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Catnaps
We talk about catnaps because cats are great sleepers – they indulge in short periods of sleep very frequently. But the word can only be rarely used in a human context, because human beings do not normally sleep in the same pattern as cats. In fact, brief naps are as common in cats as they are rare in humans.
Cat catnaps and human catnaps
Cats and humans have fundamentally different sleep patterns, unless the human in question has been kept awake for a long time or is very sick or old. Most humans sleep for eight continuous hours, usually at night. By contrast, a normal domestic cat can sleep up to sixteen hours a day, divided into a number of short periods. A nine-year-old cat, quite old and nearing the end of its life, has actually remained awake for only three years of its life span!
Performed by experts, do not try to imitate!
Surprisingly, this is not the case with most other mammals related to the cat. Other carnivores and hunting animals normally sleep much less than cats, because they have much more to do. Dogs or mongooses, for example, have to spend much time scurrying around and chasing their prey. But the cat is a refined killer, extremely efficient at obtaining its highly nutritious food. It sits and waits, stalks a little, kills and eats. So it has lots of time to spare, and uses it well by sleeping. No mammal can afford to sleep so easily or so much as a cat.
That is mostly about non-domestic cats, but the habit and the pattern runs through house cats as well – they belong to the same gene pool. And house cats have it even easier, because their food is brought to them on a platter. If our lives were as easy as theirs, who knows how much we would sleep!
The catnap and its subtleties
There are three types of cat sleep – the brief nap, the longer light sleep, and the deep sleep. The light and the deep sleep alternate in bouts. When your cat settles down for more than a nap, it floats off into a phase of light sleep that lasts for about half an hour. Then it sinks further and experiences deep sleep for six to seven minutes. Then it returns to another bout of light sleep for thirty minutes, and so forth until it eventually wakes up.
When sleeping deeply, the cat's body relaxes very much, and it rolls over onto its side, and appears to be dreaming, with frequent twitching and quivering of tail, ears and paws. The mouth sometimes makes sucking movements, and sometimes the cat may make sounds in its throat, such as growls, purrs and general mutterings. There are also very brief periods of rapid eye movement, but throughout all this the cat's trunk remains totally relaxed and motionless.
Catnap and kitty-nap
Curiously enough, the light part of the sleep is a late development. Kittens up to a month old experience only this deepest part of sleep, lasting for nearly twelve hours every day. After the first month of life, the kitten rapidly switches to the adult sleep pattern of alternating light and deep phases.