h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was woken up in small hours by several gunshots nearby, I reckon in the apartment complex next to mine. I didn't hear sirens afterwards and I don't see anything in the local news so I guess it must have been a case of hi-jinx.

I don't know exactly what time it was because don't like looking at the clock when I wake up in the middle of the night, but at a rough guess I'd say between 3am and 4am. Whatever time it was, I didn't get much sleep afterwards, not because of worry over what had just occurred, because of general insomnia. If I wake up any time after about 4am, usually for no apparent reason, it's 50-50 whether or not I get back to sleep.

The second worst thing about insomnia is the boredom. Laying in bed tossing and turning, trying to get back to sleep and wondering how much longer until the alarm goes off.

The last time I remember anything similar happening was the first time I visited America, in 1985, and in a relatively middle class area of Detroit.

Bullets are made to be shot. It seems to me that American culture & identity concerns the right to own & use guns, plus its economy is built to a large extent on the arms industry. I don't think America can end its affaire with guns and bullets. The only solution is to get yourself a gun & contribute to the economy.

What's that "the only solution" to? Being woken up by gunshots?

I'm ignoring post 2 like it never happened. I'd urge everyone else to do the same.

I tend to only suffer from sleeplessness if I have something on my mind that I can't solve. I get stuck in loops and go round and round endlessly, despite knowing what I'm doing and trying to stop. At least I'm not as bad as Mr Vip; he didn't get to sleep until 4am a few nights ago because we saw a business that we would love to own, and he ended up looking up their (publicly accessible) accounts and discovering they were so badly in the red that it would take a massive overhaul to break even.

It was a nice dream though.

Yeah, that happens to me sometimes too. It can be difficult to still your mind when something refuses to stop occupying it. But mostly I wake up for no apparent reason and can't back to sleep again for same non-reason.

Oppression takes many forms. Good luck.

I usually wake up two or three time a night (and invariably, the Subway $5 foot long song repeats in my brain ).

I've recently seen a few articles that go to explain this by suggesting that humans aren't sleeping right anymore since the industrial revolution. It used to be NORMAL to wake up and get out of bed in the middle of the night. We had something called "second sleep" or something like that. We'd go to bed much earlier, shortly after sunset. Sleep for about 4 hours or so. Wake up, do something (lots of procreating happened in the mid night hours).

Of course we also tended to take mid day naps as well.

Our modern dependence on clocks and indoor lighting has really messed up our circadian rhythm.

I find it very difficult to get back to sleep if I wake in the night. gets up around 4:15, and I have to get up at 5:00 - which means that generally I spend the time between 4:15 and when my alarm goes off in that awful half-sleep getting horribly realistic weird dreams.

Yeah, I've heard about second sleep a few times now. I think one of those was in a documentary where the makers used an example from... it might have been Samuel Pepys, since he was so fond of writing diaries, or possibly Samuel Johnson. Either way, they spoke about second sleep.

It makes sense, at least for part of the year, if people used to go to bed when it was dark, or at least didn't stay up until 11pm and midnight like we do now with the benefit of electric light and the distractions of modern media. In December and January in London it's dark by 5pm and the sun doesn't come up again until around 8am, but during the summer months it stays light until almost 10pm and starts getting light around 3am, and further north in places like Glasgow and Edinburgh the sky doesn't really get completely dark in June and July, but they only get a few hours of daylight around the midwinter solstice.

But who knows if that was even the 'natural' way of sleeping and not an adaptation from something previous? It sort of fits in with the Spanish siesta, although the timing is obviously much different.

I'm fascinated with the way humans used to live in that period of several centuries between when we stopped being a part of nature and started forming civilisations, and when strict daily routines began to impose upon the way we live, such as the move (for some) in Britain from the stone age and bronze age to being part of the Roman Empire and having bedtimes and rising times dictated by having to be part of a household and its routines.

The people, for instance, who used to live in those stone age villages in the Orkneys and Shetlands such as Skara Brae, the people who were living ordinary lives around the time Stonehenge was built. I think I missed my calling. I should have studied prehistory at university.

Or meteorology.