31 05

WJI Blog 2022, May 29 PM - Interrupted Sleep

Screeching iPhones. A tornado alert. Feet plodding down steps, receding into the ground, into safety.

I read in an article last week that the ancients didn’t believe in the eight hour sleep cycle. Instead, our ancestors slept in two phases, with a period of wakefulness in between. During the awake period, some would eat dinner. Others would go outside to check on their farm animals. Christians would pray and recite psalms.

During last night’s weather-induced wakefulness, I photoshopped Aiden being swept up in a tornado and sent it to the WJI group chat. My message received nine likes. A kind of work, sure, but far less productive than dinner or farming or psalms.

Why humanity decided to stop waking up at midnight is something of a mystery, but scholars believe that the invention of the light bulb caused us to go to sleep later while waking up at the same time, so we truncated our sleep into today’s 11-7 (or, if you’re me during finals, 1-6) schedule. Technology killed the ancient practice of biphasic sleep.

For the ancients, night was a time of mystery, the darkness gobbling up their surroundings. They couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces.

Last night, we buried our faces in our phones, seeing with pinpoint accuracy where the tornado would touch down and realizing that it would miss us. I made memes because technology had already solved the great mystery of the nighttime. I knew we were safe.

I’ve been reflecting at WJI on how storytelling can break this tyranny of knowing and return us to mystery. A good story can show that we are not as in control as we think. That storms don’t always go where Accuweather predicts. That there is a great Someone behind it all, and He rarely works how we expect.

- Jack Kubinec