When pups curl up to sleep next to us, we can’t deny them

Four in the bed and the middle one says, roll over, roll over. They all roll over and one rolls out, three in the bed and … Dadgummit; I’m the one out.

Absurd. This situation is absolutely ridiculous.

How did it happen that two chocolate lab pups who previously slept on a faded, well-worn loveseat – in absolute bookend positions – all of the sudden crept into the bed, quite uninvited, yet passively accepted in the sleepy stupor of 3 a.m.

Absurd. Twelve legs in a queen-sized bed, entwined in uncomfortable poses that may, in fact, resemble grotesque figures of Greek mythology. As in the snakes Medusa included in her coiffure.

How come dogs insist on sleeping in our beds, their velvet muzzles resting against our arms, their chests heaving in synch with our own breaths, their bodies crowding ours so that we’re in a vise?

How come they look at us with those limitless eyes? How come they lap us with anteater tongues, licking us in affection while subtly nudging us into acquiescence? How come they win? Four rolled over and one rolled out …

I’m the one out; I, who have read that more than 40 percent of us share our beds with canines even though trainers instruct otherwise. I, who recite statistics to those who aren’t dog lovers about the fact that one-third of all Americans live with dogs today. That’s about 55 million dogs.

Americans are in such a love affair with dogs that books are being written, magazines are being published, and an industry is being rocketed into economic orbit by pet owners demanding the very best health care, as well as a myriad of other products, for their poodles or hounds or spaniels or shelties. Astonishing as it may seem, Americans are shelling out a minimum of $11,500 in the course of a dog’s life.

Those figures are printed in a book written by dog owners for dog lovers titled “Dog Is My Co-Pilot: Great Writers on the World’s Oldest Friendship.” Among the contributors are Alice Walker and Carolyn Chute, but the editors of Bark – which began as a newsletter in Berkeley, Calif., and evolved into a magazine devoted to today’s “dog culture” – take the credit for the anthology of essays, short stories and commentaries about our lives with dogs.

One writer, Michael J. Rosen, described “Sleeping with the Pack.”

“There are few forces as strong as a sleeping dog’s gravity: the pull to lie next to your own dog in bed … to yield to that tug of drowsiness as you stroke the fur of a large dog dozing tranquilly … snuggling against a dog’s curved back, pressing my chest against the heat-radiant fur, lolling an arm across the dog’s rising and falling chest, and breathing more slowly, inhaling whatever cypress, clover or musk smells merge in the coat.”

Yep, I know that secure feeling, pressed between two silky chocolate Labs on a cool, rainy May night in Maine. But as Rosen also said: The dogs are “stretched on either side of your body, anchoring the covers across your legs the way the Lilliputians restrained Gulliver.”

So once again, I get up and move to the sunroom couch. It’s not every night I want to dance with wolves. Or sleep with dogs.