Silly question I think you would be qualified to answer: before electricity, how exactly did one manage to light a candle (or rushlight) in the darkness if one woke up in the middle of the night?
Not silly at all! That's a totally understandable thing to wonder.
I think it comes down to muscle memory- you probably would have been doing this all your life, once you were old enough to light it yourself unsupervised -and the fact that most houses aren't totally cave-dark at night. Once your eyes adjust, unless you're visually impaired, you could probably see matches and a candle well enough. Pre-matches, you could light a candle from the banked fire in your room if there was one. Or...flint and tinder, I guess? Or you'd just go without, if there was no fire already lit and no way of lighting one to hand.
(and even if you are visually impaired, I can attest that some impairment can be worked around for things like that. I'm thankfully within correctable range, but I mostly put small or low-contrast things like that in the same places in my room all the time, so I can find them easily without them being highly visible. like my glasses, which have very thin wire frames- hard for me to find them without them on, if I don't know where they are, so they're usually in the same place every night)
(before anyone starts in with the Second Sleep!!!!! stuff, I read that paper and all of the "evidence" is just misinterpreting sources that talk about individual episodes of nighttime wakefulness, to turn it into a cultural norm when that's not what those sources indicate at all. ie "I woke up at night once, and read a book until I fell asleep again!" becomes "EVERYONE woke up at night, every night, and was awake for a few hours or something!" sorry to burst the pop history bubble there)
