Day 112 - Do Babies Dream Of Baby Sheep?

There are those times in the middle of the night when you're checking on your kid to make sure everything is okay. I'm not too sure why we as parents do that because I would think 99.9999% of the time they're fine and dandy. And for that .0001% of the time when they're not okay, I'm not quite too sure what else it could be except that they're dead. Not trying to be morbid here, but seriously folks, what else could it be? When your infant wants something they're going to cry their lungs out. And the rest of the time they're just staring or pooping. It's not like you're going to find them planning a bank heist or shooting up heroin.

For me, I usually pass by the crib just to see their calm, innocent faces before I mess up their formative years as an embarrassing father. The thing that strikes me most when I look at them is the type of faces they make. Sometimes they might be smiling, giggling, pouting, or mouthing the words "I hope I don't look like Dad when I grow up." But with all of that expression, what are they thinking about?

I always assumed infants must dream because if they're sleeping 14-16 hours a day something better be going on in that noggin' or else I want my sperm back. So I jumped on the internet (or as my mom calls it "the typewriter tv") and did a little reading about babies and dreaming.

A doctor at the Center for Sleep Medicine in New York believes babies dream because they go through REM (rapid eye movement) sleep like adults. And since REM sleep is when adults are most likely to dream, the doctor presumes the same goes for babies. As for U2 sleep, that is when adults are most likely to dream of social activism through fame, especially in Africa.

But what babies dream of is up for grabs. Nobody really knows what they dream of so my guess is as good as any fancy pants doctor's speculation. The highly paid and educated doctor at the Center of Sleep says that "...babies dream of infantile things." I'd have to believe him because he has written articles in the New England Journal of Medicine such as "Sleep Deprivation Produces Drowsiness" and "Cows Dream of Bovine Things."

What this boils down to for me is that although our kids aren't even four months old, there's a lot of activity going on in their brains. Those heads are like 7-11s: open 24/7 and they speak a language foreign to the rest of us. It's a big mystery what exactly they're thinking and dreaming about, but as long as their little faces are smiling more often than not I guess we're not screwing up too much.