Yesterday some program my kids were watching on TV referred to the practice of counting sheep to help oneself fall asleep. It made me wonder where the concept came from.
This morning I had to go settle one of my kids at 4:30am. My personal practice for getting myself to sleep when it doesn't happen naturally is to mentally play back the highlight reel of my sexual history. I'll go through partners sequentially from my first sexual experience and remember the best episodes with each of them.
It occurred to me that perhaps the person who invented the notion of counting sheep was doing exactly the same thing. But when his wife asked him how he got to sleep, he couldn't really say, "I reminisced about all of the sheep I'd had sex with." So he said he had been "counting" them.
