Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Nights & Days

One thing that those adhereing to polyphasic sleep often mention is that days seem to blend together when there is no void of sleep to separate one night from the next day. This does seem to be a real -- and interesting -- effect. So, this brought up a question for me: if I became polyphasic, would I still stick to my system of defining nights and days?

My system isn't really revolutionary, it merely addresses what I see as a flaw in our current technical definition of when a day begins. I think this flaw results from the fact that most people aren't awake in the hours after midnight, so they don't give much thought to what they're called.

To me, it simply doesn't feel right that days begin in the middle of the night. It seems to me that mornings, and days, begin at the time that a new day dawns. This might seem like I'm just playing with semantics, but semantics are important. People live and die by semantics. I know basically why it is said that days begin at midnight. This is the time that is typically used to symbolize when the Sun is at the nadir, with noon being the zenith. So, the idea is that a new day begins at the darkest point of the night, just as a new year begins in winter. I can understand that, but this way of thinking has issues.

In addition to this midnight transition just not feeling right, it brings up problems of description. Basically, my gripe is this: if a day begins at midnight, then are those hours after midnight morning or night, and of what day? It just doesn't seem right to call them morning, because morning is associated with dawn and daylight. But if I call them night, this is problematic as well. For example, let's say I told a friend that I had a dream Saturday night. Technically, if Saturday begins at 12 AM, then if I had a dream at 3 AM on Saturday, this would be Saturday night. Yet, in natural language, we would typically describe that as Friday night, and if I said I had a dream Saturday night, someone would be more likely to think it occured at 11 PM Saturday or even 3 AM Sunday. With our current system of defining things, unless the hours between 12 AM and dawn on Saturday would be called Saturday morning, then Saturday night is split in two parts, the hours before dawn and after sunset on that day.

My proposed solution to this problem was that, just as noon and midnight represent the approximate zenith and nadir of the sun, we set the times of 6 PM and 6 AM to represent the average time of sunset and sunrise, and say that one night begins at 6 PM and the following day begins at 6 AM. I have support for this way of thinking: days begin at 6 AM in Groundhog's Day and Majora's Mask. Do you need more evidence than that?

Anyway, I've been pondering if I feel any different about the feeling of when days begin now that I'm regularly awake during those questionable post-midnight hours that seem to be in time limbo. I'm definitely feeling how days seem to be less distinct from each other, and not having any problem with that. I feel like there's less of a disruption and void in the flow of time, although I wouldn't say that days seem to blend together. However, it wasn't just waking up at or after dawn that made me feel like the day begins then. I still stand by my conviction that it's not natural to begin a day in the middle of the night.

No comments:

Post a Comment