A few nights ago, Claire said she didn’t sleep well — she woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I said something like maybe she should count sheep. I hadn’t said that in a long time and in fact I hadn’t even heard the expression for a very long time. Seems like a number of years ago, people said it all the time. I guess that was before we had all the modern electronic gadgets to help us do everything, including sleep, like white noise machines and beds that heat, cool, vibrate, etc.
But anyhow, I got to wondering why people ever thought counting sheep would help them fall asleep….
Even when I was younger, I often wondered why count sheep? why not count cats, or cows, or dogs? Why sheep? Actually, from what I can tell, no one really knows for sure. But one interesting theory is that counting sheep started in a 12th century book of fables. One of the fables in the book was about a king that demanded stories from his personal storyteller one night when he could’t fall asleep. But the storyteller himself wanted to go to sleep and decided to tell him a tale about a farmer who went to a market and bought 2,000 sheep. These 2,000 sheep had to be transported across a flooded river, but there was only a small boat on shore that could only carry two sheep at a time. So the farmer would have to complete the crossing a thousand times, over and over…. and as the storyteller began to tell this part of the story, he fell asleep. This annoyed the king a lot, and the storyteller was immediately woken up to continue. The story was so repetitive and mundane that it successfully lulled the king to sleep.
But the most popular theory as to the phrase’s origin is that (many) shepherds in medieval Britain used communal grazing land and they were obligated to keep a headcount of their sheep each night. So before they went to sleep, they counted their sheep to ensure that they were all accounted for.
Like most things, there’s at least two schools of thought about ways to fall asleep. Some think counting helps, others think it makes the problem worse. But today, sheep seem a little outdated — if people count something, it’s probably not sheep…. when politicians have problems sleeping, they probably count voters.
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