Not “Dead to the World”

Sleep.  It's a funny phenomenon -- funny in the sense of peculiar, as well as being an opportunity for levity on sitcoms.  Yet sleep is also an earnest matter.  It even links our lives on the evolutionary tree with other animals.

We humans get introduced quite early in life to sleep's being more than meets the eye.  More than one parent has had to deal with a young child's having nightmares. It is probably clearer to the parent how the disruptive dreams connect with some anxiety in the child's waking life.  In other instances, the child's nightmare can be marked by that strange other-worldly feeling we can be struck by upon remembering a dream on awaking.  One mother I know was told at breakfast by her pre-schooler that he had been chased by a giraffe. Fortunately, the mother, rather than reprimanding the child for lying, explained to her child that he had simply had a scary dream.

The phenomenon of sleep can also be scary to a child viewing it from the outside:  I remember as a child entering my mother's bedroom when she was napping so soundly that my mind almost became overtaken by the fear that she was dead.  The similarity between deep sleep and death adds another layer to the peculiarity of dreams, as well as providing material for literary pens.  In a time before modern medicine's ability to measure brain waves, Edgar Allan Poe took advantage of the frightening thought that a person might be declared dead when the person was just asleep.  Poe's story "The Premature Burial" is a gripping tale.

As we journey through life, learning about the world we live in, we also discover that many other animals sleep, and mammals clearly dream.  Those fishes in my childhood aquarium, sometimes hovering motionless, were probably sleeping (I was told), even though they had no eyelids to close to let me know they were sleeping.  It was easier to recognize that our pet dog was dreaming when, lying on its side, its legs began running, no doubt chasing something rather than being chased.

Contemporary scientists have been able to verify that dreaming can be a means for processing the preceding day's activities, even enhancing learning.  For example, a sleeping rat's brain undergoes the same activity it did when the rat was exploring a new maze the day before.

Despite sleep being essential to many animals' lives (and even to plants, in a way), the wisdom of our faith-traditions has adopted sleep as a symbol of something we should not be doing -- at least when we're awake!  The Buddha's title in Sanskrit indicates that he is for Buddhists the model of "the Awakened One."  As Christmas approaches, many Christians sing hymns containing reminders to stay alert, to "keep watch" like shepherds protecting their sheep.

However, remembering that marvelous ability of babies to sometimes sleep soundly amid hubbub, we can also wish all babies in the world the gift of being able to "sleep in heavenly peace."

~~~

Do you have a wish for the world about sleep or about watchfulness?

(The quoted hymn-line is from John Freeman Young's

 1863 translation of "Stille Nacht" ["Silent Night"], 1818 lyrics by Joseph Mohr.)

(The photograph of the artwork of the deer was made by Joachim Lutz, 

and is used under under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.)

Putting Flesh on the Bones

Is there any child who does not at some point become interested in dinosaurs?  Any of a number of things about them can intrigue children.  Such as the dinosaurs' often large size (compared to being so small oneself).  And the fact that dinosaurs inhabit a world that cannot be seen, but which children can enter using their imagination.

The first dinosaur statues
(at Crystal Palace Park)

Even the adults who in the first half of the 19th century discovered fossils from large dinosaurs had to use their imagination to try to surmise what the living creatures would have looked like.  Monsters was the first guess. And so one of Britain's leading fossil anatomists, Richard Owen, named the category Dinosauria from the Greek words deinos and sauros, i.e. "monstrous lizard."  A 19th-century London sculptor depicted dinosaurs as so obese and close to the ground that the poor animals could have barely moved.

For people who were children a century later, it was the 1940 Walt Disney movie Fantasia that helped imaginations put life into dinosaur bones, even if that movie was cartoon animation. Disney's cartoon artists, in creating the dinosaur-story segment, drew the animals' complex movements more like living reptiles.  (Rather than turning dinosaurs into clown-like stick figures, as have some marketers of dinosaur-shaped breakfast cereal and canned noodles for children.)

Despite that improvement the Disney studio made, it was still to some degree a projection of our own mental monsters upon those ancient skeletons.  That is because even in the 1800's, paleontologists had possessed fossil evidence indicating that some dinosaurs had resemblances to birds rather than being more lumbering reptiles.  During the 20th century, more and more scientific evidence -- such as birdlike hipbones and fossils with signs of feathers -- has led to a strong consensus of the close lineages of birds and dinosaurs.  The earliest bird-branch of evolution is more like an overlap with some dinosaurs, thus making birds today somewhat like dinosaur descendants.  One biologist explains:  "Biologically [dinosaurs] were perhaps more akin to today's birds and mammals, thus possibly explaining their great success."

Even when envisioned as being in a way reptilian, there is something to be said for dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the word "dinosaur" continues to be used sometimes to mean something extinct, a relic.  The science-writer Stephen Jay Gould complains about that usage:

"I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur in succumbing to progress.  Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium.  Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects,

 entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity."

That child playing with plastic toys could have told adults that there was something cool about dinosaurs.

~~~

Did you become interested in dinosaurs as a child?  What do you think about them now?

(The biologist's quote is by Gregory M. Erickson in

 Evolution:  The First Four Billion Years, ed. Michael Ruse, et al., © 2009.  p. 518.)

(The Gould quote is from his collection Dinosaurs in a Haystack, © 1995.  p. 50.)

(Both the statues photo by Jes from Melbourne and the sign photo by Jeremy Thompson

 are used under Creative Commons Attribution Generic licenses.)