Sleep Traditions

About 10% of people need nine or ten hours of sleep. Other people are fine with three to six hours a night. Different cultures have different sleep traditions. In Spain, people have a tradition of a siesta in the afternoon. Some tribes in Botswana and Zaire sleep when they feel like it. People who live in Japan sleep less at night than others. They take very short sleeps or naps called Inemuri. History can also teach us about sleep traditions. Roger Ekerch is an historian at Virginia Tech in the United States. He researched how people slept in the past. And he discovered that people used to sleep in a different way from most people today. But if