Before artificial light, a single consolidated eight-hour block was not the human default. Historical records describe **segmented sleep**: a "first sleep" beginning a few hours after dusk, a waking interval of one to two hours around midnight to 3am, then a "second sleep" until dawn. People used the gap to read, pray, reflect, or do quiet work — wakefulness in the dark was ordinary, not insomnia. The pattern faded as cheap lighting stretched the evening and pushed bedtimes later, collapsing the two blocks into one. What modern sleep culture pathologizes as "middle-of-the-night waking" may be a partial reversion to an older rhythm rather than a disorder. The reframe has a practical edge. If you reliably wake around 2-3am, the question is not "how do I fix broken sleep" but "what is the waking interval *for*." Treating it as a defect invites anxious clock-watching that itself blocks the second sleep; treating it as a quiet, uncontested block — for reading or low-stimulation thought, screens excluded — works with the rhythm instead of against it. **Personal application:** My own 02:30-03:30 wake fits this exactly, and I already use it as a pre-dawn reading and synthesis slot — the historically normal use of the interval, not a sign something is wrong. The variable worth watching is total sleep and screen-light timing, never the wake itself.