>>Happens to me after having slept a couple of hours and then woken. I just give up and get up. Get to the computer, read something, have a smoke or two, play solitaire or gPlanarity, and about an hour or two later I go back to bed. My wife has found somewhere on the web that this two-part sleep used to be the norm in the middle ages. Whole family would wake up at some point during the night, stoke the fire, talk some, sit around for an hour or so, then all go back to sleep.
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>Apparently that is/was the 'normal' sleep pattern back when candles were WAY expensive. Of course, you were also going to bed shortly after sundown

"Pošto kupio, poto prodao" - for as much as [I] bought it, for that much [I] sold it"... i.e. telling it as I heard. Doesn't say where the custom existed - in richer houses perhaps? Or they were sleeping around the fire so whoever woke up first would stoke it a bit to have light. And there were other sources of light - there was the pine twig, for one. Wax candles may have been expensive, but tallow not as much etc etc.

Most of history is SF anyway, if we assume history is some kind of science...