemporary Japan, including in tsunamis, shelters and in much earlier periods.
And also Meghan Leech, Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University and author of a book on sleep and its spaces in medieval English literature.
Brigitta is an editor of six volume book series on the cultural history of sleep and dreaming,
for which Meccan is editing a volume, but I believe they've not met before today.
I look forward to a lively conversation. Perhaps we can start with the general question of whether learning about attitudes to sleep and sleep,
practices of earlier periods and non-European cultures can help us to understand and respond to the current issues around sleep,
which seem to be plaguing our society. Thank you very much.
Uh, I think one of the most important messages perhaps we get from the study of pre-modern and also
other cultures sleep habits is that we are not the only ones who have troubles with sleep.
Actually, even thousand years ago, or perhaps longer, people had troubles falling asleep.
They had various reasons for not sleeping, and they had to deal with this.
Absolutely, yeah. Um, I would very much agree with Brigitta that we can learn a lot from the past.
Um, that might be reassuring for us that, you know, we're not the only ones dealing with troubled sleep.
I think we can also, um, learn other things from from past sleeping practices that might help us with our troubled sleep.
Perhaps, um, at a time when the World Health Organisation has been warning that industrialised societies are living through,
uh, a sleep loss epidemic. And it's only been worsened, perhaps, by the disruptions of the Covid 19 pandemic.
What might be gained by by turning to societies that organise the rhythms of their lives differently,
that didn't have electric light and screens, and 24 seven culture and the productivity paradigm shaping experience in quite the same way.
If we, um, turn to the the Middle Ages, which Brigitta and I both work on and think about.
How people slept in and thought about sleep at a time when darkness meant something different.
Yeah, I think one of the things we have to bear in mind that even though people didn't have electric light, there were always means of lightning.
Yeah, that night, even thousand years ago, especially in Japan.
And I have been studying, particularly what would be medieval times, where we have quite a lot of literature, mainly written by women.
So this is actually quite an interesting historical topic because we have the female perspective on sleep habits rather than male perspective.
And we know that there was a lot of nightlife, especially at court, of course.
So people were getting up at night, people were on night duty because the emperor was sleeping, that it admired the moon, that it to have festivals.
They did have other events that did have prayers, so the night was not quite as limited to sleep.
Everyone was just sleeping it. Yeah, absolutely. It's so interesting to think about the cultural differences, isn't it?
But also the differences of class, occupation, gender and that sort of thing.
We can't universalise about a past sleeping experience any more than we can universalise about people's sleeping experiences today, right?
It's so varied. Yeah, I really enjoyed your book.
And maybe. Thank you very much. Tell us a little bit more about how, uh, sleep is not only described as, uh, for the sleep habits,
what people did, but also used as a register to tell other messages about moral issues, about ethics and so on.
Yeah, the the politics of sleep depend on the culture in which they read, um, naps, for instance.
Nowadays, we would tend to think of a nap as a good thing if we can get one, um, that's added to our overall sleep quantity.
But in the later medieval period and in Western Europe, naps were very much frowned upon.
Um, in northern Europe in particular. Um, so again, cultures come into this.
It's it's very different in the siesta cultures of the, the medieval Mediterranean where geography, um,
as well as sort of cultural habits, suggested that people should sleep for an hour or two in the middle of the day after the midday meal.
Um, but in northern north western Europe, um, including England, people were instead instructed not to sleep during the day.
They were instructed in church sermons and manuals of health, called diaries and regimens that they read.
Um people were even instructed that if they had to take a midday nap, they should do so standing,
leaning against a cupboard or sitting upright in a chair if you're still exerting.
Um, and I think equally importantly, from the perspective of that society, still performing a degree of, of temperance,
a degree of self-control, so that other people can see, um, that you've still got some bodily decorum in that context.
Yeah. I think the bodily decorum, especially during daytime, is a very important aspect in especially,
uh, English culture, but also European culture, but well also in Japan in, in some ways.
So, uh, midday naps were common, were actually quite useful, but they're not often talked about.
But if they are talked about, it's about how good people are looking.
How beautiful this princess is.
Or this court lady in her very thin clothes, or sometimes how ugly elderly people are who are taking a nap so it can be a judgement to it.
There is quite some judgement. It's not about being lazy and actually afternoon.
You'd never have anything scheduled at the court, for instance, so we can infer that probably this afternoon's sleep was very common.
I think one of the questions is what causes people not being able to sleep?
Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that people have been worrying about as he started off by saying for a very, very long time and yeah.
Yeah, well, we've just been discussing, um, people sleeping during the day, you know, how they might go about that, whether they should or not.
Um, and of course, yeah. I guess one thing I would add in on that topic, uh, maybe just before we move on to to Night-Time strategies,
is that I think the, the survival in the written records, which are what I deal with from medieval England,
the survival of so many injunctions against midday naps very much suggests that the naps were indeed happening,
even if they weren't supposed to, even if this was seen as something slothful and idle, all that sort of thing.
Um, the you know that the priests and the other powers that be wouldn't be spending so much breath.
Um, and and text and ink, um, on trying to stamp it out if it wasn't something that people were doing anyway.
I think, yeah. Especially what they call, uh, church sleep in, in Germany.
Yeah, that was a hugely debated topic, mainly maybe 16th century when the the sermons got longer and, uh, the commoners also joined and had seating.
Yeah. Opportunities in the, in the church. Yeah. So this was hugely debated because your soul could not be rescued if you would fall asleep.
One of the things I've been looking forward to discussing with you, um, Bushy Tail, is sort of, um, night-time sleeping rhythms,
because I know you've been doing some really interesting research that might be qualifying the paradigm that we've had for the past couple of decades,
isn't it? Um, since Roger Eckert, uh, published a book on knights in the pre-modern world, um,
and this idea of biphasic sleep or sleeping in two intervals that he suggested is, is how people in pre-modern Europe,
um, in particular, tended to sleep, sleeping for several hours, perhaps, and then waking up, um,
and perhaps getting up to do something else, or lying there pondering and then falling asleep again.
The idea of that biphasic sleep is often premised on the fact that night time may have been longer at a time before we had electric light,
so you might go to bed earlier when it gets dark. Um, and spend longer in bed, but not necessarily longer asleep.
But you've been going back to those records and, um. Yeah, finding something quite new, haven't you?
Uh, well, I think that in the 18th century, about what a coach is doing, his research,
people might have used the term for sleep in the way he's, uh, uh, analysing it.
But if you go back further to, uh, it's actually a Latin expression.
And the first sleep doesn't mean the first period of sleep, but it means to sleep when people went to bed.
So it's it's a time unit rather than a unit of, uh, of sleep.
Yeah. So that means it's about depending on the time of the year, about 10:00 in the evening, 9:00 in the evening when people first went to sleep.
Yeah. People obviously often woke up at night.
Yeah, as we do today. And they, uh, sometimes worried about it.
Sometimes they just, uh, admire the moon or or talk to each other or just took it for granted or went to the toilet or, uh, whatever reason they had.
But it was not a clear, biphasic sleep. Yeah. So I think the, the expression first sleep and, and second sleep is not very common,
but first sleep is actually a legend expression for a time of the evening.
Yeah. When people normally went to sleep.
It's really interesting because there has been so much interest in, you know, in the 21st century in that idea of biphasic sleep, right?
Is, um, something that people have thought of as perhaps an answer to their difficulty sleeping, to their insomnia.
Um, or at least, uh, sort of frees people from the idea or the expectation of sleeping in one continuous eight hour chunk,
which is what we think of as the aim now. And, um, we think of as sort of natural rather than cultural.
Uh, right. But I suppose positing that idea of biphasic sleep, um, like I coached it, gave people a different way of understanding it,
that perhaps it isn't, um, something where it all needs to be continuous in this one chunk.
Um, in an eight hour period that we've squished as narrow as possible with our use of electricity and that sort of thing,
and to try and have as much a time for, you know, being productive or being alert.
Um, but but perhaps, um, in light of your research, um, but you so we can nuance that further and just think,
you know, perhaps discontinuous sleep rather than biphasic sleep, uh, is something that we might replace that with.
Uh, yeah. I think, you know, some people sleep in one chunk, some people sleep in, in several, uh, periods.
And I think what we can learn really, from the historical work is we shouldn't worry too much about having any specific way of sleeping.
Yeah. Uh, and, uh, uh, then, you know, uh, I mean, lots of, lots of our sleep habits actually develop from the logic of our overall life.
And that, of course, this logic of our life can be different depending on our jobs, depending on gender, age and so on.
Uh, and, uh, what we learn, especially from the Japanese, uh, uh, sources of 2000 years ago,
is that you have a lot of emotional reasons also for not sleeping.
Yeah. And, uh, that's to bring it back to, to more contemporary issues in Japan has probably has been widely broadcast as in 2011 and,
uh, March 11th, there was, uh, huge earthquake and tsunami.
And then of course, also Fukushima, the nuclear accident.
And during that time I went to Japan and I, uh, had the opportunity to stay at the shelter and, uh, study how people dealt,
uh, in their daily lives from living in a shelter, sharing their sleeping place, their eating place and everything.
And, um, so I think I was the only researcher who actually stayed in the shelter.
And this was only thanks to the priest who who invited me as a guest.
So I talked to people about, uh, you know, about their daily experiences and to see what helped them to sleep again, what interrupted the sleep.
Also prepare us what we can do to improve sleep in these situations.
And then people are having to to try to sleep, you know, both in a,
in a space that is very much not their own and without the comforts they might be used to,
but also while worrying about having perhaps lost everything that was their own.
Right. You know, uh, the way how they, we learned how to sleep was little things like having certainties in little daily rituals,
like how to cook, you know, uh, having a little challenge of to get all this, uh, donations of food.
What, what would they cook for the whole group or or cleaning and doing whatever they needed to do to make the shelter also a nice place.
Uh, just this year, we had another big earthquake.
Again in Japan. So unfortunately, there's not something, uh, that goes out of date.
So we we still have to deal with this situation. And there's so many disasters in the world.
And I think to understand, uh, what we do with in the disaster can actually help us also to understand sleep.
So you need security to sleep, right, to to fall asleep, to sort of give in to unconsciousness in that sort of way.
You need to, to not feel vulnerable in your surroundings. My thanks to Brigitta Staker and Megan Leach for a fascinating conversation.
This podcast is a feast. Collective production. The producer is Ruth Abrahams, with music by Madeline Morris and Melissa Holding.
Do look out for our next podcast. You can also catch up with previous episodes in this series.