The 8-hour compromise: how we invented the modern concept of sleep

We imbue sleep with an array of social meanings. Consider: the virtue of the early riser, the creative genius of the insomniac, the sound sleep of the good, the vexed sleep of the complex, the four-hour nights of the billionaire CEO, the slovenliness of the day-time napper, the disgrace of the slumbering employee.

When we catch an MP sleeping in parliament, we consider it a flagrant dereliction of duty. Perhaps we're right. Or perhaps we're expressing deeply acculturated attitudes towards the common doze.

In Japan, for instance, it's quite ordinary to sleep on the job: the concept of inemuri refers to being present while being asleep - in meetings, lectures, or even at your desk - and, instead of connoting laziness, it often connotes diligence and hard work (after all, that's why you're so sleepy).

So are our slumbering MPs diligent? "It might be complete bullshit," laughs Dr Bodhisattva Kar, who teaches a course on the histories of sleep at the University of Cape Town. "But at the same time it makes you think about what kind of behaviour is being normalised, and the forgotten histories embedded in that."

Kar is a scholar of the everyday, focusing on the complex forces that determine the aspects of our life we're most liable to take for granted. "You miss sleep and you miss one-third of human history," he says.

For a long time, that's exactly what we were doing. But this spectacular oversight has gradually been addressed, beginning with historian A Roger Ekirch.

Ekirch exposed that what we now consider "normal" sleep - one compacted session, at a similar time each night - only came about in the 19th century. Prior to that sleep was commonly segmented, and responsive to seasonal fluctuations: a "first sleep", shortly after dark, followed by a couple of hours of productive wakefulness, and then a "second sleep" until dawn.

The interlude was filled with every imaginable activity - reading, puttering, and praying - and was also considered the ideal time for sex; having rested, and digested dinner, and with the promise of more slumber to come.

Whether this is the "natural" way to sleep is disputed, but the fact that bi-phasic sleep was once prevalent goes to show that our current mode of consolidated sleep is anything but inevitable.

A PARTIAL TRUCE

How, then, did we come to lose one of our cherished sleeps?

Ekirch blames artificial light, which keeps us up later. Moreover, he blames the Industrial Revolution with its relentless ideologies of efficiency and productivity. What a profound inconvenience, from this vantage, that we should have to shut down into a kind of non-existence for a third of our lives.

And so the stage was set: the consolidating forces of capital versus the ancient forces of biological necessity. And where capital tried to disavow sleep - through ruthless shifts without respite - sleep had its revenge: we make a lot of costly mistakes when we're under-slept, sometimes even fatal ones, and we take a lot more sick days.

Gradually, the eight-hour night became the partial truce between the demands of the body, and the demands of industry. Sleep was regulated and in some respects condensed, but it was also conceded. Not for the sake of our sacred dream-life, mind you, but because accepting sleep was more efficient than disregarding it.

"It might be a site of silent social war," Kar muses. "We don't realise that: the contestation of a sleeping time is actually a site of embattlement."

From being practised quite flexibly and freely, sleep became an object of discipline and management: of clocks, time sheets, schedules, and measurable outputs.

In turn, we became hooked on stimulants such as caffeine and sugar to keep us up, and soporifics to put us down, all in an effort to sleep in the supposedly correct way, in the designated place, at the right time.

This whole mentality was then colonially exported and enforced around the world. The normalised Western approach to sleep was interpreted by colonisers as virtuous and productive, and other habits of sleeping deemed errant and slothful. (An afternoon nap might just be an act of decolonisation).

A COMMUNAL AFFAIR

Another aspect of the invention of sleep, and the subsequent enforcement of sleeping norms, concerns who we sleep with. Nowadays, the accepted ideal is to sleep alone or with an intimate partner. But this is also remarkably new.

Until the 19th century, sleep was a communal affair the world over. In general, the extended family would sleep together in the main room of a dwelling. Gradually, especially among elite classes, sleep became viewed as a private affair, and notions of virtue and civility were overlaid on the practice of retreating to a private space to rest.

With this retreat came a variety of sleeping rituals: the warm drink, the good book, the fine cottons and goose-down pillows. But not for everyone, of course. "On the one hand you have this entire apparatus of pleasure developing," says Kar. "On the other hand, many people are rough-sleeping, sleeping in parks, or in the crammed spaces of working-class houses."

Sleep is another place where inequality reigns: some people's sleep is treated as more sacred than others'. And where sleep is compromised - or where its need is willfully ignored by overwork or obscene commutes - so too is any capacity for genuine wellness or flourishing.

Every creature with a brain must sleep. To achieve this, some animals even sleep with one hemisphere of their brain at a time, the other staying alert for mortal threats. In sleep we heal, we grow, we rinse our brain of built-up toxins, we consolidate our memories, and allow our subconscious mind to address the problems that our conscious mind has failed to solve (there's a reason we "sleep on it").

This list sounds like wishful thinking, but it is in fact a record of the scientifically demonstrable achievements of sleep. What's more, if less demonstrably, sleep provides us the consolation of a bit of oblivion; a daily respite from the evolutionary accident of consciousness and its burdens.

THE FUTURE

Most likely "normal" sleep is going to look very different in a few decades' time. The demands of capital are changing: you are expected to be online at all hours, but you might never be expected to turn up at an office; you can live in South Africa, but work on China's time, or in India taking calls from San Francisco.

New social structures are emerging to cater for this different population of sleepers: all-night bars, and restaurants serving dinner first thing in the morning.

Where systems of information, commerce and consumption once quieted down over night - how quaint! - they now carry on incessantly and eternally. It's an endless global human alertness, and dwelling on it can make us seem abstract, immortal and infinite.

But something of sleep's partial triumph over the forces that would prefer to vanquish it bears testament to our repressed reality. We are, after all, only animals. And we get tired, OK.