Yahtzee!! You play Yahtzee? You must have tame deer.

I sleep on the stand once in a while (including lightly dozing a couple of times STANDING on the stand and leaning on my tree), and I’ve woken to deer in under 10 yards a couple of times. I hunt in the forest, and usually the best places to hunt are where it’s fairly thick, so my visual range is usually fairly limited. My first clue as to deer approaching is my ears 80+% of the time, unless it’s windy, raining or has just rained and is really wet. Bad thing is, there are also a LOT of squirrels and a fair amount of turkeys where I hunt, so I get a lot of false signals from their noise.

Because of a neighbor that poaches deer (20 to 40 per year, according to his kin) year-round (not just in season), the deer where I hunt are pretty paranoid, even early in the bow season (although much more so after rifle season starts). I have to be very careful about turning my head too much. The deer love to come up to the edge of the thickets or tops of ridges and peek over for a while, looking for motion. If I’m swinging my head back and forth, they can bust me (and I’m sure they have!).

I agree that, while I don’t like to sleep in the stand, it’s about being in the woods, IMO, so it’s OK if I doze once in a while. Listening/looking for deer is so very different from what I do for a living (which is very focused, tunnelvision kind of analytical work), that I find it very refreshing to open my senses, rather than focus them. Because it’s so different than what I usually do, I find using my “splattervision” (you know what I mean if you’ve read Tom Brown’s tracking and nature observation guide) stimulating, so sleeping isn’t as much of a problem as it otherwise would be. Hunting is one of the few things I don’t get tired of easily!