I have talked before about how this fiscal year I am using a sleep tracking app and that I am low-key scared it will record a ghost haunting me during the night. Well, my sleeping phobia does not end there since I also have the habit of waking up unprovoked around 3 am. When I share this experience with other people, around one in every four of them will tell me the same thing happens to them.
Growing up, I never cared much about this pattern of sleep until I saw the Exorcism of Emily Rose. Erin, one of the main characters in the movie, leads the case of a priest who is charged with murder while carrying out an exorcism that went wrong. During this period of time, she starts waking up at 3am to the smell of rotten eggs. The priest she is defending tells her that the same occurrences started happening to him before the exorcism and that this means she is being targeted by demons.
The priest also points out that 3 am is the hour in which demons are the most active since they are mocking the inverse 3 pm time in which it is believed Jesus passed away. So please, can someone explain to me how time zones work for demonic purposes? It is always 3 am somewhere, so I guess they are always active in a certain part of the world, never being able to take a break?
The power of suggestion in my mind is strong, so from this point on each time I woke up around 3 am, I was panicky and tense. Fortunately, I just recently found out about some research that could help you and me sleep better - and less demony - at night. Let’s start with the basics.
Recent studies point out that we need to sleep to repair our bodies, clean waste, store information, and conserve energy. We now make sure that we get our 8 hours of sleep per night in order to properly function the next day. In present times we know about sleep paralysis, night terrors, and insomnia, and we are trying to find ways to address those disorders in order to improve our quality of life. However, back in the day, sleep looked very different from what it is today.
Before we came to our current sleep patterns of going to sleep awfully late at night after watching an hour of TikToks, only to be woken up by our partner’s alarm clock at 7 AM, then at 7:06 AM, and again at 7:12 AM… humans had a very different way of sleeping.
According to Roger Ekirch, the leading expert on biphasic sleep, people went to bed around 9 pm - usually in groups since there was a greater chance of overcoming the threats of the dark in numbers - only to wake up a couple of hours later (likely around 11 pm). This was their first sleep phase of the night.
Humans then used a couple of hours of wakefulness to perform activities that their long hours of work would not allow them to, such as socializing with their loved ones, making the delicious (Mexican slang for intimate activities), praying, writing, or committing acts of crime 🔪. Personally, I cannot stop thinking that before public lighting and plumbing were a thing, this would be the prime time to find yourself stepping on human poop on your way to meet your lover. How sexy.
Another utility of being awake for a couple of hours in complete darkness was to keep working on activities that were just less painful or more efficient to perform without the light and heat of the day: watering crops, catching birds (I would imagine to train them to commit petty crimes 🐦🔪) or harvesting food in order to meet with merchants first thing in the morning.
Whatever the activity was, researchers agree that the time spent after this “first sleep” was a time of peacefulness and calmness. However this all changed, Ekirch argues, as the Industrial Revolution gave way to the addition of artificial lighting. Our sleep patterns changed, as we could stay awake later to perform our activities instead of sleeping when the sun went down. As a result, we (or most of us) now have one uninterrupted sleep cycle.
After this research, I’ve come to believe that the reason you and I wake up at 3AM every Friday the 13th is due to the vestiges of the sleep patterns of our ancestors still embedded in our DNA, and not due to the fact that demons want to possess us. This is based on zero evidence or data - just my hunch and eagerness to find an answer without having to follow anything like the scientific method ✌.
So… mystery solved. Maybe?
My ancestors: wakes up at 3 AM to harvest crops, catch birds, and make love.
Me: wakes up at 3 AM to doomscroll