Kirrilly Thompson and Bradley Smith Should We Let Sleeping Dogs Lie... With Us? Synthesizing the Literature and Setting the Agenda for Research on Human-animal Co-sleeping Practices

Introduction. Human sleep practices are highly divergent across culture and time (Blunden, Thompson & Dawson; Worthman and Melby; Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting). In the same way that sleeping spaces in industrialized societies have increasingly become divided according to age (adult and child), so have spaces been segregated according to species (human and non-human animal), although many cultures have practiced or still practice co-sleeping. This is often related to crowding or a response to domestic spaces having no physical internal divisions, but also because co-sleeping is the norm for some cultures — devoid of the taboos of incest and bestiality, or the socio-cultural construction of sleep disorders that can be found at the core of (or indeed contribute to) solo-sleeping practices in other cultures.