This makes far more sense. A lot of people with insomnia have Sleep Disordered Breathing - sometimes apnea, sometimes UARS which is roughly the same thing except you tend to wake up before oxygen desaturation, resulting in somewhat different symptoms and high false negative diagnostic rates.
It sounds like a distorted memory of a small study where subjects without sleep disorders slept earlier but not longer or better when camping with natural light and fire only.[2] How long the effect lasted was not studied.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm1TxQj9IsQ
[2] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(13)...