Playing Dead
"The back door of the world"
In my recent essay on a low brow/high brow photographic stunt known as Horsemanning, where you and a friend play the roles of Head and Beheaded (a la Headless Horseman), it was striking to me to note how people seem to love to mimic deadness with their meme poses.
Planking, Playing Dead-ing, Horsemanning.
Playing dead is a so-so survival technique when you have no better way to avoid predators. While humans just toy around the edges of this by lying limp, certain animals seem to have a knack to really get into character. I’ve often wondered how playing dead might work when it seems to just make the player more compliable and readily available prey, but alas, witness the foul opossum in this National Geographic compendium who becomes a fine method actor, wholly transformed. The Oscar goes to the creature who melodramatically…
opens its mouth, sticks out its tongue, empties its bowels, and excretes foul-smelling fluids to convince a predator it’s past the expiration date.
Thanatosis, or “tonic immobility,” is the technique also used by guinea pigs, rabbits, snakes, Japanese quail, domestic chickens, wild ducks, mongoose. Opossums are so good at it, they’ve become synonymous with the term itself, which can be called “playing possum.” Along with others:
If flipped on their backs and momentarily restrained, lemon sharks will go limp, displaying labored breathing and occasional tremors.
Pygmy grasshoppers in Japan will play dead by sticking out their legs in several directions, making it nearly impossible for frogs to swallow them.
Many insects perform “post-contact immobility” to feign death after being attacked. The larvae of antlions can reportedly play dead for over an hour, beating the record of a beetle Charles Darwin clocked in at 23 minutes of fake demise.
As William Faulkner wrote in the novel Soldier’s Pay,
Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.
These opportunistic animals, birds, and insects are busy doing nothing either in order to save their lives, or get laid.
Take the nursery web spider. Females often prey on males, so to mate, the male makes a bundle of food, attaches himself to it, and pretends to be a goner. The female then drags around the food and supposedly dead male. When she begins eating the food, the male comes back to life and tries mating again—sometimes successfully,.
On the other end of the spectrum is the female moorland hawker dragonfly, which goes to great lengths to avoid mating: She’ll stop flying and crash to the ground to escape aggressive males, which can harm her.
Or, perhaps most basically, they have the munchies.
The Central American cichlid pretends to be dead on lake bottoms to lure fish and other prey. When another fish comes in to take a bite of the carcass, the cichlid awakens and strikes. Similarly, the comb grouper of Brazil fakes its own death to attract young fish.
In many cases, playing dead doesn’t guarantee the predator will stop caring about the feigned mortally maimed creature, but it does increase their chances of survival, even if only slightly. This is a last-ditch attempt to live—and to live we’ll do anything. The will to live is surprisingly strong across all species, even depressed humans.
In all my true crime ramblings, and most lately, a multi-month long binge of all the I Survived series, many survivors were injured enough to successfully feign death. (One of these victims had actually planned to kill herself later that day, until she came upon an attacker and had to battle her way to a new second life.) While we don’t excrete and smell malodorously—although I would argue, the chemical surge of primal fear must not be the best perfume—human victims can attempt to be still and slow our breathing for prolonged periods of time to convince a would-be killer we are killed enough to leave be. That is, if the attacker is also a dumb human. These tricks won’t stop simpler thugs like bears and crocodiles from dragging your limp body away with them, says an article from McGill University which argues “Playing Dead Is Rarely the Answer, Despite What Nature Tells Us.” Better to just stay away from these meat eaters.
Maybe it’s all those minutes of doing the dead man’s float in the pools of our suburban youth that make us good at this performance. It always seemed as if you could stay underwater for much longer than usual if you went limp.
Another trick comes from Harvard Medical School, having fun with telling folks to “Try this: Play dead.” It’s not what you think:
If you want to feel more grounded, spend time lying on the ground.
In yoga, corpse pose (also known as savasana) is a resting supine pose done at the end of a yoga session to help calm and center the body and mind.
“When you lie flat on your back, your posture becomes open and relaxed, which can have a calming effect,” says Dr. Julia Loewenthal, a geriatrician and certified yoga teacher with Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Here’s how to do corpse pose:
Lie on your back on the floor. You can lie on a yoga mat, blanket, or other support if direct contact with the floor is uncomfortable.
Hug your knees in toward your chest tightly and inhale deeply.
Exhale and stretch your legs out away from you while keeping your tailbone grounded on the floor.
Your feet should be hip-width apart and relaxed away from each other.
Let your lower back soften and relax as your body gradually sinks into the floor.
Close your eyes. Place a folded towel over your eyes to block out any light, if necessary.
Relax your arms at your sides, palms facing upward.
Focus on taking deep even breaths.
Stay in this position for five to 10 minutes.
In a Reddit yoga group, some say this sort of playing dead is among the more difficult poses. Not necessarily because it’s hard to do but because it’s hard to turn your brain off, and if you can it may be hard not to fall asleep. Others also complain about being flat on their back.
I hate Savasana. I don’t have trouble being in stillness, and I meditate regularly. It’s just SO physically uncomfortable for me. I finally stopped punishing myself, and now just lay on my mat with my feet planted on the floor, knees together. It has never, ever been relaxing for me to lay flat on my back on a hard floor with my bones getting smashed and feeling the uneven tilt of my pelvis.
[Or]
When I’m too relaxed I find it difficult to not fall asleep, I guess the mind is used to a lot of mental activity and all of a sudden when it finds some peace just go directly into sleeping mode, instead of conscious relaxation, it’s truly difficult
[Or said a “restorative yoga therapist”]:
This is not meditation. This is productive rest.
I had the same problem with the Buddhist seminars/meditations we went to when my then-husband I and had little kids at home. This became our date night, and in a way, our couple’s therapy. And when given this rare respite from work and homelife, to sit in a chair or on a mat and be still for a moment against the backdrop of a soothing voice or hum of some note or singing bowl, I always struggled not to fall asleep. Which is truly one of the more uncomfortable feelings we face, forcing yourself to stay awake in public when you really want to sleep.
Or worse, the inverse when home and too tired for anything else in bed but not quite able to sleep. Feigning sleep a trick we do when dead seems too dramatic. No amount of Buddhism or counseling could cure this.
And now, No Kings Day part 2, only nine months into the second presidency of the man who wills himself to be a monarch. In the time it takes to incubate a baby, a whole nation transformed into something unrecognizable, a rift inconsolable. How many millions will come out to march in the face of all the unfathomable monsters that are keeping us awake/chipping at our American dreams. I was going to sit it out this term, but that no longer feels like an option, with so much at stake, with my girls to raise. We roar and rage (peacefully), I must teach them, do anything but play dead.
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I love this post! I truly wish I had the ability to express my thoughts into something so fascinating as this. Thank you!
Thanks a very interesting article! As someone who is bullied in school, I have this instinct to go docile and still when threatened and I wonder if that's related to the playing dead phenomenon. Also, I think with the incredible specter of American democracy in flames, I think this is not the time to play dead and I hope the no Kings movement finds it only as a beginning of turning from the docile into the feared predator of all forms of fascism. I find it so interesting that the obsession the right has with antifa, is so at odds with the fact that America was all antifa in the 1940s. What changed that made being against fascism? Something wrong? I am so confused, as per usual.