The designers of the Children’s Pavilion at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair wanted to provide a definitive answer to the question of the ideal way for children to lie down. Realistically sculptured models illustrated a clear set of oppositions. One child lies flat on his back with his head slightly raised on a pillow, legs straight, arms stretched out against his sides. The other lies on his side with his arms under his head so that, in the words of the physician H. Plass, “the lungs cannot freely expand when breathing, the circulation is inhibited, the back is hunched and all the limbs are displaced.”
While the first child oozes good health and smiles in his comfortable sleep, the other wears the pained expression of someone plagued by bad dreams. Concerned parents are said to have stood in front of the exhibit and admonished their children: “You have to lie like this one, stretched out, and not huddled together like the other one!” At the same time, Plass insisted that “sustained lying in a horizontal position” was damaging for children and drew a comparison to the practice of fattening up animals by preventing them from moving. Other experts even claimed that the high incidence of child mortality was due to children’s lying excessively still. Recommended countermeasures included wicker beds with fixed legs or wooden or steel beds with movable side panels. The point was to allow children to move without falling to the floor. In the nineteenth century, it was a great sign of progress that parents could be admonished to provide “a separate bed for every child!”
A Sami hanging bassinet
Other cultures took different and occasionally surprising approaches. George Catlin, a lawyer who became a painter, began traveling through the American wilderness in 1830. During his journeys he observed how a group of Native Americans had tied their children stretched out on boards, with their heads supported on bolsters so that their chins could not sink and their lips would remain closed as they slept. Elsewhere, he saw babies in basketlike devices hung on tree branches. In many parts of the world children were often laid down on soft grass, animal skins, or the bare ground, sometimes with an extra support for the head. Parents in South Africa supposedly scooped out depressions in the ashes from fires and placed the children, wrapped in animal pelts, in these hollows to protect them from the night cold.
Lying Down Together
We are rarely so alone as we are in our sleep and in our dreams. When two people lie down and sleep in the same bed, they express a profound closeness. Choosing to share a bed is a ritual of coupling that symbolizes togetherness. Nothing is as intimate as pillow talk, the conversations we have in bed while lying beside each other. A double bed with a single blanket for both partners makes it easy to sleep side by side.
In bed, a couple’s struggle to find the right mix of distance and closeness takes a practical form. No matter what the outcome, their bodies speak a clear language. In her book The Secret Language of Sleep, Evany Thomas identifies no fewer than thirty-nine possible sleep positions, from the classic Spoon to the Tandem Cyclists to Excalibur, in which the partners are almost inextricably entwined. Other options include the Zipper, in which the couple lie back to back, with their offset lower bodies touching, and the extreme Bread and Spread, in which one partner lies directly on top of the other (who somehow manages to avoid being crushed or suffocated).
It is ill advised to make hasty conclusions about the quality or psychological characteristics of a relationship based on a particular sleep position. Whether your partner turns his or her back to you when sleeping has more to do with how comfortable this position is than anything else. Yet the practice of sleeping together as a couple does raise all sorts of interesting questions. How much physical contact—stomach on back, leg on leg—can and should we tolerate? Does the level of shared proximity in bed say anything about the state of a relationship? Does sleeping in separate beds mean that deep down, a couple has given up on their relationship? Is it a signal that the end has already begun? There are no simple answers.
Some lucky people never have to worry about such thoughts keeping them awake. For them, sharing a bed becomes a habit they never question. For others, sleeping in the same bed is more problematic because of snoring (which can reach one hundred decibels, approaching the sound of an engine starting), sleeptalking, rhythmic flailing of the limbs, or restless legs syndrome. These problems are sometimes triggered by inner compulsions the sleeper cannot control. In such cases, a wider bed or separate blankets can sometimes help. Some couples also decide to stop sharing the bed as they get older so they don’t disturb each other’s sleep.
Gerhard Klösch, an Austrian sleep researcher, has notoriously claimed that women sleep worse with a man at their side because they feel responsible for him, and that men sleep better next to a woman for the same reason. There may be some truth to this observation; it’s not uncommon for heart attack sufferers to get help more quickly because their partners noticed their distress in bed.
The question of whether it’s better to sleep alone or together is answerable only on a case-by-case basis. Many people can’t imagine doing without this physical closeness. But even when spending the night in the same bed leads to problems, a willingness to compromise can allow couples to still enjoy falling asleep next to each other. For example, one partner can switch to a separate bed or room during the night. Zip and link beds are also an option. These are single beds that can be joined with a zipper to create a large bed when a couple craves intimacy and later separated when they prefer to have some space. For some couples, the solution is simply to sleep in the same bed but face in opposite directions. In the early 1920s, the architect Otto Bartning designed a bedroom that sounds like the setup to a joke: the beds were separated by a wall of clear glass that allowed the happy couple to sleep side by side without suffering any resulting inconvenience.
It was long taken for granted that couples would sleep in the same bed, and it rarely occurred to anyone to question the practice. For many people, it has become an issue only in the last few decades. Now we have a range of options to use as we grapple to find the right amount of nearness and distance to each other. In some cases, sleeping apart or sleeping side by side may be what makes or breaks a relationship.
Lying Down, Sleeping, Waking Up
Regular sleep—that unconscious downtime—is a physiological necessity. People who often don’t sleep well suffer mental and physical effects, and become irritable and confused. A complete lack of sleep can be deadly. One extreme example is fatal familial insomnia, an exceedingly rare and to date incurable disease recognized only in the last twenty-five years. Entire families are affected by this devastating illness, which is caused by the same genetic mutation as that which triggers Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
But what is sleep in the first place? The scientists and philosophers of earlier times suggested astonishing answers to this question. Aristotle, for example, claimed that eating caused fumes to form in the blood vessels that collected in the brain, causing sleepiness. Later, in an age that prided itself on its grasp of chemical principles, Alexander von Humboldt explained that sleep results from a lack of oxygen. Today we understand the processes that occur during sleep much better, but we are far from having all the answers. It is clear that sleep, viewed as an interruption of consciousness, erects a kind of barrier to perception, but one that is not completely secure against external stimuli. Still, it remains a mystery in many respects. The ways we spend our days and nights, our levels of activity in the phases of the day, whether these activities are physical or mental, are intertwined and interdependent variously. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.”
Lying down and sleeping are more than just ways to prepare for the standing, walking, sitting, and other physical activities we engage in. Jürgen Zulley, a German sleep researcher, characterizes sleeping as “a different form of being awake.” Furthermore, he claims that quality, not quantity, is what matters. Still, the state of being awake requires explanation just
as much as sleep does. Why are we conscious? And while we’re at it, why are we alive in the first place? “You cannot imagine life without death,” wrote the Italian legal philosopher Norberto Bobbio in his wonderful book Old Age and Other Essays. Sleep and waking are similarly inseparable.
What happens between lying down and getting up in physiological terms? The blood pressure is highest in the arteries leading directly from the heart and falls as the blood flows through the body until in the veins before the right ventricle, it is practically nonexistent. Since all our blood vessels are laid flat when we lie down and our entire blood volume is just a few inches high as a result, hydrostatic pressure accounts for just a small share of our blood pressure overall. In other words, in a horizontal posture, the heart no longer has to pump our blood “uphill” from our legs. When we lie down, the veins in the head and neck swell noticeably, and the jugular and temporal arteries pulse more strongly. Sometimes temporary headaches and confusion can occur; these symptoms worsen if the head is positioned lower than the rest of the body. When we stand up, hydrostatic pressure comes into play as the height of the liquid column changes and the blood vessels extend over a greater height range. In the arteries supplying oxygen to the head, for example, the pressure suddenly increases, while it falls in the arteries of the legs. If we stand up very quickly, the amount of oxygen reaching the brain may drop below the needed level. In severe cases, we can end up fainting.
When we lie down, sleep is usually not far off, provided we’re in the right frame of mind for it. Although we can create favorable conditions for the transition between waking and sleep, we can’t plan all the details; a moment comes that we can neither control nor predict. Our eyes close; functioning slows in the muscles, including those in the neck; a feeling of heaviness floods through us. Thoughts lose their definition, and we stop concentrating on them. Our sense of space dissolves, we cede control, and consciousness slips away. Falling asleep in the presence of loud noises or other external stimuli is possible only when we are truly exhausted. We need to feel that we are safe from disturbances, unpleasant surprises, and real or imaginary dangers.
Some people, especially children, are afraid to give themselves over to the night and its slumber. For those who suffer from insomnia, lying awake can become a nightmare. Edward W. Said, the noted Palestinian American literary theorist, had the habit of going to bed late and getting up at dawn. In his autobiography, Out of Place, he explains that he always wanted to get sleeping over with as quickly as possible: “Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier.”
Sleep can be something pleasant and welcome, and full of dreams that open up new possibilities, offer solutions, and fulfill wishes; or it can present terrible nightmares. Presumably, people whose daily rhythms were not so rigidly controlled, as is often the case today, could, despite obligations and constraints, take a more flexible attitude toward sleep and the opportune times for it. They were also not subject to the constant noise that makes it difficult for so many people today to sleep through the night.
An observer can only tell if someone is awake or asleep by listening to his or her breathing. When we sleep, our breath slows and becomes more regular. The body continues to work: peristaltic movement in the digestive tract and other essential bodily functions take place uninterruptedly. In deep sleep, even hunger and thirst cease to disturb us. But as the writer A. L. Kennedy notes, the passages between waking and sleeping are sometimes fraught with peril:
We know what a terrible place the edge of sleep can be. It is perhaps one of the quieter reasons for making love, or rather for being each other’s companions in our beds—we try to be present when the people we need most have to drop into the other little death and we like to feel them there for us when we surface badly, when we are afraid and pulling the sheet up over our faces will make no difference, will not save us.
Waking up, in particular, can bring a host of unpleasant sensations—even if we never find ourselves turned into insects overnight like Kafka’s poor Gregor Samsa. It seems somewhat paradoxical, but we can wake up feeling more tired than when we went to bed, and many people start the day with terrible back pain. The English scholar Robert Burton wrote that to prevent melancholy, “waking that hurts … by all means must be avoided.” But how can we ensure that we wake up free of pain? What preparations can we take? Louis XIV’s morning ritual—the lever du roi—is legendary: members of no fewer than six levels of the aristocracy lent a hand in easing the king though the stages of waking up and getting out of bed.
Many an unhappy soul has found the secret of getting up out of bed to be a tough nut to crack. The Scottish writer James Boswell (1740–1795) was so disturbed by a feeling of heaviness when he woke that he felt confused, testy, or “dreary as a dromedary.” He longed to find a treatment that would allow him to rise from bed without experiencing severe pain. Usually he could banish the stiffness he felt only by staying in bed for a long time after waking up. He imagined a pulley especially designed to gradually lift him into a standing position, but feared that it would counter his “internal inclination” and end up causing more pain. Still, he could remember times when rising from bed had been accompanied by pleasant sensations, and did not abandon hope that something could help him: “We can heat the body, we can cool it; we can give it tension or relaxation; and surely it is possible to bring it into a state in which rising from bed will not be a pain.”
From a physiological perspective, not only do parts of our musculature relax significantly during sleep, but some muscles may also shorten slightly. The result is muscular imbalances that have to be corrected when we wake up. Movements like stretching or bending the arms and torso while you sit on the side of the bed are beneficial because they help restore this balance.
Waking up also affects us psychologically. In the first moments of consciousness, the surrounding room often seems unfamiliar, and it can take a few seconds before we grasp the situation and, drawing on our memories, find our place once again. These waking moments offer an ambiguity and disorientation that may be disturbing but can also be pleasurable. And they show just how shaky the foundations of consciousness can be. Our mental map reconstitutes itself step by step, and it takes a moment before our sense of self takes shape. We have no awareness of above and below, horizontal or vertical; only the surface we’re lying on seems real. Then slowly the position of the bed within the room and the surrounding furniture and windows emerge. No one has ever captured the sensation of these transitional moments as well as Marcel Proust:
When I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory … would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself.
Perhaps, as Proust believed, our experience of the unfamiliar is particularly intense when we fall asleep at an unfamiliar time in an unfamiliar position. When it comes to understanding the possible associations lying down can have, Proust is a central figure; thanks to his heightened sensibility, seemingly everyday behavior in bed becomes a key to the remembrance of things past: “I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood.” To take this thought a step further: phases of sleeplessness provided Proust with better access to his past. In ways not entirely known, the alternating rhythm of short phases of sleep, dreaming, and awakening undermines the vigilance of our consciousness in a kind of involuntary memory.
The bed was his world: Marcel Proust
For some people, an odd perceptual di
sturbance takes place just before they fall asleep or after they wake up. Although they are lying down, they have the impression that they are moving into a vertical position, as if they were standing up. In such an “out-of-body-experience,” body and mind seem to temporarily separate, a feeling that apparently results when various sense impressions cannot immediately be brought into harmony. The same thing can happen after an epileptic seizure or certain injuries.
When we stand up, things shift back into agreement with the perspective that day-to-day life demands. Consider for a moment the words of the philosopher Hans Blumenberg in his theory of the life-world:
Standing up to assume a vertical posture does not only multiply the quantum perceptible to us, extending its perceptibility to the point where it is not yet or no longer acute. It also creates the ability to mediate with the perceived world as the organism which has become human can compare itself to others like it. The higher or, in other words, upright person thus also sees and hears more because he can let others see and hear for him—he can delegate these activities.
But, one is tempted to add, he loses something in the process.
Awake, Napping, Asleep
The Art of Lying Down Page 3
