God’s Hour: The Big Misconception Of Why We Wake Up In the Middle of the Night
Making sense of a nightly phenomenon
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In the 1990’s scientist and psychiatrist Thomas Wehr wanted to examine whether humans had natural sleep patterns that differed from what we have been accustomed to today.
He conducted a study where he placed volunteers in a setting with 14 hours of darkness each day for a month. The participants were free to sleep as much as they desired during this time.
On the first night, they slept for an average of 11 hours, which was thought to be the result of compensating for long-term sleep deficiency.
But by the fourth week, the volunteers slept an average of eight hours per night, divided into two distinct segments. Initially, they would stay awake for one to two hours before falling asleep rapidly. The onset of sleep was associated with a surge in melatonin, a hormone produced by the brain's pineal gland when exposed to darkness. After sleeping for approximately three to five hours, the subjects would wake up and experience one to two hours of calm wakefulness before entering a second sleep phase lasting three to five hours.
Participants described this calm wakefulness between sleep periods as a state of mind they had never experienced before. Later Wehr would compare this in-between state often experienced from 1 - 4 am to the deepest states an advanced meditation practitioner would experience.
Despite none of the participants ever meditating before, they somehow were able to tap into this by simply waking up in the middle of the night.
My Own Experience Of God’s Hour
I first heard about this study at a friend's house a few weeks ago. I was immediately captivated because it so closely mirrored a phenomenon that I have been experiencing for the past few years.
Every night for as long as I can remember, I’ve woken up in the middle of the night. Although I usually could get back to sleep, sometimes I couldn't, which would cause me to drag the next day. For the longest time, I was incredibly frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t sleep through the night.
If only I could figure out what was going on with my biology that was waking me up every night! I assumed there was some type of nervous system irregularity or chemical imbalance causing this and that something was wrong with me.
For years, I tried all types of interventions from supplementation and perfect sleep hygiene, to evening meditation and sleeping in an EMF blocking faraday bed. I’ve even done psychedelic sessions entirely oriented around identifying what subconscious programs might be driving the wake-up response. And no matter what I tried, I still always woke up.
A couple of years ago, I began to notice something interesting. When wake up during these twilight hours, I’d have a perfectly clear awareness; no thoughts, just peaceful stillness. It was comparable to the deepest states of meditation I’d experienced.
In this stillness, all types of information would flood into my awareness through a quiet audible voice. Sometimes it’d be solutions to problems I was chewing on and other times it’d be guidance completely out of left field. It felt like I was connected to a divine firehose of information. I enjoyed these events, but still resisted the fact that I was being woken up each night.
One day it occurred to me that perhaps I was being woken up each night not because something was wrong with me, but for a bigger reason: to receive information from the Divine.
I started to keep a notepad next to my bed and lean in, viewing these experiences as a gift. Each night when I wake up, I’ll pose this question to a clear mind:
“What do you want me to do”
The answer is always clear and either some form of “sit up” or “go back to sleep.”
When I sit up, I’ll meditate and ask:
“What guidance or information would you like me to be aware of?”
After this, the downloads start flooding into my awareness.
I set up a little system where I have a very faint light that does not disturb my partner Zaharo so that I can record these. After each major message, I’ll write them down and then drop back in to receive more information. I started with a notepad, but once this became an important practice to me I invested in a Remarkable so that I could more easily store, organize, and search all the content in the cloud.
If you’ve ever used psychedelics, you probably are familiar with the notion that you can drop in and out of the experience pretty seamlessly by just opening and closing your eyes. This is what these wakefulness experiences are like. Sometimes there are pages of information I record and sometimes it’s just one or two things.
At a certain point during the experience, there is just silence and then I ask if I am done. The answer is usually yes. After this I usually fall back to sleep immediately.
What’s interesting is that before when I resisted waking up and leaning into the experience, I’d often struggle to go back to sleep. It’s almost as if my lack of receiving whatever information I was supposed to receive was blocking me restfulness.
I credit these Divine communion experiences with some of my most profound creative insights and much-needed encouragement in periods of challenge over the past two years.
Ancient Wisdom We Seemed To Have Forgot
The reason I was so excited to learn about Wehr’s study is because up until this point, I thought that something was wrong with me and that my evening downloads were a unique phenomenon.
Once I found out about the study, I started to do more research and read the book “Waking Up To The Dark.”
It turns out that this period of divine communion that I had been experiencing is something ancient wisdom cultures and religions have known about for ages.
“The reports of various contemplatives I have talked to over the years - monks and nuns, priests, and rabbis, imams, and lamas - reveal a single pattern at work. After four hours of sleep, they would awaken to perform their devotions, during which time their minds occupied a space that wasn’t quite waking and wasn’t really dreaming either, but seemed to have the qualities of both. It was a visionary state, a time of deep tranquility in which they felt especially forgiven, blessed, or loved.”1
This period has many names and is widely recognized as the “God’s Hour” across traditions
In Judaism, it is called Tikkun Chatzot or “Midnight Repair”
Catholics have a practice called the “Night Office” which is observed by the most serious Catholic monks
In Hinduism, the hour of god is referenced in the Mandukya Upanishad and practices like yoga nidra
Muslims believe God draws physically closer to listening to prayers in the middle of the night and call it Tahajjud
Buddha’s alleged personal routine included a time between 2 am-4 am called the Last Watch where he saw the whole universe, blessed it with his boundless love, and brought happiness to millions.
All of these examples made it clear to me that what I was experiencing has been a well-known part of ancient wisdom that we’ve seemed to have forgotten. Moreover, this phenomenon is not something that is merely reserved for experienced meditators and spiritual aspirants - it’s available to everyone.
So if this magical divine connection is available to all of us, how come we have not been told about it?
Clark Stand, the author of Waking Up To The Dark seems to think the culprit is artificial light.
“Ninety-nine percent of Americans today live in areas that are officially light polluted which means the night is 10x brighter than it should be.”
This light pollution throws off our natural circadian rhythm which is actually more bi-phasic in nature. This was exemplified in Thomas Wehr's study when participants reverted to a more bi-phasic sleep pattern and mirrored reported patterns in more ancient times.
There’s also cultural inertia. We live in a society that values the industriousness of daytime activity over all else.
For most of human times, people were not physically able to work when the sun went down. Evenings were a period of connection, rest, and early bed-times. Now we jam work and all types of unnatural stimulation in the evenings which result in a sleep pattern that goes against our original biological blueprint.
There’s also the fact that our consciousness has been conditioned to believe that we are meant to sleep 7-8 hours straight. Like many ideas, this likely can be traced back to what served an economic ideal rather than human prosperity. Therefore, if the body doesn’t follow this conditioned program, we find ways to force it through sleep aids.
This conditioning was very evident in my own experience of resisting waking up in the middle of the night because it got in the way of me “being productive” the next day…God forbid!
What Can We Take Away From All of This?
If you are waking up in the middle of the night every night, consider that this is actually quite normal and potentially even a gift. Instead of resisting it, I encourage you to try embracing it and experimenting with a meditative or contemplative practice.
You might also want to consider going to bed earlier. I’m not sure if you go to bed at 1 am you’ll get up at 5 am and experience the same thing. I can’t say because this isn’t my schedule.
Most traditions that acknowledge this phenomenon advise people to go to bed earlier so that they can enjoy this “God or Mystical Hour” while still getting a proper 2nd sleep to be productive the next day. For me, it’s an easy tradeoff. Whatever is happening around downtown Austin at 2am is far less interesting than what I experience during these Divine communions most nights!
Our current lifestyles and technologies yet again seem to be pulling us away from one of the richest parts of the human experience: communing with the Divine each day.
I’m not sure our family is going to fully do away with artificial light in the evenings, but it’s definitely something I am now more mindful of.
Increasingly I find returning to a more analog living situation that is more connected to nature, its natural rhythms and the divine appealing to me.
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Clark Stand, Waking Up In The Dark
Fascinating stuff, Scott. I remember being deeply intrigued a decade or so ago when there was a burst of mainstream interest in this matter of segmented or biphasic sleep as it made the rounds in the popular press. The big revelation seemed to be that this is how much or most of the human race slept before the advent of the industrial age, and that, as you've pointed out in this post, we may well have lost something by coming to insist that a long span of unbroken hours represents the only "valid" way to envision human sleep patterns.
I recall reading a 2013 Harper's article on this subject by Dr. A. Roger Ekirch (https://harpers.org/archive/2013/08/segmented-sleep), who also wrote the 2016 paper "Segmented Sleep in Preindustrial Societies" (https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/39/3/715/2454050) as well as an entire book looking at sleep patterns from the past.
See also the excellent 2016 AEON article "Broken Sleep" (https://aeon.co/essays/why-broken-sleep-is-a-golden-time-for-creativity).
Thank you for bringing this up. Especially since, in a mild bit of synchronicity, my own sleep has become more biphasic than usual, in a very pronounced way, over the past few nights.
Here's a nifty trick I use at 3 AM to receive information from the universe. Before bed, I fill the kettle in the kitchen with water because I use the six-minute boiling cycle as a meditation timer in the early morning hours like this:
I wake up around 3 - 3:30 AM and wander from the bedroom to the kitchen without opening my eyes.
I feel for the kettle and hit the power button. And then next, I assume what Qigong calls: 'dead man's posture.'
(Dead Man's Posture is cupped hands pulled into the lower stomach, knees slightly bent, and core pulled in—in other words: It's relaxed standing.)
All the while, the kettle is going through its six-minute cycle, so I shift my attention to the noise of the water boiling, open my mind and see what pops in, with one caveat. Often I go to bed and ask the universe to show me some options on specific stuff. And sometimes the answer pops out when I'm listening to the kettle boil at 3 AM.