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Counting On The Dark
In the dark of the night, I count.
Lately, I’ve been counting countries. In alphabetical order. By continent. Antigua, Argentina, Austria, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Algeria, Angola, Afghanistan — you get the idea. For your information there are 17 countries that begin with “M.” On a bad night, I get all the way to Zaire and Zimbabwe.
Did I mention I do this in bed? With my eyes closed? Breathing rhythmically? Of course I’m hoping to to trick — or at least bore — myself to sleep.
There’s an old expression: “Your mind is like a bad neighborhood. Don’t go there too often and don’t go alone.” I didn’t make that up, but it explains why I count. It’s too risky to let my mind drift.
Of course counting to fall asleep is as old as the hills, or at least as old as the days when sheep herders began counting sheep. According to Mental Floss, shepherds in medieval Britain used communal grazing grounds, thus the nightly roundup. Each shepherd needed to keep track of how many animals he had. Some speculate the expression “counting sheep” has even older origins.
I suspect that humans have been tossing and turning since they acquired the ability for abstract thought.
Anyway, there are many approaches to sleep counting. One hack recommends counting backwards by one, starting at 10,000. Another suggests counting backwards from 300 by threes. I am not a math person and this would be far more stressful than soothing.
I’m prefer playing with letters. Letters can open you up to all sorts of mind-numbing categories. For instance, I used to see if I could name a rock band for each letter of the alphabet, but that was too easy (except for “X’) so I switched it up to three rock bands per letter. My list will date me, but this challenge took me from America, Aerosmith and the Animals all the way to the Zombies, Warren Zevon and ZZ Top. But this got too easy as well.
Now, to reveal the depths of my nerdiness, I’ll confess that another great night time count is naming all the characters in Jane Eyre, alphabetically. (As a prerequisite for playing…
