HAS YOUR SLEEP GONE TO THE DOGS

Family Let Sleeping Dogs Lie One exhausted pet owner defends his decision to share the bed BY BILL BAROL.  

One night in 1998, my wife and I fell asleep, our very young puppy, Mojo, on the bed between us. When we woke up the next morning and discovered there hadn't been any disastrous consequences, a thought balloon bloomed over our heads: Dog sleeps on bed. Snuggles with humans. Kind of nice. The reason I remember this: It was the last good night's sleep I ever got. There are no hard numbers on how many pet owners "co-sleep" with their animals, but two studies presented at last year's annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies confirm what any pet-loving idiot like myself can tell you: There are a lot of us, and we are walking around like zombies. One study surveyed 298 patients at a family practice clinic. About half reported sleeping with pets (more dogs than cats), and of those, 63 percent of respondents who shared a bed with a pet more than four nights a week reported poor sleep quality. I'm no sleep scientist, but these figures seem low to me. Then again, I'm usually pretty foggy. At my recent annual physical, my doctor asked me how I was sleeping. Not well, I told him. I suspected the dogs had something to do with that. "You have your dogs in the bed with you and your wife? Yes, I told him. "What kind of dogs? Labradors, I told him, hearing how ridiculous it sounded. He blinked and said incredulously, "Labradors? Plural? Yes, I said in a meek voice. That's right-my wife, Jennifer, and I share our king-size bed with 11-year-old, 60-pound Roxy and four-year-old, 55-pound Scout. (Mojo went to her reward several years ago. She was well rested.) Roxy and Scout are small as Labs go, but their lust for a good night's sleep is outsize. They don't mind colonizing a disproportionately large swath of our bed to get it. If you were to watch a time-lapse video of a night in our bedroom, you would see Roxy and Scout sprawled peacefully across the vast middle of our enormous bed, the area that would correspond to the Midwest on a map of the United States, while Jennifer clings precariously to the Atlantic seaboard and I try to avoid plummeting into the Pacific. I know this is bad for me. The Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School reports cheerily that "a lack of adequate sleep can affect judgment, mood, [and the] ability to learn and retain information and may increase the risk of serious accidents and injury. In the long term, chronic sleep deprivation may lead to a host of health problems, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even early mortality. Yet night after night, my wife and I-two adults who train our dogs rigorously, insist on their good citizenship, and are otherwise firmly unsentimental about our status as pack leaders-decline to kick them out of our bed, and we wake up grouchy and stiff. As do many of the friends and acquaintances I informally polled for this story. One, who sleeps with a 25-pound wheaten, compares it to "trying to share our bed with a piano bench. Another was at least willing to do something about it. One recent night, when her two-year-old Great Dane jumped on the bed at 2 a.m., she "put up with it for about an hour. Then I moved to the couch. Don't misunderstand. I don't discount the psychological satisfaction of curling up next to a slumbering dog or, I guess, cat. Psychologist Stanley Coren cites speculation among anthropologists that human-animal co-sleeping may even be encoded in people's DNA , or animals'. It's hard to ignore the elemental comfort of Roxy's muffled snores or the whispery exhalation of Scout's breath. The sounds say the day is done and the pack is together and safe. Who am I to buck DNA ? Even if tonight, at about 3 a.m., when I'm feeling less broad-minded, I give Scout a vicious shove that doesn't wake her up. Even then, I will sleepily but deliberately act against my own physiological best interests and allow her to stay right where she is.