The Science of Sleep
Its not possible to make anybody and any baby or child sleep whole night continuously. This is not how sleep work. Sleep is not one unbroken, dead to the world state. but a glide through a standard sequence of levels of consciousness. Deep sleep - light sleep- a period of dreams - a brief awakening and roll over - then down into the depts once more and so the cycle goes on all night.
If you attach electrodes of a brain wawetest to a sleeping human, the tracing tells us much about the states of sleep. This shows if they are deeply asleep, dreaming or floating on a lighter plane. It measures the length of the cycle and tells us how much time is spent in each state along the way.
From this we discover that adults sleep a ninety-minute cycle from start to finish. This means that every ninety minutes we wake briefly, open our eyes, strecth, grunt, roll over, register that it is still dark and then go back to sleep again. When we wake we keep it to ourselves and don’t wake our partner to share the moment.
new babies ride a cycle with a shorter frame, one which measures only sixty minutes. Being shorter it increases the potential number of wakes possible each night, leaving the daunting possibility of a wake every hour if you are really unfortunate.