Counting sheep makes it worse
Researchers at Oxford tested the oldest sleep advice in the world on people who could not drop off at all. One group counted SHEEP, one imagined a calm and interesting scene such as a beach or a waterfall, and one was given no instructions at all.
The sheep-counters took longest. Counting is repetitive enough to be boring but not absorbing enough to occupy a busy mind, so the worries simply carried on underneath the numbers. Picturing somewhere pleasant in detail worked considerably better, shaving around twenty minutes off. The advice has survived for centuries on the strength of sounding sensible.
Small children dream about almost nothing
Waking children in a sleep laboratory over several years, the researcher David Foulkes found that under-fives, asked what had been going through their minds, mostly reported nothing at all. When they did report a DREAM it was a single still image — a dog, a bowl — with no story and usually no dreamer in it.
Anything resembling an adult dream, with a plot and the child taking part, does not appear reliably until around seven or eight. Which reframes the three-year-old at midnight insisting something happened: the vivid narrated nightmare that parents picture may not be what is going on at all.
Yawning has nothing to do with oxygen
The old explanation was that a YAWN tops up oxygen. It was tested by having people breathe air with extra oxygen and air with extra carbon dioxide, and the yawning rate barely moved. The leading idea now is temperature: a yawn draws cool air over blood vessels near the roof of the mouth, and people yawn measurably less in very hot weather, when the trick cannot work.
The contagious part is stranger. Watching somebody yawn sets most people off, reading about it sets some people off, and dogs will yawn after watching their owner do it — more readily for their own owner than for a stranger. Anybody who has reached the end of this paragraph without yawning has done well.
Your body switches itself off to dream
During the stage of SLEEP where the vivid dreams happen, the brain sends a signal that paralyses almost every muscle in the body. The eyes still move, the chest still breathes, and everything else is disconnected — which stops a sleeper from getting up and acting out whatever is going on.
Sleepwalking is therefore not somebody performing a dream. It happens in the deepest, dreamless part of the NIGHT, usually in the first couple of hours, when the body is perfectly able to move and the thinking part of the brain is largely offline. That is also why a sleepwalking child remembers nothing about it in the morning.
The cosy list
The grid has the sky — MOON, STARS, the DARK and the QUIET — the kit, a BED, a BLANKET, PYJAMAS and everything COSY, and the ritual: a STORY, a LULLABY, a CUDDLE, a SNUGGLE, a YAWN when TIRED, then SLEEP, REST, a DREAM, a SNORE and the SHEEP.
A toddler needs somewhere between eleven and fourteen hours a day and a five-year-old around ten to thirteen, and an overtired child does not wind down but speeds up. Teenagers are a separate problem: at puberty the body clock really does shift a couple of hours later, so the fifteen-year-old who cannot sleep at ten is not being difficult.