Sleep, Perchance to Dream
The Forgotten Art of the Second Sleep
There is a sacred hour between darkness and dawn - that half-awake, half-asleep space where thought and dream blend, and the soul begins to whisper.
Our ancestors knew this rhythm well. They slept in two acts, the first sleep and the second sleep, separated by quiet wakefulness. In that still hour, they prayed, wrote, meditated, or sat beside the fire, listening to the silence speak.
Dr. Greg Lawton Building a Healing Community
Sleep, Perchance to Dream
The Forgotten Art of the Second Sleep
© 2025 Gregory T. Lawton, D.C., D.N., D.Ac., N.D.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise - without prior written permission from the author.
Published by
Blue Heron Academy of Healing Arts and Sciences
Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
https://blueheronacademy.com https://americanhealthsource.org
Printed in the United States of America
“Meditate profoundly, that the secret of things unseen may be revealed unto you, that you may inhale the sweetness of a spiritual and imperishable fragrance, and that you may acknowledge the truth… so that light may be distinguished from darkness, truth from falsehood, right from wrong, guidance from error, happiness from misery, and roses from thorns.”
Foreword
There are moments in human understanding when ancient wisdom and modern science meet, and a forgotten truth rises quietly into view.
Sleep, Perchance to Dream is one such meeting place. In this work, Dr. Gregory T. Lawton invites the reader to rediscover the natural rhythm of two sleeps - an ancestral pattern once common to humanity, now obscured by the artificial light and restlessness of modern life.
Through prose, poetry, and science, Dr. Lawton restores our awareness of the sacred interval between sleeps - a time for reflection, inspiration, and communion with the unseen. This work reminds us that the night need not be feared nor medicated away; it may instead be reclaimed as a teacher, a healer, and a doorway into contemplative awareness.
It is written for all who seek balance between physiology and spirit, science and soul, waking and dream.
Preface
Before the hum of the modern world, before electricity and alarm clocks, human beings lived by the light of the moon and the rhythm of breath. Sleep came gently, in two acts - the first deep and physical, the second spiritual and renewing. Between them stretched an hour of stillness when prayer, poetry, and contemplation bloomed.
This booklet explores that forgotten rhythm and its relevance today: how natural biphasic sleep aligns with our circadian biology, how the liminal state fosters creativity and healing, and how awakening in the night can become a moment of communion rather than distress.
It is both science and reflection, a journey into the quiet where the mind and soul meet.
Prologue – The Half-Waking Dream
There are discoveries that come not through study, but through silence, not in daylight, but in the borderland between sleep and waking.
In 1976, while preparing for my first doctorate, I began to teach myself in my sleep. I would drift into a half-dreaming state, neither awake nor fully gone, and there, on the inward screen of the mind, I would see my notes unfold. Paragraphs, diagrams, and formulae would hover in luminous order, as if waiting to be remembered. By dawn, the knowledge had taken root.
I did not yet know that artists, poets, and philosophers before me had walked this same path that Edison, Tesla, Dalí, and countless mystics of Persia, India, and Greece had trained themselves to dwell within the threshold. I was ignorant of their art, yet the art itself had found me.
What began as a tool for study became a doorway into creation. In those hours before dawn, the sacred stillness when thought breathes freely - I learned to solve problems, compose essays, sketch forms of art, and later to write entire works while half-asleep. It was as if the mind, freed from the tyranny of daylight reason, became translucent. The night became my teacher, the halfdream, my workshop.
Through time, this rhythm shaped my life: sleep, wake, contemplate, and create. I found that the hour between worlds, that liminal hush when the soul still lingers in dream, yet the eyes begin to open, holds a power beyond intellect. It is the meeting place of memory and revelation.
And I discovered, as others have whispered through centuries, that in this half-waking dream the heart learns to listen, not to its own echo, but to the greater silence that surrounds all things.
Introduction
Modern life prizes continuity and control, even over the most sacred cycles of nature. We are taught to fear waking in the night, to treat it as disorder, to medicate silence. Yet long before the industrial age, human beings rose gently from their first sleep to meditate, pray, or dream awake before returning to the second.
The historian Roger Ekirch, through decades of research, documented this pattern across centuries and cultures. What we call insomnia was once the body’s natural rhythm, the space where rest and revelation intertwined.
Sleep, Perchance to Dream reclaims this knowledge. It speaks to physicians, therapists, artists, and seekers alike - reminding us that the path to healing often lies not in suppression, but in remembrance.
When we awaken in the night, we are not broken. We are being called.
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.”
Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī,
The Liminal Hour
When the world grows silent, the soul begins to speak. Wakefulness drifts like a candle through the dark, revealing not the noise of thought but the rhythm beneath it. The night was never meant to be unbroken - it was made for listening.
Between darkness and dawn there lies a secret hour, the hush between two worlds. The air is still, the pulse of the house quiets, and the soul stirs from beneath the veil of sleep. It is not yet morning, yet not wholly night. Here, thought and dream mingle like breath upon glass.
For thousands of years, before the glare of electric light and the tyranny of the clock, humanity lived in harmony with this rhythm. After the first deep rest, the first sleep, men and women would rise softly, kindling a candle, tending the hearth, whispering prayers, or writing by moonlight. Monks prayed. Poets dreamed aloud. Lovers spoke quietly of their lives and hopes. This hour was not a disruption of sleep; it was part of the great cycle of rest, reflection, and renewal.
Modern science now rediscovers what ancient souls already knew. Within the night there are natural rhythms, ultradian cycles of about ninety minutes, during which the brain moves between depths of rest and gentle ascent toward wakefulness. To awaken lightly in the night is no pathology. It is a physiological wave cresting on the sea of circadian rhythm, an invitation to awareness, to contemplation, to listening.
It is not abnormal to wake in the night. What is abnormal is to fight itto drown the whisper of the soul beneath the chemical tide of forced sleep.
Yet we have been taught to fear this awakening. The pharmaceutical age has turned the body’s natural rhythm into a disorder. Many reach for pills, forgetting that once this moment was sacred - a threshold for prayer, meditation, and quiet creation.
It is in this half-wakeful state, when reason still sleeps and the dream has not yet died, that inspiration arrives unbidden. Artists and mystics have sought this hour as a teacher: the window where conscious and unconscious meet, where images, insights, and verses rise from the depths like luminous fish.
The liminal hour is not lost time. It is a bridge - between the worlds of form and meaning, between breath and thought, between being and becoming.
To wake at midnight is not a curse of restlessness, but a subtle form of guidance, a summons from within. The body has done its first labor of repair; the mind now hungers for communion. Here, one may meditate, breathe, pray, write, or simply sit in the quiet company of the soul. And when the eyelids grow heavy once more, the second sleep will come - deeper, gentler, bearing dreams ripened by reflection.
“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.”
Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī
The Two Sleeps: A Forgotten Rhythm
We once slept in two breaths of the same dream, one for the body, one for the spirit. Between them flowed a river of stillness, where prayer and poetry were born. The moon kept the time, and the heart obeyed.
There was a time when humanity slept in two acts, not one, when the night was a slow unfolding rather than a sealed oblivion.
In the age before the ticking of clocks, before streetlamps pierced the darkness, people drifted into what was called the first sleep soon after dusk. After four or five hours, they would awaken gently, not startled but lucid, refreshed in the quiet belly of the night. For an hour or two they prayed, meditated, wrote in journals, made love, or sat in stillness by the fire. Then came the second sleep, a tender descent into dream, lasting until dawn.
This rhythm was universal. Medieval monks kept vigils through these hours, composing hymns and psalms. Peasants used the interval to tend to animals or share thoughts by candlelight. In the writings of Chaucer, Cervantes, and countless others, the “watch between sleeps” is simply assumed, a human constant, not an anomaly.
Only with the industrial revolution, with its artificial light and regimented labor, did this pattern dissolve. The night became something to be conquered, and wakefulness became a fault to be fixed.
The clock replaced the moon, and the soul forgot how to wander.
When light floods the eyes long after sunset, melatonin, the body’s herald of night, falters. The deep, natural rest of the first sleep fragments into shallow cycles. When people awaken, they panic, misreading a physiological rhythm as a disorder. Yet neuroscientists and chronobiologists now confirm what the ancients lived by instinct: the biphasic sleep pattern aligns with the body’s
circadian and ultradian rhythms. Our ancestors were not insomniacs, they were participants in a biological ceremony of consciousness.
What happens in that midnight hour is neither dream nor thought but a fertile convergence of both. Modern studies on the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, the thresholds of sleep, reveal bursts of creative insight, memory consolidation, and problem-solving activity. Artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Salvador Dalí used this state deliberately, holding an object in hand so that its fall would awaken them at the brink of dreaming, allowing visions to follow them into waking life.
Dreams are the forgotten language of the self.
To wake within them is to remember one’s native tongue.
The waking between sleeps was once seen as a spiritual window, a thin place where the boundary between the seen and unseen thins. It was a time for introspection, prayer, and inspiration, not anxiety. The poet may write a verse; the mystic may listen for divine whisperings; the healer may feel the body’s energy hum quietly beneath the skin. Each act of wakefulness, gentle and unforced, becomes an opportunity to realign with the self, to participate consciously in the rhythm of creation.
To return to sleep afterward is to re-enter the dream carrying the seed of awareness planted during the waking. The second sleep often bears more vivid imagery, as if the subconscious has been stirred and illuminated. This is why the last dreams before dawn are the ones most often remembered, they carry the echoes of thought, prayer, or intention set in the midnight hour.
The second sleep is not a return to darkness, but a descent into the garden of the soul.
“Last night I saw angels knocking at the tavern door, bearing bowls of light to awaken the hearts of lovers from their sleep.”
Hafiz of Shiraz
The Science of the Liminal Mind
Between waking and sleep, the mind paints in light unseen. Neurons sing in slow waves, memory folds into vision. This is the workshop of the unseen artisan, where imagination and awareness shape one another.
The mind between sleeps is a field of shimmering possibility, not fully in the world, not yet beyond it. Thought loosens, boundaries blur, and imagination breathes freely again.
Modern sleep science reveals that the human brain is not a monolith of silence at rest. It pulses through repeating cycles of light and deep sleep, of dreaming and near-waking. These ultradian rhythms, lasting roughly ninety minutes, are waves of restoration - each with its own symphony of hormones, neurotransmitters, and neural firing patterns.
When the mind floats toward the edge of waking, that delicate interval before dawn or after the first sleep, it enters a unique neurological state dominated by theta waves, slow and fluid oscillations associated with creativity, memory integration, and mystical experience.
Between delta and alpha lies the sea of dreaming, where the heart remembers what the mind forgets.
In this state, the default mode network, the system responsible for imagination, self-reflection, and inner dialogue, becomes highly active. Far from being idle, the resting brain is composing: recombining fragments of experience, emotion, and intuition into new constellations of meaning. This is the same network that lights up during deep meditation and moments of creative inspiration. The night, then, is not a void, but a workshop, the mind’s hidden atelier, shaping insight from silence.
Thomas Edison, Salvador Dalí, and Nikola Tesla all practiced deliberate half-sleep techniques to harvest this creative gold. They would sit with an object in hand, a key, a ball, and as they drifted, their grip would loosen, the object would fall, and the sound would awaken them just as visions were forming. They captured images, solutions, and intuitions that had bypassed the rigid filters of waking logic.
In dream, the intellect kneels before imagination. In waking, imagination kneels before intellect. The wise learn to let them dance.
The pineal gland, long symbolized as the “seat of the soul,” orchestrates much of this rhythm. Responding to darkness, it releases melatonin, regulating circadian cycles and encouraging the descent into deeper sleep. Yet, just before dawn, or in the gentle waking between sleeps, melatonin ebbs, and other neurotransmitters rise: dopamine, acetylcholine, and serotonin, each lending lucidity to the dream.
This cocktail of chemistry gives birth to what mystics have described as lucid awareness, the soul awake within the dream.
Sleep repairs the flesh. Dream repairs the soul. Awareness unites them.
To wake briefly in the night, then, is not a disruption but an opening, a neural and spiritual aperture through which creativity and revelation may flow.
To resist it with pills or panic is to silence the orchestra just as it begins to play. To embrace it is to participate in the ancient covenant between consciousness and the cosmos, to remember that even in sleep, we are never truly alone.
“I
have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, or a Jew. The Truth has shared so much of Itself with me that I can no longer call myself a man, a woman, an angel, or even pure soul.”
Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz
The lamps are different, but the Light is the same.”
Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī
The Contemplative Awakening
To wake at midnight is not to be restless, but to be remembered. The silence has called your name, sit with it. There is no need to speak; only to receive. The heart understands what words cannot.
There is a kind of silence that does not belong to the world, a stillness that descends when the night has ripened, and the mind wakes not from restlessness, but from remembrance.
When one awakens between sleeps, the mind is tender, the veil between worlds thinned. The senses are softened, and the heart, freed from the noise of the day, becomes more receptive to the whisper of intuition. It is in this hour that poets write their most lucid lines, that healers receive guidance, that prayers ascend effortlessly. What modernity calls insomnia, the ancients called vigil, a time to be awake with the Divine.
The soul wakes before the body knows it has stirred. The candle is lit not by the hand, but by the heart.
Across cultures and centuries, this moment has been recognized as a bridge between the seen and the unseen. In monasteries, it was the Nocturns or Matins hour, when monks rose to chant psalms. In Taoist and Buddhist temples, it was the time of jing zuo, quiet sitting, when the breath was measured and the spirit refined. Among the Sufis, it was the hour of tahajjud, the deep-night prayer of lovers of God. Each tradition points to the same truth: the soul does not sleep when the world does. It seeks its Beloved in silence.
The Baha’i writings remind us that reflection and prayer are acts of awakening, that “the meditative faculty is the mirror of the soul.” When the mirror is still and unclouded, it reflects
the light of the spirit. This is the essence of contemplative awakening: to turn inward not in withdrawal, but in communion, to remember that the same light that moves the stars moves within us.
He who wakes at midnight is not alone in the dark; he is being called by the dawn within.
Contemplation at this hour need not be elaborate. One might simply breathe and observe the mind’s quiet unfolding. One might write a verse, or record a dream, or offer gratitude for the unseen work of life’s renewal. The body has completed its first repair; now the soul begins its own.
In this stillness, the boundary between prayer and thought dissolves. To think deeply becomes to pray. To breathe mindfully becomes to commune. To write becomes to remember.
The creative act itself becomes devotion. What flows onto the page in those hours is often not planned, it arrives, as if whispered. Many artists have felt this, that they are not inventing, but receiving. The same current that restores the cells of the body restores the imagination; both are nourished by surrender.
At the threshold of night’s second breath, the soul speaks in symbols and the heart translates. The wise do not force meaning, they listen.
To awaken consciously in the night is to cultivate friendship with the unknown, to turn a passing moment into a temple of insight. It is here that sleep, meditation, and dream converge into a single act of remembrance: the remembrance of who and what we truly are, luminous beings suspended between two worlds, learning to dwell gracefully in both.
“In that state man abstracts himself; he is immersed in the ocean of spiritual life and can unfold the secrets of things-in-themselves.”
‘Abdu’l -Bahá
Returning to Sleep: Dream as Communion
Close your eyes not to escape, but to enter more deeply. The dream is a language older than thought, the soul writing to itself in symbols of light. Sleep now, for morning is the echo of your night.
The candle burns low. The ink dries. Outside, the river of darkness flows softly toward dawn.
You close your eyes again, not to flee the world, but to enter it more deeply. This is the second sleep, the descent into a dream shaped by all that you have felt, pondered, or prayed in the quiet hour between.
In this second sleep, consciousness does not vanish; it ripens. The mind, freed from the weight of effort, begins its alchemy. Images born of the day’s experience are transformed into symbols, stories, and inner music. The nervous system completes its repairs. The immune cells sweep the blood. The neurons whisper to one another in sparks of remembrance.
The dream becomes the soul’s language, poetry written in the syntax of images.
Dreams are letters written by the soul in light invisible to the waking eye.
Science tells us that during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the brain’s emotional centers are highly active while its rational filters are subdued. In this union of openness and restraint, the psyche speaks to itself.
Yet when the waking interval is honored, when we have sat in stillness, breathed, or written, that dialogue becomes clearer, more coherent. The contemplative hour acts as a conversation starter between conscious and unconscious, setting intention and tone for what follows.
Thus, the second sleep is not mere continuation, but integration. What was reflected upon becomes incarnate in dream. What was prayed becomes answered in symbol. It is as if the soul takes the offering of wakefulness - the poem, the prayer, the silence - and weaves it into its tapestry of renewal.
The thoughts you whisper to the night return at dawn as wings.
To live in harmony with this rhythm is to remember that sleep is not the opposite of wakefulness, but its companion. Dreaming is not a departure from reality, but a way of deepening it.
When one honors the two sleeps, the rest of the body and the renewal of the soul, life itself becomes a dialogue between worlds.
We sleep to dream, and dream to awaken. We awaken to remember that we have never been separate.
Conclusion
The two sleeps are more than a rhythm of rest, they are a reflection of the dual nature of being: body and spirit, matter and meaning, darkness and light.
To awaken within the night is to stand at the bridge between these worlds. To resist that call is to silence our own depths; to honor it is to heal.
When one listens in that sacred hour, when prayer replaces panic and breath replaces fear, the night becomes luminous.
The second sleep then carries not only the residue of rest but the resonance of remembrance.
In that rhythm, the healer, the dreamer, and the divine all share one breath.
“Let him sit in silence to hearken to the verses of God, the Sovereign, the Almighty, the All-Praised.”
Bahá’u’lláh
“O ye loved ones of God! Know ye that the world is even as a mirage rising over the sands… Its comfort is but weariness and sorrow. Abandon it, and turn unto the Kingdom of your Lord, the All-Merciful.”
Abdu’l-Bahá
References and Sources
o Ekirch, A. Roger. At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. W.W. Norton, 2005.
o Stickgold, Robert, and Matthew P. Walker. Sleep and the Mind: Neuroscience and Consciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2005.
o Dali, Salvador. 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship. Dover Publications, 1992.
o Edison, Thomas. Personal notes on napping and ideation, 1888–1903 (Library of Congress archives).
o Siegel, Jerome M. Clues to the Functions of Mammalian Sleep. Nature, 2005.
o Bahá’u’lláh. Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh Revealed After the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. Bahá’í World Centre, 1978.
o ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Paris Talks: Addresses Given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Paris in 1911–1912. Bahá’í Publishing Trust.
Recommended Reading
o Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep
o Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
o Thích Nhất Hạnh, Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise
o Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
o Mirra Alfassa (The Mother), On Dreams and Sleep
o Rumi, The Essential Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)
o Baha’i World Centre, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
About the Author
Dr. Gregory T. Lawton, D.C., D.N., D.Ac., N.D. is the Founder of the Blue Heron Academy of Healing Arts and Sciences, Dr. Lawton is a physician, teacher, and poet whose work bridges clinical science and spiritual healing.
For over five decades, he has taught and practiced the integration of manual therapy, naturopathic medicine, and contemplative philosophy.
His books, workshops, and essays, such as The Healer’s Path, Building a Healing Community, and Conscious Healing, carry a single mission: to awaken the human capacity for service, compassion, and awareness.
He lives and writes beside a river, often in the quiet hours before dawn.
Sleep, Perchance to Dream
The Forgotten Art of the Second Sleep
What if waking in the night were not a problem to fix, but a doorway to insight, creativity, and spiritual renewal?
In this luminous blend of poetry, philosophy, and sleep science, Dr. Gregory T. Lawton reveals that our ancestors once lived by two sleeps, divided by an hour of quiet reflection known as “the watch.”
Modern science now confirms that this natural rhythm aligns perfectly with our biology and psychology.
Sleep, Perchance to Dream invites you to rediscover that sacred rhythm, to turn midnight wakefulness into meditation, and to remember that every dream is an echo of the awakening soul.
© 2025 Gregory T. Lawton, D.C., D.N., D.Ac., N.D. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise - without prior written permission from the author.