Two Sleeps
the room I didn't know was in the house
I’ve had a sleep disorder since I was a little kid. I’ve written about it before, so I’ll be brief here: I grew up in a house where becoming unconscious felt dangerous, because it was. Nightmares were loud, and loud got punished with more nightmare fuel, so the thing fed itself.
For my whole adult life, going to bed was a coin flip with no stated odds. Two hours and then awake with a heart full of adrenaline. Or up every twenty minutes until the sky went grey. Or nothing at all.
Night terrors were routine — I measured my good years by how few times I came to under my desk holding my car keys.
The only reliable deep sleep I ever got came with depression attached, which meant the one thing I needed most arrived only as a symptom of the thing that was killing me.
Then, last August, I went on a trauma-recovery retreat, and it undid all of that. I wrote about what came after here — I called it Promoted to Human, because that’s what it felt like: being handed something everyone else had apparently been issued at birth.
The one-year mark is coming up, and I’ve been turning it over. It pops to mind at the oddest times. The friend I made there who was newly pregnant now has a three-month-old.
What I expected, honestly, was regression. I’ve had good stretches before. They end. I assumed I was living inside a reprieve and that the meter was running.
It wasn’t, and it isn’t.
But the thing I’ve actually spent the year learning isn’t that the sleep held. It’s what it’s been quietly turning into — something that is a word that almost never applies to me.
Normal.
For the last several months, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night. Not with a jolt. Not with my hands already looking for something to defend myself with.
I just — wake. It’s dark, the house is quiet, and I’m awake, and there’s nothing wrong.
The first few times, I braced. An adult lifetime’s worth of training says a wake-up at two in the morning is the beginning of a bad night, and the correct response is to fight it: lie still, keep the eyes shut, will yourself under.
I fought it for about two weeks, afraid the old pattern was coming back, but I discovered quite by accident that it’s normal.
It even has a name!
It’s called biphasic sleep. Sleep in two blocks instead of one, with an hour or so of wakefulness between them.
Before artificial light and factory shifts and advertising campaigns designed by mattress companies compressed the night into a single slab, this was ordinary — people woke, prayed, talked, tended the fire, and went back down for a second sleep. Some historians think our single-block night is the aberration, not the other way around.
So now I don’t fight it. I get up.
I comfort-read. I meditate. I write in a journal. I draw — but only from imagination, never from a reference photo, because studying an object demands a kind of focus that this hour will not supply and doesn’t want to.
Whatever this hour is for, it is not for effort. It’s a room in the middle of the night that I didn’t know was in the house.
Then I go back to bed, and I sleep again.
I’d distrust all of this — it sounds like the kind of thing a person talks themselves into, which is one of the few things I have literal Zeus-granted talent, i.e. I never had to work at learning the skill, for — except that it left fingerprints.
My ocular migraines have dropped off dramatically. Not gone, but rare enough that I noticed the absence before I noticed the pattern.
And there’s the caffeine. I used to get a bottle of caffeine pills on Amazon Subscribe and Save, once a month, because I ran on them. After the retreat I stretched the delivery to once every three months. Once I stopped fighting the wake-up, I stretched it again, to every six.
The bottle that came last just might end up lasting me a year. Or two. Or forever.
I don’t have a lesson to hand you.
I just want to put it somewhere that a thing my body was trying to do — a thing I spent years interpreting as evidence of my own brokenness — turned out to be normal, and turned out to be nice.
The worst hour of my life, for most of my life, was the one where I woke up in the dark.
It’s now one of the best.