"My
favorite's the three o'clock hour. For most people, that's the hard time. If
they don't sleep through it, that's the time the mind wakes up and starts
worrying about what they did or didn't do that day, or what they'll do or not
do the next. And the next, and right up until life's over."
Night Shield
___________________________
Ellin Beltz, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Now wide awake from a once peaceful slumber, you roll over
to check the clock and find it’s 3 a.m. That’s the same time you woke up last
night. And the night before.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because nocturnal awakenings
happen to a lot of people. Waking up several times throughout the night is a
natural occurrence often due to sleep architecture, which are the stages of
sleep that one cycles through every night.