Counting Sheep

It's said to be a exercise leading directly to sleep, for all those nights when sleep just won't come, count sheep. But seriously, I mean, if you've tried it you know, and if you haven't, well you knew better, that it really doesn't work. But, I was out of options last night and so I decided to try out the age-old trick.

At first the monotony had me thinking that maybe this was going to work. The sheep were stacking up in my brain, one-dimensional and all the same...however by about 16, this got too boring and they started to take on characteristics: old sheep with long white beards, young girl sheep in bonnets, cowboy sheep, skinny sheep,

fat sheep, sheep with buck-teeth, sheep with no teeth, sheep smiling, sheep crying etc. This went on for awhile but slowly the sheep because 3-dimensional and started moving. By the 40s there was a tap dancing sheep, a line dancing sheep, a sheep herding dogs, a sheep jumping over the moon, a sheep barbering a man's head and they got more creative over time.

Unfortunately, coming up with new mind pictures was growing exhausting and so by the late 60s I was back to monotonous plain old sheep. By the 70s, it was just sheep heads, the the 80s they had turned into ducklings somehow and by the 90s were fortunately back to sheep.

 By the time I reached one hundred I decided this exercise was fruitless and annoying. I thought about starting over at one (as saying one hundred and one would take too much effort) but gave up after about 10...I wasn't even imagining sheep anymore, just counting. So my mind wandered and I started writing this post in my head and so here we are...I eventually fell asleep around 12, long after the details of this post were put together and I was once again bored.

So, I have decided that the whole idea is nonsense and either bores you so that you can't continue or leads your mind on so many different paths that you get confused and more awake trying to figure out where the sheep are than sleepy.

According to Wikipedia it is "presumably, is to induce boredom while occupying the mind with something simple, repetitive, and rhythmic, all of which are known to help humans sleep." (maybe it didn't work because I wasn't imaging them all jumping one after the other over a fence, all identical and such...but I tried the monotony, it failed). However according to a study done at Oxford (people actually do STUDIES on this type of thing!?!?) it is less beneficial than imaging a calm seen such as a beach or waterfall (why do calm scenes have to have water in them??? and anyways, depending on the beach or waterfall, things might not be calm there at all!)

Interestingly one of the earliest references to this activity dates back to 1605 in "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes :

 "Let your worship keep count of the goats the fisherman is taking across, for if one escapes the memory there will be an end of the story, and it will be impossible to tell another word of it."

However, this sentence really makes very little sense to me so I fail to see its relevance...in other news, people of India and Pakistan would refer to the exercise as counting stars.

In regards to my further research on the topic I have found that there is very little information about the origin and effectiveness of this old folk lore. But I have discovered some interesting tidbits about the way shepherds in like the DARK AGES, actually, I don't know the time period, but they had this weird rhyming system of counting sheep...like, real sheep...I'm sure you wanted to know that. As my search has yielded nothing else which strikes me as particularly fascinating, I will here close my post. If you have more questions or interest in the subject...Google your heart out.