What happens if you have a community of people, an intentional tribe, that doesn’t necessarily sleep at night?
Maybe they’re free-running sleepers, or 28 Hour Day sleepers. Hell, maybe they’re polyphasic. I’m not talking about a controlled environment — I’m talking about an uncontrolled environment, at least in terms of affecting sleep patterns. Can the children grow up being watched by whomever is awake, learning to follow their natural rhythms without being forced to develop sleep patterns that match those of mainstream society (or whoever happens to be in proximity)? Sure, I imagine they’re likely to sleep when some other people are sleeping — but what if they don’t have to?
What would we discover about sleep when it doesn’t have to be attached to daylight or convention? Not where there’s too much or too little daylight, but where because of electricity and technology our patterns and activities are not restricted by it?
Of course, being human also means being an organism that has evolved in a particular combination of light and dark, is accustomed to a certain schedule… But that doesn’t mean that our natural sleep inclinations must follow that strictly, only that we know our patterns can be DISRUPTED by misuse of light and dark. So what does that mean for an intentional community like this?
It’s the kind of experiment I could dream of running, if I knew enough other people interested in sleep experiments — and I admit that going so far as to run the experiment in an environment with growing children is pretty hardcore. I think we’d all want to be pretty sure it wasn’t going to mess everyone up before we subjected our children to it from their moment of birth, you know?
Does this mean it’s an implausible experiment?
Probably not.
In fact, all it needs are the right people and the right circumstances. But it would probably have to happen by itself — not solely as a result of some science-minded explorer just wanting to know. Even if that explorer is me. ;}
Still, I’m pretty interested in communities that raise children (as opposed to isolated single family units, for instance). And I’m just mad for sleep experiments.
