sur le sommeil polyphasique

J'ai trouvé ces passages dans un livre, j'essayerais de les traduire plus tard pour les non anglophones.

[...]Thomas Edison. Edison’s mechanical mastery appeared to extend to his own body. He claimed to need very little in the way of sleep, but he was a champion napper, a state of consciousness that in its first ten minutes or so is almost pure hypnagogia. When Edison was stumped by a problem he would find a comfortable chair and settle into one of his naps. On the table
in front of him he would place a pad of paper. In each hand he would grip a steel bearing, and on each side of the chair he would deposit a tin plate. He would then sit back in his chair, dangle each hand over its respective plate, and doze off to sleep. As he began to drowse, one or both of the bearings would fall out of his hands and hit the tin plates, waking Edison with a start. And it was in that period of half-wake, half-sleep that many new ideas came to him. The falling bearing was the associative mind, racing away with the insoluble problem. The tin plate was the leash of waking consciousness. With a clank it would yank back unexpected connections for Edison to inspect and duly document in his notepad.

Salvador Dali apparently used a version of the same technique to prepare for his own creative exertions[...]

‎[...]He kept coming across references to something called “first sleep,” as in a medical book from the fifteenth century that advised sleepers to lie on their right side during “fyrste slepe” and “after the fyrste slepe turn on the lefte syde.” An early English ballad, “Old Robin of Portingale,” had this advice: “At the wakening of your first sleepe / You shall have a hott drink made, / And at the wakening of your next sleepe / Your sorrowes will have a slake.”

The same phrase popped up in other languages. Première sommeil in French, primo sonno in Italian, primo somno or concubia nocte in Latin. In total, Ekirch found over two hundred references in English and several hundred more in French, Latin, and Italian, including some choice mentions in Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey. They were all passing references; the utter familiarity of the expression to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century readers appeared to require no further elaboration.

The notion of a first sleep suggested, of course, that another sleep followed, and indeed Ekirch also found references to a “second” or “morning” sleep. The picture he began to piece together of human sleep before the industrial era was not one anyone had ever remarked on before. It appeared that people slept in two bouts: an evening bout, which lasted from about 9 p.m. to sometime after midnight, and a morning bout, which lasted from around 2 a.m. to dawn. In between, it seemed the great mass of supposedly slumbering humanity was actually…wide awake.[...]

‎[...]Segmented sleep, it seemed, was still in our bodies. This was bimodal sleep, the sleep of chipmunks and chimps, a proto-mammalian mix of slumber and vigilance that looked very little like the sort of sleep we expect in the modern world. When Wehr published his results, he speculated that bimodal sleep may be the default physiological pattern for our species in general. The night is twelve hours long at the equator, where we evolved—plenty of time for year-round segmented sleep. As humans ranged north and south and patterns of seasonal light changed, our biological clocks adapted to these variations, and we probably began to sleep long nights in the winter and short nights in the summer. But then culture intervened, and we developed a taste for those short summer nights. Modern humans unwittingly became “perpetually clamped in a long-day/short-night mode.”[...]

[...]In these cultures, interrupted or polyphasic sleep is the norm, which jibes with findings about still other cultures, like the Temiars of Indonesia and the Ibans of Sarawak, 25 percent of whom are apparently active at any one point in the night.[...]

[...]They were Uberman Sleep Schedule testimonies. Also known as polyphasic sleep, the Uberman is an extreme example of how culture is able to shape sleep—in this case, our own productivity-obsessed culture. Under the Uberman regime, individuals train themselves to sleep for twenty to thirty minutes every three to four hours, reducing their total sleep need to about three hours a day and opening up great vistas of free time in which to, well, to do something. Polyphasic sleep has undergone a bit of a renaissance of late. Various investigators have speculated that this was how Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Winston Churchill slept; currently, it’s popular with round-the-world sailors, who need to maintain maximum vigilance, and select Internet bloggers.[...]