I think I’m beginning to settle quite nicely here in my little corner of cyberspace. When I get stressed or bored or have some ideas to play with, I’ll crouch here by the digital fire, toast some byte-sized marshmallows, and swap stories with whoever happens to wander by and sit for a spell. At first I was under the impression that I needed to have something important to say, but a few meaningless entries and the conversations they sparked have disabused me of that nonsensical notion.
On that note, as I lay in bed last night contemplating the inside of my eyelids and listening to my dog snore (one of these days I’ll record it and upload an mp3 file so you both can understand what I go through) it struck me: Why do we not sneeze when we’re asleep?
Bear with me here. I have, like you, sneezed as I was falling asleep. Rare, but it happens. But sneezes are sparked by a histamine reaction to an allergen, normally. (I sneeze when I walk out into the sunlight, but that’s another story.) You would think that that reaction is involuntary and could happen whether you’re asleep or awake. But it seems that any stray allergens on the prowl seem to have the common decency to avoid my nasal passages whilst I slumber. Should I thank them? How? Maybe I should bake a cake. Anybody have any idea what kind of cake allergens prefer?
A side note: If I were to sneeze while I was asleep, would it be a snooze?
The other thing that has been running through my thought processes is an article I recently read about mortality rates in Tyrannosaruses. Tyrannosauri? Youngsters, obviously, had a pretty high death rate, since there were a lot of things wandering around that liked to eat them. It was not an easy childhood. After age two, however, they seemed to have much better luck at surviving. I’m thinking there probably weren’t too many things wandering around that wanted to take a crack at an adolescent T-Rex.
However, once they reached sexual maturity (twelve to thirteen years old, according to paleontologists) their mortality rates skyrocketed. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is some snide comment about how the female of the species is the death of the male, but I’m not gonna go there. What actually happened, they theorize, is that they began competing with each other. Males began to fight over females, females began to fight over nesting areas, everyone fought over seating at the latest espresso bar, and so on. This, according to researchers, explains the lack of fossils of adolescents – they just didn’t die. On the other hand, skeletons of T-Rexes at that awkward, gangly, pimply-faced stage are a dime a dozen. Which is convenient: I know I would have preferred to be fossilized at that point in my life.
I wonder if there’s a way that these two trains of thought can be combined without derailing the whole mess. I’m allergic to T-Rex? T-Rexes were allergic to sleeping? Let me think on this for a while.
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