It’s the age-old question that has plagued man since the dawn of time.

Why do my dogs insist on sleeping on top of me?

My lovely wife and I have two Labradoodles. Well, in reality, she has two Labradoodles. Apparently, I am classified as a chew toy around our house.

They follow her pretty much everywhere. They will also follow me as long as I have a ball in my hand. They are obsessed with a ball.

I suspect it is some form of canine ADHD.

Anyway, my wife and I have a king-size bed and that is where our, sorry, her dogs, choose to sleep every night.

When they were younger, and smaller, that wasn’t such a big deal. But now that they weigh about 80 pounds each, our sleeping arrangements have become, shall I just say, strained.

Not for my lovely wife. She sleeps over on the left side of the bed in complete uninterrupted bliss. On my side, the right side both physically and metaphorically, it’s a nightly cage match.

The dogs nestle up in the middle of the bed at the beginning of each night’s slumber. They’re so docile and innocent when we begin our evening.

Then my wife goes to sleep and that’s when the dogs plan their nightly attack.

I don’t know if she puts off some kind of noxious fume in her exhales or if it’s the rhythm of her breathing that hypnotizes them. Whatever it is, as soon as my wife goes to sleep, the dogs begin their slow assault.

I do believe their ultimate goal is to push me off the bed.

First, one of them puts her head against my leg. That’s sweet and innocent. I can live with this.

But then I make a fatal mistake. I fall to sleep.

Maybe it’s the phase of the moon or some weird gravitational force that emanates from deep in the earth under our bedroom. Whatever it is, as soon as I fall to sleep, they both start by slowly drifting my way.

I notice it when I wake up for my first visit to the potty of the night. That’s usually about 1:30 a.m.

As I open my eyes, I discover that now both dogs are lying on me.

The first dog has moved from having just her head laying gently against my leg to now her head, torso and at least two legs are pinning me to the mattress.

Her sister is a little more stealthy. She is laying in the space between my feet. It’s obviously a ploy to distract me because as soon as I come back to bed, she has stretched out to cover the entire lower third of the bed.

Not the whole bed. Just my side.

There is some type of invisible barrier that keeps them from drifting toward my wife’s side. Maybe she has gotten smart and embedded sharp pins into the mattress and just knows how to sleep around them.

The dog, now hogging the bottom of the bed, is trying her best to make it look like this is how she was sleeping before I went to the bathroom.

I nudge her a little to move and she just raises her head and gives me a confused look that says, ‘What? I’ve been sleeping like this for hours.’

Of course, I don’t want to wake up my beautiful wife. She is sleeping so peacefully over on her so side. Mouth wide open, drool on her pillow.

So, I pull on the covers trying to just get a little cloth to cover my poor, frozen legs. The dog fights me a little but after an hour or two, I manage to get enough bedspread to cover my right knee.

The other dog, the one who had laid her head on me so innocently a couple hours earlier, now has her head in my pillow.

I try to nudge her away and she growls. I know exactly what she’s saying. ‘Beat it, buster. This is my pillow. Go find your own.’

Somehow, I manage to get a small corner of the pillow to lay my weary head. With an edge of the blanket on my right knee and a postage-size sliver of pillow under my head, I drift back off to dreamland.

Nature calls again at 4 a.m. I’m clinging to the edge of my bed like a survivor of Titanic holding onto a crate of canned peaches.

I slide out from under the dogs and head back to the bathroom knowing that when I return to bed, the second round of the fight would begin.

Upon my return, I stand over the bed trying to figure out how to go back to sleep without disrupting man nor beast.

The dog at the bottom of bed is now laying sideways. She is doing her best to make me think that she is no longer just sleeping. No matter how much I nudge her, she is now completely lifeless. Expired while chasing a rabbit in her dreams.

The first dog who had been occupying 98.9% of my pillow, has now rolled off my pillow and lays prone on the middle of the bed with her legs straight out in front of her.

Apparently, she is deep into the throes of rigor mortis. No chance I’ll get her to curl up and not stab me in the back with her nails.

I somehow manage to bend my legs into a geometric shape the human body was never intended for, so not to interrupt the dog sprawled dead across the bottom of the bed.

I bunch up my blankets to put a soft wall between me and the other dog, now stiff and unforgiving in her death throes.

Hopefully, I can now sleep until at least dawn, despite the bottom half of my body completely numb from loss of circulation and being continuously stabbed in the back.

My wife, still sleeping deeply and unencumbered on the other side of the bed, knows nothing of the battle raging just a few inches away.

I wondered why my wife is never assaulted and I am always neck deep in dogs every night so I went to the World Wide Intraweb for answers.

It seems that dogs are pack animals. At night, they curl up in a big circle with the other members of their pack.

Our dogs curl up around me and leave my wife alone. That means I am considered a member of the pack. She is an outsider.

So, yes, I’ll will continue to fight the dogs every night but that’s okay.

I’m the leader of the pack. The alpha dog. The chieftain of the tribe.

I can sleep with that.