HOW ANIMALS SLEEP

HOW ANIMALS SLEEP
Dr. Colin Shapiro, Illustrated by Sari O'Sullivan
Black Moss Press, 1996
2450 Byng Road, Windsor, Ontario, Canada N8W 3E8
31 pages, paperback, $6.95
ISBN 0-88753-281-0

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

"Why do I need to go to sleep?," Mahla asked.

Parents of young children hear this question all the time, often followed by the plaintive wail, "Why right now?" If "Because I said so," doesn't do the trick, parents may ease stalling, and learn a thing or two themselves, by reading this bedtime story to their children.

In How Animals Sleep, Colin Shapiro, a psychiatrist and sleep specialist at the Toronto Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, starts with the familiar. He reminds his daughter that the family dogs and a neighbor's cats take frequent naps, and likens their pattern of
alternating waking and sleeping to that of human babies and persons who are very old.

"When you dream," he tells his daughter, "your eyes move around a lot under their lids." She can see pets doing this, too, he notes, adding that twitching paws and whiskers also indicate dreaming sleep.

Whales, she learns, must sleep with their heads sticking out of the water in order to breathe. Dolphins sleep with half of their brain part of the time, and then switch over to the other half, always moving. Even fish sleep. "Guppies have stripes along their bodies. When they wake up, they swim backwards for a few minutes and when they do, the stripes change from going along their bodies to going up and down," Shapiro relates. "It's like the fish are changing from pajamas into clothes."

Bats sleep upside down. Leopards sleep on tree limbs without falling. Penguins sleep standing up in circles with their backs to the wind, taking turns on the outside to permit those in the middle to sleep. Gentle water colors by Sari O'Sullivan show a wide array of dozing animals.

"Good night, sleep tight. Don't let the bed-bugs bite," Shapiro whispers on his way out the door. That costs him a few more minutes: spiders, scorpions, bees.... "Every living thing," he tells his daughter, "needs sleep." And so, at last, does Mahla.