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aprilmarchOK, so here's something I thought about some time ago.
Humans are the only mammals that have monophasic sleep - that is to say, they do all their sleeping in a single phase, eight hours long. Most mammals sleep in two or more phases. (That's why cats 'nap' during the day and often wake up during the wee hours of the morning; they're not built to sleep eight hours at a time.)
However, a theory says that monophasic sleep is actually a social construct and humans are naturally biphasic - they sleep in two phases. This theory posits that humans originally would go to sleep at sundown, sleep for four hours, wake up in the dead of night, hang out a bit (one to two hours), then go back to four more hours of sleep. There are quite a few references to 'first sleep' in ancient text. This natural flow would have been disrupted by the Industrial revolution, when the advent of electricity, along with new societal roles, caused humans to remain awake during the early evening, after which they had only eight hours to sleep in one go.
That's the science. Now for the fantasy.
A very common trope in the fantastic is the preponderance of thresholds, borders, spaces between. Anything that's not clearly one thing or other is a place where the veil of reality is thinner. Pacts with the supernatural are made at crossroads because they are such spaces: part of two streets but of neither. Midnight is the witching hour, the hour when monsters come to roost, because it is the temporal space between two days, after one has ended but before the next has begun. Anything that comes along during a threshold is innately more magical.
Well, what's more of a threshold than the idle hours between the days, when so many people happened to be awake? If that portal opens itself for a moment during midnight, then during these hours it would stay open for as long as someone was awake, and the magical world beyond could not only peek through but linger and stay. The entire world was magical for a few hours.
And if someone happened to be conceived during these hours - which must have been absurdly common - they they'd be touched, born of a different world, full of magic in their mundane bodies, and the fantastical would come to them that much more naturally.
Many stories of magic talk about a withering, a vanishing of magic. Some stories have it start during the Renaissance, some during the late Victorian times, but always around the time of the Industrial Revolution, give or take a few centuries. Why is it that magic seems to have gone away, just as the Victorians were suddenly interested in it?
Well, maybe there just weren't as many people who were good at it.
Humans are the only mammals that have monophasic sleep - that is to say, they do all their sleeping in a single phase, eight hours long. Most mammals sleep in two or more phases. (That's why cats 'nap' during the day and often wake up during the wee hours of the morning; they're not built to sleep eight hours at a time.)
However, a theory says that monophasic sleep is actually a social construct and humans are naturally biphasic - they sleep in two phases. This theory posits that humans originally would go to sleep at sundown, sleep for four hours, wake up in the dead of night, hang out a bit (one to two hours), then go back to four more hours of sleep. There are quite a few references to 'first sleep' in ancient text. This natural flow would have been disrupted by the Industrial revolution, when the advent of electricity, along with new societal roles, caused humans to remain awake during the early evening, after which they had only eight hours to sleep in one go.
That's the science. Now for the fantasy.
A very common trope in the fantastic is the preponderance of thresholds, borders, spaces between. Anything that's not clearly one thing or other is a place where the veil of reality is thinner. Pacts with the supernatural are made at crossroads because they are such spaces: part of two streets but of neither. Midnight is the witching hour, the hour when monsters come to roost, because it is the temporal space between two days, after one has ended but before the next has begun. Anything that comes along during a threshold is innately more magical.
Well, what's more of a threshold than the idle hours between the days, when so many people happened to be awake? If that portal opens itself for a moment during midnight, then during these hours it would stay open for as long as someone was awake, and the magical world beyond could not only peek through but linger and stay. The entire world was magical for a few hours.
And if someone happened to be conceived during these hours - which must have been absurdly common - they they'd be touched, born of a different world, full of magic in their mundane bodies, and the fantastical would come to them that much more naturally.
Many stories of magic talk about a withering, a vanishing of magic. Some stories have it start during the Renaissance, some during the late Victorian times, but always around the time of the Industrial Revolution, give or take a few centuries. Why is it that magic seems to have gone away, just as the Victorians were suddenly interested in it?
Well, maybe there just weren't as many people who were good at it.
