Allah with His Infinite Wisdom has blessed Islam to have numerous miracles. Even still sometimes our Iman gets strengthened when western science validates something introduced by Islam 1400 years ago. This article sheds light on the bodies natural inclination towards sleeping in 2 segments, rather than straight through until the morning. Allah has created our body in such a way that praying Tahajjud is healthy and natural SUBHANALLAH!

Surah 17
79. And from [part of] the night, pray with it [i.e., recitation of the Qur’an] as additional [worship] for you; it is expected that your Lord will resurrect
you to a praised station.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

The myth of the eight-hour sleep

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.


Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night
Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.

A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

Interesting isn't?. Ramadan seems to teach this sleep pattern as well.

Reporting for Nairaland Islam for Muslims Section, Tbaba12345.