Basic Trope: Dragons spend most of their time slumbering in their lairs.
- Played Straight: Somnus the dragon spends most of his time between raids curled up in his mountain cave, sleeping on his hoard.
- Exaggerated: Somnus, the God of Lazyland, is an incredibly heavy sleeper who will happily sleep away the centuries, and can only be waked briefly and by extreme events.
- Downplayed:
- Somnus spends a lot more time asleep than other creatures, but has a regular wake-sleep cycle outside of that and spends some time awake and active each day.
- Due to the energy consumed by his massive size, Somnus can only be awake for short periods before getting exhausted and needing to rest. During periods of exhaustion he veers between Sleepyhead and Heavy Sleeper, and he has to sleep longer and more often than other creatures, but he can be wide awake and alert for brief durations when fully rested.
- Backfired: As Somnus sleeps soundly in his cave, thieves sneak in and rob him blind.
- Justified:
- Dragons are ravenous predators whose feeding rampages quickly depopulate their surroundings; consequently, they've adapted to hibernate for long periods of time to let their food stocks replenish.
- Somnus was cursed by a wizard long ago, forcing him into a deep sleep that's difficult to break.
- Somnus had been awake and energetic for centuries on end. This year, he gets his well deserved beauty rest.
- Whenever he's awake, Somnus has a habit of eating himself into a Food Coma.
- Inverted: Vigilans the dragon literally never sleeps, and keeps constant watch over his lair and land day and night.
- Subverted:
- A group of Nay-Theist theives sneak into Somnus' lair, confident that he'll be fast asleep. When they enter the treasure chamber, Somnus is wide awake and waiting for them.
- Somnus is only pretending to be asleep to catch a potential thief off-guard.
- Double Subverted:
- The thieves freeze in terror, and remain hiding in the shadows for so long that Somnus concludes that they didn't come after all and nods off.
- Somnus accidentally gets a little too comfortable and falls asleep for real by the time the expected thief arrives.
- Zig-Zagged: Somnus spends most of the story flying around, eating people and burning things, but when Alice sneaks into his lair he's curled up on his hoard and not moving. As she sneaks closer, he turns out to just be inspecting some of his treasures, but after a while he grows tired and falls asleep for real. Alice sighs in relief, and the sound causes Somnus to startle awake.
- Implied:
- Somnus' activity cycles are never describe in detail and the story never visits his lair, but he's still named after the Latin word for "sleep".
- The heroes stole Somnus's entire hoard offscreen, but they noted that Somnus didn't seem to put up much of a fight.
- Parodied:
- Somnus suffers from narcolepsia, and has an unfortunate tendency to fall asleep at inopportune times.
- When thieves sneak into Somnus' cave and seem to wake him up, he just blinks blearily, mutters something about "five more minutes", rolls over and goes back to snoring.
- Somnus is such a Heavy Sleeper that he shows no reaction to incompetent thieves knocking over valuables, getting into a screaming match, and dropping a chandelier on him. He is finally woken by one of the thieves making a shushing noise — at which point he looks around, decides it's nothing, and then goes back to sleep.
- Somnus is such a Heavy Sleeper that the thieves just treat him as part of the scenery, to the point where an entire fight scene happens across Somnus's sleeping form without the dragon having the slightest reaction.
- Enforced:
- Since Alice's story is intended to be a reimagining of Beowulf, the dragon needs to be asleep when a thief first sneaks into its cave.
- Dragons in this universe have been previously established to be a One-Man Army that can easily destroy a human army. Rather than diminish their fighting power, the producers decide that this particular dragon will be asleep when the heroes raid him.
- The writers want to write the in-universe explanation of Dragons Are Divine, but they couldn't come up with their lore, so they looked up and make them appear to be lazy.
- Lampshaded: "Eh, dragon-robbing is a lot less exciting than people make it out to be, at least as long as you make sure to do it when the dragon's asleep. Once it's off in slumberland you can walk right in, help yourself, poke it in the eye if you've a mind to, because believe me it will not wake up."
- Invoked: A group of adventurers need to obtain an item guarded by a ferocious dragon. To get past it they pour a sleep-inducing elixir into the stream they know it drinks from, hoping to cause it fall asleep long enough for them to sneak it, grab the item, and sneak out.
- Exploited:
- When Sir Rodrick has to battle Somnus, he deliberately draws out the battle and forces the dragon to chase him across half the countryside — he cannot defeat the beast directly, but he knows that Somnus can't stay awake for long and will need to return to his cave for a long sleep once he tires himself out.
- Warrior Princess Lady Gwendemere needs a particular artifact from Somnus's hoard, but can't fight him directly. So she intentinoally allows herself to be captured by Somnus so he will take her to his lair thinking he's won. Sure enough, he decides to take a nap within minutes of returning. Somnus turns out to be such a Heavy Sleeper that a "nap" for him can last days, easily giving Gwendemere enough time to escape her restraints, search the lair for the artifact, and escape without him noticing.
- Somnus realizes that thieves coming in while he's sleeping, whether by accident or intentionally, is always a possibility — and any thief that finds him asleep will think they have the upper hand. So he sets traps around the lair designed to punish any unwanted guests expecting to sneak out as his Bolt of Divine Retribution.
- Discussed: "If luck is at all with us, the beast's going to be asleep when we head into its lair; goodness knows dragons need their shut-eye."
- Conversed: "Anyway, then it turns out that Somnus is asleep on his hoard when Alice and Bob sneak in — I mean, what else do dragons ever do in their lairs? — so they have a fairly easy time getting the MacGuffin. Of course, in the next episode he wakes up and realizes the theft..."
- Played for Laughs: Somnus is depicted as a Sleepyhead who can never seem to be stay awake for more than a few minutes. Within minutes of waking up, Somnus will declare that he needs a nap. At one point he has to carry Lady Gwendemre and Sir Roderick, and they suddenly realize that he's napping in mid-air (and learned how to fly in his sleep). However, the one time it's actually useful for Somnus to be asleep, he accidentally consumes a freight train's worth of caffeine that makes him hyper energetic and wide awake. That only wears off after it's no longer useful, at which point he immediately collapses and begins snoring.
