Drums and consciousness

Drums are usually thought of  as something that awakens you and gets your heart beating faster and makes you want to dance. This is true. Today me and Jonah were listening to a live performance of Brazilian drumming. Jonah danced all around on a sugar hi from ice cream. He loved it. But then later he fell asleep in  my arms. One might think, "How can he sleep with all this drumming?" But I think that actually the drums helped him sleep, the same way that a CD of various noises like a hair dryer and and a vacuum cleaner helps infants sleep.
Noah used to fall asleep all the time during Lion Dances performances, in the stroller, next to the drum. Of course if he had been sleeping or bored and suddenly heard these beats, the same drum would wake him up and make him very interested.
How is it that something that wakes you up can also put you to sleep?
Drums are very much like a heart beat and very much like the sound you probably hear in the womb as a fetus. And so you are attracted to it and it you want to move. But at the same time those deep sounding drums (not so much the rat-tat-tat) can lull you into a sleep or dream-like state.

In fact often during dancing of many types you may be doing both things at once. Maybe you are moving around and partying or your under a head, or in a bog carnival costume. But at the same time you may be zoning out in an altered state of consciousness that helps you to move around for such a long period of time without a break. Anyway, it's usually difficult to get Jonah to go down in his bed. But he didn't even wake up the whole trip home. It would have been nice if I had brought the stroller, but I managed without. And of course once we actually arrived home and I put him on a mattress, try as he might to roll over back into sleep, he was awake and there was nothing to do but get up and do awake activities.

Perhaps we should always do Brazilian drumming for lunch and then crash.