Growing up in Corbeau Town in the 40s and 50s, I slept with my two younger sisters in a large bed in a corner of my mother's room at 1 Scott Bushe Street until I was eight and my younger brother arrived.
I was then shunted off to a single cot and thereafter generally slept by myself until I got married.
The idea that people always slept alone, however, never entered my mind until I entered the bedroom of a European friend of mine in Caracas and saw two single beds. "My parents don't think it's hygienic to sleep in the same bed," he said proudly.
Others, North Europeans, mainly, slept in different rooms. No wonder their birth rates were falling.
In Guyana in the early 80s, the talk about sleep came up at a conference on oral rehydration, the sort that takes place at a bar in the evening.
The head of the Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute, an elderly Jamaican lady of the ilk that speaks its mind, told me the story of her elder daughter, who, having been packed off to UWI, refused to stay in Irving Hall because, as she put it, "Sleeping alone is not nice." She and her sister had always slept together.
Our children too, refused to sleep alone in their beds. Until my eldest suddenly decided one day, at around eight, that she wanted her own bed, they all slept either with each other or on top of me and their mother.
Children sleep like puppies, on top of you and each other.
At times I ended up perched precariously on the edge of the bed, one hand on the ground, so as not to be shoved off.
During my paediatric training in Baltimore I had bought into the incorrect theory that sleeping alone creates independence so we tried everything to get them out of the parental bed.
One night, after taking them back to their bedroom for the third time, I locked our door. We woke up in the morning to find the three children, the eldest not more than six, all in a heap, sleeping on the ground, outside the door.
Luckily there was carpet. I gave up and allowed them back in.
My younger daughter's comment, when she found out that her elder sister wanted to sleep by herself was to ask plaintively, "Who am I going to snuggle up to now?"
Well that problem's been solved. If not to her entire satisfaction, she now sleeps between her husband and two children.
Sleep, according to modern belief, goes something like this.
After a solid dinner and some television watching (the best way to put on weight), your eyelids sag, you get up and walk into your bedroom, change into your pyjamas, brush your teeth etc, climb heavily into bed and nod off. Suddenly the alarm goes off and it's another day, another traffic jam.
This idea of a solitary bout of sleep organised around a regular bedtime is about as common in the history of man's sleep as an honest politician. It simply does not apply to people living outside the modern Western world or even to inhabitants of Western Europe as recently as 200 years ago.
Studies of traditional societies, archeological sites and sleep labs have demonstrated that almost all we believe about the way to sleep is wrong.
The natural way to sleep includes all of the following. People sleep together. They share sleeping spaces. There is constant background noise (that's why parents of new babies marvel at how well their newborn sleeps in noise). Pillows or head supports are rare. People doze in whatever they happen to be wearing. Darkness determines the time to sleep. People do not complain of too little sleep but too much.
There is no general model of sleeping. The main one is a two-phase sleep pattern. This is the way most Europeans slept up to 200 years ago, according to sleep historians. As the sun went down, people went into what they called a "first sleep," which lasted for several hours. Shorty after midnight, they awoke and spent one or two hours in a "watching period." A "second" or "morning" sleep followed, ending with sunrise.
The "watching period" presented many opportunities. It may have been a security device. Or since most people stayed in bed, it was an occasion to pray, talk, contemplate the day's events or simply let their minds wander in a semiconscious state of contentment out of which many ideas may have originated.
Rapid eye movement (REM), which is when you dream the most, typically occurs just before the first awakening and the "watching period" may have been used to attempt to decipher what a dream meant.
If dreams are the brain's attempt to organise and interpret life's problems, this semiconscious state of contentment, during which huge amounts of the love hormone are secreted, may be nature's way of attempting to give meaning to life.
Sexual intercourse typically occurred at this time and it is intriguing to think that many of us were conceived during the "watching period."
This historical two-phase observation, which began to change around the time that artificial light was invented, has been observed in modern sleep research. When prohibited from using artificial light from dusk to dawn, people who formerly slumbered in one solid block of time, began to sleep in two periods separated by an hour or two of quiet rest and reflection.
These results raise the possibility that people who wake up once or twice a night may not necessarily suffer from insomnia. It may be the natural sleep pattern reasserting itself in an unwelcome world and getting labelled as a disorder.
The exact same thing happens to human babies who evolved to wake up several times at night to breastfeed and for elderly folk for whom early morning periods of contemplation may be the precursor to leaving this life.