Fajr Prayer and a good night's sleep!
Note: This entry is more pointless than pretty much all of my Islam-related entries! And it's probably equal to my off topic fashion type entries, but it feels weird for an Islam-related one to be so pointless. I will publish it nonetheless!
Fajr prayer is EARLY! It seems like a difficult prayer to pray, but it also seems like the most important one, setting the tone for your day. With it being so early, it seems like the most Islamic thing to do is to wake up for Fajr and go to bed with the sunset... I don't feel like most people who pray fajr do it this way. At least not in Egypt, where what I have seen is that they wake up for fajr and then taking a long nap in mid afternoon, only to stay up most of the night (basically sleeping two almost equal periods, but at different times in the day).
But is it my common sense or my upbringing that has lead me to believe that one sleep period of approximately 8 hours (more for some, less for others) is what is ideal for an adult human being?
I feel like sleeping twice in a day is not a good system! I don't mind naps, I take one or two naps of about an hour each week myself... A person needs a boost sometimes! But when a person is sleeping two stretches of 4 hours, for example, it's not a nap, but it's not a night's sleep either. It' something weirdly in the middle.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's unislamic to sleep with this pattern, far from that, it's perfectly fine if you function well that way... But is it ideal? I don't feel like it is... I feel like sleeping one long period is ideal. And Islam has an obligatory prayer very early in the morning... So ideally, a person would have slept their average of 8 hours before that early morning prayer... So they should probably go to bed on average at around 8pm! Ideally!