The Art of Lying Down

by Bernd Brunner

  The position of a hammock in a room is not necessarily just a matter of chance and may even have a meaning. Pascal Dibie, a French cultural historian, has shown how the arrangement of hammocks among indigenous peoples in the Amazon region reflects the social relationships of those who use them. Dibie explains, for example, that in the communal rooms of the Bari “the hammocks are placed at different heights that signify the age, gender, family membership, and symbolic relationships linking their owners to one another and to the universe of the house.” Young unmarried men sleep almost two meters (six and one-half feet) above the ground in the “sky” of the house and need ropes to reach their beds.

  The wave of mechanization in the late nineteenth century brought changes to the hammock. For example, its netting could be reinforced with wooden slats to improve the tension. Round nets draped around the hammock could ward off pesky mosquitoes. And a blind pulled up across the entire contraption could even protect the occupant from painful sunburn.

  One clever inventor hung a hammock in a large inverted tricycle and added a waterproof tentlike cover that, according to the patent, could turn a “vehicle” designed for rocking and reclining into a full-fledged bedroom. Was it a genuinely useful creation or just a dubious technical curiosity?

  My bicycle is my castle

  A hybrid of hammock and recliner—one of history’s many forgotten “solutions of motion problems,” in the words of Sigfried Giedion—could be found in the self-adjusting hammock chair, which was designed to be suspended from a tree. This innovation replaced the often difficult-to-handle net with a piece of canvas stretched within a frame. According to the manufacturer, this design prevents “drawing the clothing so tightly around the body, thus making it just as cool, while the annoyance of catching buttons tearing down the lady’s hair, and the double somersault in the air is avoided.” Although the hammock chair has not survived to the present day, it’s not all that far removed from a patio swing with flowered cushions for the seat and back. If the seat is big enough, you can lie down in it as well.

  Each to their own: “self-adjusting hammock chair” for husband and wife

  The Puzzle of the Recliner

  The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the reclining chair, but this new development brought its own problems. Unlike the bed, which allows its occupant to change position at any time and find a comfortable position, recliners must be carefully tailored to users’ physical needs from the beginning. In 1940, Gunther Lehmann, an occupational psychologist who was highly critical of the reclining chair design of his day, formulated these requirements:

  1. The area where the body lies must be as large as possible and the pressure on the surface of the parts of the body lying on it as small as possible. However, this does not mean that this pressure should be distributed evenly. On the contrary, the parts that are especially resistant to pressure (e.g., the posterior) should be subject to more of it than those that are sensitive (e.g., the lower spine). A plaster cast would not provide an ideal surface to lie upon!

  2. All direct and indirect pressure on the nerves (which causes the limbs to fall asleep) must be avoided, as must blockage of the flow back from the blood vessels in the legs, which are overly full as a result of working in a standing position.

  3. The position of the limbs defined by the design of the chair must represent a state of true rest.

  Floating as model for recumbency: the optimal position in the basin

  All this is more easily said than done because it takes more than cushions, arm- and footrests, and support for the head to produce that “true state of rest.” Achieving it entails finding a position in which the muscles that move the hip and knee joints are completely relaxed and not subject to external forces. But how? Lehmann had the idea of submerging test subjects in a transparent basin, where they held themselves in place with a horizontal bar. He assumed that reducing the effects of gravity in this way would make it easier to identify the positions in which the muscles relax the most. Then, using photos of these experiments, he measured the angles that felt most pleasant to the participants. At 134 and 133 degrees respectively, they were nearly the same for both the hip and knee joints. Lehmann had his answer.

  When we recline in a floating position, the joints are bent at these especially comfortable angles and the legs are raised. Furniture that accommodates this position existed even before Lehmann conducted his studies. They included the kangaroo sofa, inspired by its wild namesake and designed in the United States, and the chaise longue basculante, a recliner with a frame of steel tubing by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand (1928). Seats like these are made for daydreaming.

  The potted plant must stay: “Chaiselongue Basculante,” 1929

  The Best Place for the Bed

  When we lie down, we perceive a room’s proportions, materials, and light differently from when we’re standing. Our sensation of the space depends on how far the bed is from the window and whether just the head or an entire side is against the wall as well as the individual associations and memories these factors may evoke. Lying in a completely dark room without any visual points of orientation can be disturbing. Attention is then wholly concentrated on anything that stands out in the gloom: the blinking of a computer screen in standby mode; a door ever so slightly ajar; a lamp with a loose connection in the house across the street.

  Many people need a little light to fall asleep easily. Some enjoy being awakened by sunlight in the morning. But not everyone enjoys falling asleep at night without the sound of traffic in the background and waking up in the morning to the melodic sound of birds. A soundproof room can make falling asleep difficult or even impossible. In such an environment, the sounds of our own breathing and digestive processes take on a whole new weight, becoming more disturbing.

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, experts made it a top priority to protect people from the negative effects of almost everything. Dangers posed by lying down were no exception, and the home’s surroundings, the bedroom, the materials used in beds, and even the design and position of the bed itself all came under scrutiny. The bed became a cause of powerful clashes of opinion, and there was no excuse for not knowing the consequences of sleeping incorrectly. Some recommendations still sound plausible, while others strain even the most generous amounts of credulity.

  Most of this advice calls for a quiet, dark place to sleep that is protected from loud and irregular noises. However, prudence can cross the boundary into superstition, as when Isidor Poeche warns against placing the bed so that the “light falls onto the room over the sleeper’s head.” Such illumination, he explains, could cause children to become farsighted or cross-eyed. Sleeping with our feet toward the window is therefore preferable, although should there be no curtains or blinds, “the light stimulates our eyes and disturbs our rest.” Of course, those who want to get up early can use the daylight to their advantage. The elderly are warned to make sure that the head of the bed does not face the door because the dead are carried from their rooms headfirst, a belief that echoes concerns about the coffin position in feng shui. On the other hand, the bed can intentionally be placed in this position to shorten the suffering of those dying.

  Regardless of these theories, habit and the psychological aspects of our fundamental instinct to sleep in a protected place determine how people come to prefer the bed in a particular spot in the room. The anonymous author of the book Our Household (1964) offers a simple explanation: “Fearful individuals feel safe in niches or corners, while those with more confidence prefer the bed to stand unenclosed within the room.” Janosch, famous for his children’s books, offers a more modern take on this theme. He claims that his stories—“enough ideas for the next 300 years”—come to him while he is sleeping. To encourage this process, he sleeps in a variety of different places, including an attic room less than four feet high, “on a hard futon measuring six feet by six feet so that my sleeping body can turn in every direction like a compass.” He explain
s that his body “must align itself to the stars in order to receive the transmissions. When the moon is full I sleep in a soft bed on an iron frame in a windowless room in this house, where the stone walls are three feet thick. On other days I choose a room with a small window facing east so that I don’t miss the sunrise.”

  In Healthy Sleep! Advice and Hints for the Unwell and the Well (1887), Theodor Parthey ignores the effects of light to concentrate on the supposed correlation between the earth’s magnetic fields and the human nervous system: “Since magnetism flows from the North Pole to the South Pole, we should ideally lie with the feet pointing south and the head toward the north so that it passes over us from the head to the foot and not in the opposite direction.” The next best option, according to Parthey, is a west-east orientation “so that when we lie upright in bed, our eyes are facing south or east, but not west or north. Many a person who has fruitlessly longed for sleep has been able to remedy the situation by switching the foot and head of the bed; immediately our friend Morpheus was prepared to close his weary lids in slumber.” Parthey also reports that a certain Dr. Julius von dem Fischweiler from the German city of Magdeburg—who lived for an impressive one hundred and nine years—ascribed his longevity to the fact that he always slept with his head pointing north.

  Those seeking to optimize their downtime were encouraged to consider other factors. In one section of his hefty turn-of the-century bestseller The Natural Method of Healing, Friedrich E. Bilz describes a world overrun by enfeebled near consumptives and insists that their salvation lay in reducing the amount of dust they breathe in while sleeping. Bilz suggests climbing up on the bed frame and attaching a blanket to an open window so that it hangs over the bed. The would-be sleeper then needs to precisely align himself and the blanket to create optimal sleeping conditions. Bilz helpfully provides a diagram, which is reproduced here. According to his instructions, the trick is to lie on your back with your head propped up on a rolled-up pillow behind the blanket (at the point marked “4”). Then you grab the corners of the blanket (marked “3”) and stick them under the left and right edges of your pillow (marked “5”). Thanks to these precautions, you are now completely shielded from that most dangerous of elements the air in your bedroom. Refreshing slumber is all but assured. Bilz was not the only expert making such recommendations: in an age when many people suffered from tuberculosis, prophets of well-being frequently extolled the benefits of sleeping in tents and open buildings or—in a compromise—under an open window.

  Dust-free sleeping: Bilz’s diagram

  Lying Down as the Stuff of Dreams—and Nightmares

  During the nineteenth century, a movement gathered steam to create, in the words of the historian Peter Gay, “an age of avid self-scrutiny.” The couch abetted this development. Instead of merely providing a place to lounge, it became the functional furniture of psychoanalysis, the operating table of the mind. Lying in a trancelike state on the couch, the patient grants the psychiatrist access to his or her innermost thoughts. A reclining position encourages introspection and the tendency to make playful associations and draws the inner gaze into corners and depths it does not normally reach. Desires that the patient may not consciously register during day-to-day life or may not dare express can be articulated to the psychoanalyst and then interpreted. Today, of course, the accuracy of this procedure is contested. But Freud’s couch was far more than just a piece of furniture. When he and his family fled from the Nazis in 1938, the couch went to London with them.

  Uncovering the subconscious through repose: Sigmund Freud’s Ur-couch

  The patient stretched out on the couch and the analyst sitting upright are hardly in equal positions. Moreover, if we assume that the patient and analyst like each other or feel a charged or erotic attraction, it’s easy to imagine that a sexually laden situation could result. Accounts of Sigmund Freud report that he originally sat next to the couch, where he could maintain eye contact with his patients. In response to the advances of a female patient, he moved behind the couch to head off any such situation in the future. This setup had another benefit: because patients felt less closely monitored, it was easier for them to engage in free association.

  Thanks to the popularity of Freud’s method, the word couch has taken on a whole new meaning and is now an informal synonym for psychoanalysis in many languages. When the designer Todd Bracher developed a couch for an Italian furniture company, he called his elegant creation Freud.

  It seems inevitable that the psychoanalyst’s couch would sometimes become the scene of intimate sharing that went beyond verbal disclosures. Freud’s Hungarian student Sándor Ferenczi suffered from pangs of conscience on this account and, in a letter to his famous teacher, expressed a worry that patients with finely tuned senses might smell or even see traces of sperm on his couch. The historian Andreas Mayer has described how the couch’s pornographic past caught up with its psychoanalytic present: the couch played a role in the text and even the titles of quite a few racy books. These include Le canapé couleur de feu (1741), supposedly by Louis Charles Fougeret de Montbron, which chronicles the sexual adventures of various church dignitaries in a Paris brothel. A number of memorable episodes play out on the establishment’s sofa. Combining moral outrage and voyeuristic impulses, the text shifts “between attacking the hypocrisy of the clergy and religious education and commending its secret beating rituals as a sure cure for aging husbands,” Mayer explains.

  By adapting so brilliantly to the body’s biomechanics, the mechanized recliners of the nineteenth century not only broadened the horizons of motion technology but channeled sexual fantasies into previously untrodden regions. It was not difficult to draw parallels between the sudden action of tipping a patient over and the abrupt movements and changes in position that occur during sex. Under the pretense of examining his female patients, the young protagonist of James Campbell Reddie’s The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (1881) takes advantage of them sexually. His customized couch serves him as a “veritable battleground of Venus.” He writes: “This couch was very wide, with no back, and a scroll-head at one end, whilst what would be considered the foot was half-moon shaped.” Thanks to this remarkable piece of furniture, our hero is in a position “to administer [his] natural clyster … either standing or kneeling on a hassock.” In another enthusiastic description, the narrator explains that “this couch had a most springy motion when under a pair of lively lovers, being constructed with a special eye to luxurious effect, and it also had screws at each end and at the centre, so that I could elevate the head, bottoms, or bodies of my patients to suit the ideas to be carried out.” While female patients are his favorite prey, he receives a few male guests as well: “I used this couch sometimes to tie down and flagellate several of my old male patients, whose early excesses had made them too used up for the sport of love, and could only enjoy the pleasures of emission under the stimulating effects of the rod” adding that this activity “was one of the most lucrative branches” of his practice.

  Suddenly, adjustable furniture was everywhere—for surgery, hairstyling, births, and physical examinations of reputable and disreputable varieties. It’s therefore no surprise that these devices took up a place in the artistic imagination as well. At the turn of the nineteenth century, lying down was associated with bohemian pleasures, as well as with the perilous depths of the unconscious. As technology invaded the everyday environment and threatened to fully define it for the first time, perceptions of the horizontal world of dreams began to shift.

  Heat treatment as art: Max Ernst, The Preparation of Bone Glue

  In their search for a visual counterpart to rationalism, the surrealists imbued sleep, dreams, and ecstatic states with aesthetic and political dimensions. Max Ernst, for example, frequently took material drawn from the world of commercial consumption and reworked it into surreal, disturbing collages. For his 1921 work The Preparation of Bone Glue, he added mechanical elements to the illustration of a heat treatment he had found in a
medical journal. The resulting image shows a supine human figure that seems to have given up control over its surroundings. Thin tubes introduce or extract liquids from the body. It’s a vision of pure horror. Does this reclining individual still possess a consciousness, or does the machine simply maintain outward signs of life? This bizarre image was intended for publication in a Dada magazine. Ernst knew that machines cannot serve as models of life and lying and that attempts to link humans and machines could turn nightmarish. His work could perhaps serve as a warning to today’s technology addicts.

  The Museum of Reclining

  Let’s take a short stroll through the Museum of Reclining, an imaginary institution housing every image ever made of a horizontal human figure. Among the more famous works is Vittore Carpaccio’s The Dream of St. Ursula, which depicts its subject covered in blankets and fast asleep. Of course, not all the individuals shown are as bloodless as Carpaccio’s holy nun; just think of Francisco de Goya’s The Nude Maja. Henri Matisse, who not incidentally painted in bed using brushes attached to long sticks, shows us a reclining nude with a most impressive backside. He produced this painting sometime after the boom years for such sprawling odalisques, and in the words of the French essayist Jean-Luc Hennig, their defining anatomical feature “had tripled in size” during the intervening period. Hennig continues: “As the model has placed all her weight on the right side, the buttocks appear one above the other in two storeys as it were; it is phenomenal … this women was heaviness that is alive. Furnished with the equipment she has, she can probably only exist lying down, for it is difficult to imagine her resisting the immutable laws of gravity.” Indeed, the lying figure can seem obscene, awkward, comical but also elegant. By allowing us access to the intimate realms of their couches and beds, many of those portrayed demonstrate that lying down can be the highest form of life. And some of these horizontal hotties challenge and perhaps even arouse the observer.