Circle M Farm

Visitors to the farm during spring will often squint with deep concern into a pasture and then finally ask me, “Is that one alive?”

Baby animals, of all kinds, certainly know how to sleep. With my own first child, I spent many nights awake listening for the absence of breath, and I wasted many opportunities to rest myself by shaking Eli awake from naps because he looked dead. Pasture animals seem to have an instinctual ability to sleep almost entirely flat, perhaps an evolutionary strength to keep them hidden and safe in the tall grass to which they are adapted. But it’s odd to behold. A young calf or foal asleep in a field next to it’s mother appears to be a pile of shed skin. Lambs and kids are so small they all but disappear when sleeping, even in the closely cropped grass of their wintered-over paddock.

Now the mother of several teenagers and the owner of too many animals in decrepit fencing, I fully appreciate what a gift such total immersion in sleep must be. But it’s not just the lack of anxiety and consciousness that’s so fabulous. Sleep is something magical. I’m quite certain my own children have emerged from their bedrooms in the morning several centimeters taller. Certainly I’ve observed lambs and kids bigger in the morning. Human research has actually shown that growth hormone is released during deep sleep in infants and young adults. Also during sleep, individual cells show increased production and decreased breakdown of proteins, the building blocks needed for growth and repair from the damage of ultraviolet rays, stress and illness.

Then there’s that James Herriot story. The compassionate vet secretly euthanizes a suffering ewe, against the wishes and behind the back of the stubborn and cheap farmer. Months later, James is at the farm again, and the farmer smuggly shows him the very same ewe, grazing happy and healthy in the paddock. Shocked and stumped, James puzzles out that the heavy dose of morphine he injected did indeed “put to sleep” the ewe, who the farmer avows napped for several days straight and then was right as rain. Apparently the deep sleep Herriot induced, intending to gently kill the sheep, actually enabled her body to heal itself. A pretty strong argument against working through a flu. Let the sheep sleep!

Apparently such growth and repair during sleep is especially important in the brain. Some researchers believe that the constant twitching observed during a baby’s naps are neurons sending their electrical impulses out to map the body, gradually establishing better co-ordination and physical control. I remember my childhood pet, a giant dog named Moses, twitching and jumping and even barking tiny quiet yelps in his sleep. My brother and I used to sit next to him on his rug in the garage and giggle at his subconscious escapades.

Then my husband and I did the same with our own babies. As quite young parents, we had few friends with children when we started our family. The friends we did have couldn’t understand our reluctance to get out and do things without the kids. Truth is, we were most happy at home playing with them, or watching them twitch and jump in their sleep. We have literally hours of videotaped footage of various kids sleeping. To us, their antics, both waking and sleeping, were endlessly amusing (although we don’t take those sleeping videos out and watch them now).

Of course it was having babies of my own that made me appreciate my own sleep so much. I still consider an uninterrupted night’s rest the greatest luxury life has to offer. Nice to know something is being accomplished in that time as well. Sweet dreams!