one of the iran hostages from 1980 said on a tv show i saw that sometimes he and other hostages were forced to sleep standing up…how do you do this and how do you learn to do this? i know horses and other animals do this:rolleyes:
Horses have physical properties that allow them to do this – ‘lockable’ ligaments in the legs to keep them straight while the horse is asleep.
Humans don’t have these.
But when they are tired enough (or drunk enough) humans can sleep in all kinds of weird postures. Presumably standing up (leaning on each other) would be one of them. Probably not a very sound sleep – they would occasionally begin to fall, and wake enough to stand straight again, then dose off again. But if they were tired enough, that could happen.
do cows sleep standing up> what about other animals
Yes, cows can.
It’s a fairly common ability for grazing herd animals – horses, donkeys, cattle, goats, sheep, antelope, deer, etc. These are all prey animals, and their survival depends on them being able to run away from predators. Thus the ability to sleep standing up at times is a useful survival trait, that involved in most of them.
I’m going to assume that “forced to sleep standing up;” means constrained in a situation in which it is impossible to lie down, so they are slumped in a posture in which their body is held more or less upright, but allowed to sleep. That is, impossible to lower their knees to ground level, nor their buttocks to knee level, but leaning against the boundaries of the enclosure.
It’s not difficult for quadrupeds to keep their center of gravity inside their ground supports and keep balance. I’ve seen wading birds that seemed to be asleep with their legs extended vertically beneath their bodies, Herons and egrets usually roost for the night perched in trees, I think cranes hunker down like chickens, I’m not sure about flamingos. Colobri will correct me I am wrong, but I think all birds sleep with bent knees beneath them, but can rest for long periods on straight legs, or even one straight leg. Birds knees seem to articulate the wrong way, because what we think are their knees are actually skeletaly analogous to our ankles and heels.
I can remember falling asleep on road marches in the Army.
Yep.
I checked with our Veterinarian tonight, and I was wrong – cows do NOT sleep standing up. Neither do deer or antelope, really – they can take short naps standing up, but for sleeping they lay down.
All of the family Equidae (horses, donkeys, mules, & zebras) do sleep standing up.
Velcro.
One of my meds is to be taken 3 hours before bedtime. When I was working the graveyard shift, I used to take them before leaving work, so I’d sleep more easily when I got home (it was a long commute via train). One morning I took my pill, then some work came in and I couldn’t leave. By the time I got off work the med was starting to kick in, and I fell asleep while walking to the train station. I caught myself as I was about to step off the curb, into traffic, and used various means of keeping myself awake until I got on the train. Fortunately, my stop was the last.
Standing up while sleeping? Child’s play…
Back in 2007, a teenager in Germany managed to climb out of a fourth-floor window in his sleep. Incredibly, he not only survived the fall, he actually sustained relatively minor injuries — a broken arm and leg (it bears mentioning that he remained asleep throughout the entire accident).