Counting sheep is a mental exercise...
Counting sheep is a mental exercise used in some Anglophone cultures as a means
of lulling oneself to sleep. It most likely arose from the practice of sheep
counting, a traditional numbering system used by some British shepherds to count
their flocks.
In most depictions of the activity, the practitioner envisions an endless series
of identical white sheep jumping over a fence, while counting the number that do
so. The idea, presumably, is to induce boredom while occupying the mind with
something simple, repetitive, and rhythmic, all of which are known to help humans
sleep.
Although the practice is largely a stereotype, and rarely used as a solution for
insomnia, it has been so commonly referenced by cartoons, comic strips, and other
mass media, that it has become deeply engrained into popular culture's notion of
sleep. The term "counting sheep" has entered the English language as an idiomatic
term for insomnia. Sheep themselves have become associated with sleep, or lack
thereof. For example, an ad campaign of the Serta mattress company features the
Serta Counting Sheep, a flock of animated sheep who resent said company's
mattresses for supposedly rendering their services unnecessary.
According to an experiment conducted by researchers at Oxford University, counting
sheep is actually an inferior means of inducing sleep. Subjects who instead imagined
"a beach or a waterfall" were forced to expend more mental energy, and fell asleep
faster than those asked to simply count sheep.
It has also been whimsically suggested that the phrase originates from a Hebrew pun
on the Latin phrase "sopor sond" (literally, sleep deeply/soundly). The Hebrew pun
is ???? ??? (sopwor tsoan), an imperative that means "count sheep!". However, this
is most likely a folk etymology.
All operations involving sheep such as shearing, dosing, foot-trimming etc. are
routinely followed by a count of the sheep. This is in order to keep track of the
number of deaths, strays, etc. and of course, the number of sheep in each field.
In the past each farm would have rights (known as "stints","gaits" or fell rights)
dating back to the medieval period for a certain number of animals to graze on common
land such as open moors and fells, so head-age counts were important. This system
still exists on some "stinted" fells in the Slaidburn area. Modern agricultural
subsidy payments are often dependent on the number of animals on a farm and are
paid on a "per head" basis and therefore accurate counts are still essential.
One of the few survivals of the use of the ancient "British" language into the
20th century was that of the old way of counting sheep. Many farmers in the
Slaidburn area born before the Second World War can remember the old dialect
sheep counts or remember their use by their fathers and grandfathers.
Mr. John Whitehead has compiled the following tables of some of the different
words used to replace numbers. These demonstrate regional variations in the
traditional counts and the dialects. Numbers above 20 do not seem to have been
used:- indeed, old documents tend to use the term " x score sheep" (score = 20).
There are traditional methods of counting sheep in many of the Lakeland dales,
though none seem to still be in actual use. Garnett in 1910 said even then that
the method was almost obsolete and as for the names of the numbers, "but few of
the farmers remember them". "Yan" is still used for "one", but the others are
only known as curiosities.
Traditionally the shepherd counts to twenty, then he marks a stone or stick with
a "score" and starts again. The final total is given as so many score of sheep.
The method seems to be common to old Cymric or Celtic areas although the words
themselves have taken slightly different forms over the years.