In the Wee Small Hours

you and me in the middle of the night

Morning, bb! How did you sleep?

I slept well, if you don’t count the part where I woke up at 3 AM, tiptoed downstairs, and read on the couch for 1.5 hours.

If you do count that, I slept poorly. But I don’t count that, because that’s just how I sleep. For as long as I can remember, I’ve regularly woken up at 3 AM and then been unable to get back to sleep for the next 1-2 hours. After that, though, I sleep like a baby ‘til morning.

Now, this doesn’t happen every night, but it happens often enough (3-4 times a week) that I used to think something was wrong with me.

As a kid, it wasn’t that much of a problem – I’d wake up, turn on my reading light, and read until I passed back out.

But as an adult? sharing a bed with a partner???

There is no book light on Earth that can fulfill its promise of only lighting up your book and not waking up your partner, believe me.

sorry Dav, i swear this book light was supposed to be “discreet and adjustable”

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Eventually, over about 20 years of thinking I had a sleep disorder, I figured out two things:

1. It’s actually pretty normal to sleep this way.

   In 2016, I read a book called At Day's Close: Night in Times Past by Roger Ekirch that made my eyes bug out with sudden recognition. In his book, Roger, a professor of history, explains how night used to be, and offers historical documentation of the fact that people in pre-industrial times commonly slept in two distinct shifts, calling them First and Second Sleep. The idea is this: Before electric lights, nighttime started early, was dark as fuck, and was super dangerous, so everyone went to bed when it got dark, slept for a couple hours, and then woke up in the middle of the night for an hour or two. They’d stoke the fire, have sex, read, or do other quiet tasks. Then they’d go back to sleep until dawn.

   

   These days, lots of people have adopted this idea for health reasons, and the idea of sleeping in two shifts is called segmented, or biphasic sleep. If you’re interested, there are tons of articles online about this, and there are also plenty!!! of dudes on Reddit talking about how they’re using biphasic sleep to biohack, because why wouldn’t there be.

2. The shortcut to getting back to sleep, for me, is Changing Locations and Reading Something Interesting Yet Boring.

   Nothing else works. If I want to sleep again after I wake up at 3 AM, I can’t just lay there, staring into the darkness and willing myself to go back to sleep. I have to leave the bed and go somewhere else, bringing a pillow, a blanket, and an interesting-yet-boring book with me.

Please understand: By “boring”, I just mean the book cannot have a plot. It can’t be a page-turner. It can’t be even slightly exciting, or I’ll read it until dawn. I have zero self-control!! For me, the perfect get-back-to-sleep book is non-fiction, loaded with fascinating facts or descriptions, and it concerns something I know almost nothing about.

I have whole shelves at home devoted to books for my 3 AM get-back-to-sleep reading. Last year, for instance, I read Victoria Finlay’s Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World pretty much exclusively at 3 AM, and my god, the amount of time it took me to do it! Literally months!! I’d wake up in the middle of the night, grab Fabric, switch locations, read an in-depth description about the process of hand-weaving tartan in Scotland, and BOOM!!! out in 20 minutes flat.

It was just so calming and interesting; it was like being put into a trance!

So: There are lots of good books for when you wake up and can’t get back to sleep.

But perfect books for this?

There are only two PERFECT books for this. We’re talking “time-tested, read again and again by me, 100% guaranteed to knock you the fuck out while also teaching you about a world you did not know existed” perfect. They are:

Venice by Jan Morris

Once upon a time, it was 2007, and I was in a battered temporary apartment in Taipei, Taiwan, awaiting my teaching placement into an English kindergarten. I’d been waiting in the apartment for two days; I had no idea how long I would be staying. I was nervous and bewildered, unable to understand anything on TV, afraid to go out in case I missed the placement person who was supposed to stop by, and I’d left my book on the plane.

There were approximately 300 dog-eared books in that temporary apartment. None were in English.

Except one.

Venice by Jan Morris. I seized this book and inhaled it in two days flat. When I finished, I didn’t even take a break; I turned to page 1 and started it again.

It was… incredible. I’d never encountered a book like it. I love travel writing, and this was not travel-writing. This was world-building, but the world was real, and I was walking through it, using Jan’s legs as my own.

Venice is the best travel book I’ve ever read. It’s about exploring Venice – its history, its stories, its architecture, its people and animals – street by street, canal by slimy canal, and all though the eyes of Jan, who lived there in the 60s and loved every cobblestone in the city. (Exciting and unrelated fact: Jan Morris is a trans author!) This book is so loaded with facts and lore and creepy, foggy aesthetic, so packed with minute observations and character sketches, that I’d estimate I’ve read it around 20 times, and almost always right around 3 AM. There is no better book to get back to sleep with. I dare you to finish a dense, fascinating chapter in one sitting. You can’t do it. You can’t. You’ll be rocked to sleep in minutes, your dreams haunted by the soft splash of gondola poles dipping into canals in the dead of night.

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The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

Oh, you can’t sleep? You woke up in the dark and now you’re laying there worrying about money, your day tomorrow, and whether the shooting pain in your leg is something you can ignore or a warning sign of an impending aneurysm?

Move locations immediately and bring The Pillow Book with you!!! It’s the only way.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is gonna calm you down. Listen to this description:

Written by the court gentlewoman Sei Shonagon, ostensibly for her own amusement, The Pillow Book offers a fascinating exploration of life among the nobility at the height of the Heian period, describing the exquisite pleasures of a confined world in which poetry, love, fashion, and whim dominated, while harsh reality was kept firmly at a distance. Moving elegantly across a wide range of themes including nature, society, and her own flirtations, Sei Shonagon provides a witty and intimate window on a woman's life at court in classical Japan.

Babe, it’s the mid-900s, and we are RICH and BORED. We do not have any worries or any problems at all! Our main concern is making sure the Empress likes us best in a very gay-sounding way! Our biggest complaint is when people gossip and dress in silk robes that don’t exactly match the colors of the season! Everyone’s jealous of us, we sleep around, and goddamn, there are so many festivals to get ready for.

You are going to love The Pillow Book. The author, Sei Shōnagon, reeeeallly makes you realize that people have always been people, even when they lived in palaces in 10th century Japan. Sei Shōnagon is privileged. She’s shallow and bitchy. She’s smart and funny and obsessed with protocol and she makes incredible lists. Like, look at this list!!

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“Elegant Things

A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat.
Duck eggs.
Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and put in a new silver bowl.
A rosary of rock crystal.
Snow on wisteria or plum blossoms.
A pretty child eating strawberries.”

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It is one thing to have a vague awareness that people had rich inner lives 1,100 years ago. It is another thing entirely to meet someone from 1,100 years ago – to see their clothes, dish about their lovers, get scalding-hot tea from court, and stare up at the moon with them in the middle of the night.

Have fun waking up in the small hours next time! And don’t worry when it happens – I’m up, too! 💋💋💋