The daily cycle of light and darkness provides the underlying rhythm of our sleep, but many other factors also influence when we go to sleep and how long we stay unconscious. There is no such thing as a single natural time for us to sleep. Historically, nighttime did not simply mean peace and quiet. It was also a time of danger, when being on the lookout for enemies and wild animals was imperative. Moreover, before machines and regular working hours imposed their rhythms upon us, several periods of relaxation and sleep broke up the daily routine. Periods of wakefulness after midnight were even common. Concentrating our daily sleep into a monobloc uninterrupted by waking phases is a new habit in line with a modern society in which each activity serves a specialized purpose. Looking at how certain African or Asian societies less subject to strict time rules manage their sleep schedules provides a glimpse of what it may have been like for our society when sleeping followed an older pattern: while some sleep, others get up during the night to chat or make sure the fire does not die out. Even today it’s common in Japan to see people sleeping during the day—in their offices or even the subway. Not only do the Japanese tend to sleep less at night, but falling asleep in public does not carry the same social stigma it does in the West. Of course, the fact that “normal” sleep is relative does not mean that we can simply change the way we organize our downtime.
Today we know that season, climate, and weather play a role in how long and deeply we sleep. Individual factors such as age and health also have an impact. One example of how climatic conditions can influence sleep behavior is the siesta. Common in a number of Mediterranean countries, this extended afternoon nap can last two hours or even more. The desire to sleep during the day arises when high temperatures or heavy meals put a strain on the body. While the siesta is generally considered justified in warm countries, where people tend to get up early and go to bed late, inhabitants of more northern climes have long viewed it as bad for the health. Of course, such attitudes reflected a disdain for the relaxed Mediterranean lifestyle. We now know that a short siesta—the power nap—can greatly increase performance during the second half of the workday. The tireless business minds at the British company MetroNaps recognize that a napping market exists. Their “corporate fatigue solutions” make it possible to reduce environmental influences to a minimum in order for workers to enjoy a refreshing afternoon nap.
Many workaholics have taken a dismissive attitude toward sleep. Henry Ford considered it unnecessary. Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Alva Edison, Winston Churchill, and—somewhat less exaltedly—Silvio Berlusconi have all been celebrated for sleeping just a few hours at night. (If or when any of these famous night owls made up this downtime during the day is unknown.)
American researchers claim to have found that those who need little sleep share a particular gene. If more recent studies are correct, sleeping longer helps us lose weight. According to this research, people who skimp on sleep actually gain weight even if they consume fewer calories. Although scientists may disagree about the reasons for this correlation, the idea that we could simply sleep away extra pounds certainly has appeal.
One of the most unusual proposals for managing how we sleep can be found in Sleep Before Midnight, a pamphlet published in 1953 by Theodor Stöckmann. Stöckmann, a school principal, claimed to have discovered the law of natural time. According to this law, those who go to bed early need only four and a half or five hours of sleep and thus gain three awake hours each day. The trick is to let the sun govern the rhythm of the body by going to bed when it sets and getting up no later than when it rises. It’s also important to avoid “artificial suns” that “trick us of darkness and sleep.” Submitting to this natural cycle kills many birds with one stone: we balance out nervous exhaustion, regain productivity, overcome sleep problems and “aversion to active life,” plug the holes in our “sieve-like memory”—in short, “cure the sufferings of body and spirit.” Following the principle is so important that even the loss of social life or contact with one’s family is worth the price. Stöckmann ends his tract with a prophetic rallying cry: “By consciously and willingly submitting to the cosmic dictates of the sun’s orbit, we must become people of the sun, children of the light.”
Nathaniel Kleitman and Bruce Richardson on the job
Taking the opposite approach, other researchers have asked if we can reset our sleep cycle in the absence of the sun’s impact. To answer this question, the scientist Nathaniel Kleitman and his assistant Bruce Richardson retreated to a cave in Kentucky during the summer of 1938. They tried to shift their daily rhythm to a twenty-eight-hour cycle. Only Richardson was successful, but it is Kleitman who has gone down in history as a pioneer of sleep research.
Eating and Lying Down: Better Together?
For a number of years now, lying down has enjoyed a renaissance in the form of lounging, an “activity” practiced largely, if not exclusively, in a horizontal position. Adherents gather, for example, in a softly lit room decorated entirely in orange tones, where an enormous round couch (or has it crossed the line to a bed?) invites them to get comfortable to the sound of easy-listening tunes. Some even take lounging to the next level. At B.E.D. (short for “beverage, entertainment, dining”), an elegantly designed and creatively lit restaurant in Miami Beach, patrons enjoy fusion food while lying on beds placed in different arrangements throughout the space. The menu has been planned to minimize spills: drinks are served with straws, and no soups are available. The restaurant has been open for more than ten years, though only time will tell if horizontal socializing becomes a lasting trend extending to other restaurants or even further spheres of activity. It seems likely that it will remain an exception, an expression of a particular zeitgeist targeted to specific age groups.
The ancient Greeks and Romans, on the other hand, were known for eating while lying down. Special dining sofas would be grouped around a table. Each sofa, called a triclinium (from the Greek word kline, or bed), could accommodate as many as three men. Each would lie on his side with his head facing the table and his left elbow propped up on a pillow. The lady of the house, other guests, or retainers of the main diners had to make do with chairs, while slaves were denied even that comfort. The Casa di Nettuno e Anfitrite in Herculaneum contains a large built-in triclinium that stretches from one wall to another, as does the Casa del Moralista in Pompeii. The Romans lavished time on their dinner parties, starting as early as four in the afternoon.
Reconstruction of drinking bout in ancient Pompeii
Taking pills while lying down should be avoided because they can stay too long in the esophagus and cause damage. But there are few other practical reasons to object to horizontal dining in general. The aesthetic perspective offers a far better case against eating while lying down. The practice riles traditionalists, who see it as the end of table manners, a symptom of cultural decay, or simply as an absurdity. Eating while sitting certainly has its advantages: the position does not limit the movements involved in eating and drinking. After all, tables and chairs have existed for thousands of years, and their anonymous inventors developed them for a reason. Sitting across from one another makes it easier to talk during the meal. And anyway, eating while reclining can easily lead to unpleasant or involuntarily comical situations: a diner’s movements can result in showing a backside to someone’s face or in feet inching too close to the food. Lying down may be comfortable, but it’s hard to use a knife and fork in that position, and cutting up a meal into bite-size pieces can be quite a trick. It’s also difficult to balance your plate on a thigh in order to cut your food or to bring your plate up to your mouth once you’re back lying down. Is this really something to try without a bib? At the same time, eating in bed is possible with a backrest and a tray with a stand or folding legs.
If eating while lying down is catching on, the reason may be that many trendy restaurants feature furniture that’s hard to sit on. The appropriate response to such ergonomic affronts may well be to lie down on them. Of course
, there’s no guarantee that lounge furniture designed first and foremost to be aesthetically pleasing will make sense ergonomically or functionally either.
Horizontal—but Hard at Work
Writers seem to have enviable lives. All they need is a pen and a piece of paper to work, or perhaps a laptop. That’s what you might think, but it’s not that simple, for writers are more complicated than that. To get their thoughts flowing, they need coffee, tea, cigarettes, alcohol; the right location; and the right writing position. Some writers require the background noise of a café or the lulling rhythm of a train. Others demand complete silence. Still others are notorious homebodies, content to dream about the world beyond their doors. This list is not complete.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau couldn’t come up with ideas without taking a long walk. The great outdoors were his study. Just seeing a desk was enough to make him feel queasy, and working while lying down would certainly never have occurred to him. The Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek also needs wide-open spaces for inspiration but finds hers by looking out the window. Both writers are polar opposites of their artistic brethren who can be creative only when they lie down.
People who work while lying down often don’t like to admit it. They know that their preference can quickly get them labeled as lazy. Lying down is associated with tiredness, apathy, and a lack of drive, with doing nothing, with passivity and relaxation. Goethe’s industrious Faust incorporates this attitude when he declares, “If ever I lay me on a bed of sloth in peace / That instant let for me existence cease!”
Does this mean that with the exception of the occasional siesta, we should lie down only at night? Not necessarily. For some, a horizontal posture seems to create the optimal conditions for creativity and focus whatever the time of day or night.
Could it be that creativity requires a retreat from our day-to-day activities? Do artists need phases of passivity in order to make something new? There’s plenty of evidence that this is true. In his letters, Marcel Proust reports that he wrote while lying down in his famous brass bed, especially during his final years, when illness confined him to his cork-lined bedroom while he completed Remembrance of Things Past. Everything can come to pass in bed, from erotic productivity to destructive mortality.
Proust is not the only cultural giant known for working in his bedroom. Mark Twain shared this predilection, as did Edith Sitwell, who, appropriately enough, was known for her literary portraits of English eccentrics. Lying down seems to have helped them concentrate their thoughts. William Wordsworth reportedly preferred writing his poems in bed in complete darkness, and would start over whenever he lost a sheet of paper because looking for it was too much trouble. And Walter Benjamin relates that the French symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux (1861–1940) wrote “LE POÈTE TRAVAILLE” (“POET AT WORK”) on the door of his bedroom when he didn’t want to be disturbed.
Like Proust, because of illness Heinrich Heine spent his final years in Paris writing in bed. The great German poet completed his last literary work while trapped in this “mattress grave,” as he called it. W. G. Sebald, who worked on The Rings of Saturn while suffering back problems, lay on his stomach across his bed, propped his forehead on a chair, and placed the manuscript on the floor to write. The content of Sebald’s work might be said to reflect this unenviable position. He repeatedly took up what Italo Calvino called the problem of universal gravitation, and writes of trying to achieve a state of levitation, floating on his own without external support. In Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1985), Calvino defines literature as “an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living.” If we follow Calvino a moment longer, we also learn that the state he describes can be reached only rarely because it springs from “the special connection of melancholy and humor.” Could it be that he most clearly reveals the connection between lying down and creativity? Even if they are free from physical ailments, creative types don’t necessarily laze around in bed for the pleasure of it. In an interview with Le Monde, Roland Barthes exhorted readers to “dare jjjjjto be lazy” but confessed throwing himself on his bed with the sole purpose of “stewing” there whenever his thoughts began to circle and he felt a little down. For him at least, this phase didn’t last more than fifteen or twenty minutes.
Edith Wharton, the esteemed author of The Age of Innocence, retreated to bed to escape rigid expectations about what women should wear. Freedom from her corset liberated her thoughts as well. She even celebrated her eightieth birthday in bed—with a candle-covered cake that caught on fire.
In an interview for The Paris Review, Truman Capote outed himself in a surprising manner:
I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.
Lin Yutang further attested to the creative benefits of lying down when he wrote, “A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his novel in this posture than by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and afternoon. For there, free from telephone calls and well-meaning visitors and the common trivialities of everyday life, he sees life through a glass or a beaded screen, as it were, and a halo of poetic fancy is cast around the world of realities and informs it with a magic beauty. There he sees life not in its rawness, but suddenly transformed into a picture more real than life itself.”
Some people watch TV or listen to the radio or music while lying down. Others read. Do some books lend themselves to horizontal reception more than others? Perhaps particular works offer a special experience—one that would be difficult to duplicate otherwise—if we read them while lying down. Do we perceive books differently in this position? Are we more susceptible to certain moods? If the theory proposed by the Argentine writer Alberto Manguel is correct, we may feel a “sense of redundancy in exploring on the page a world similar to the one surrounding us at the very moment of reading.” We should balance the peaceful isolation of the couch or bed, say, with action-packed reading material. Interestingly, crime stories and horror novels are what Manguel reads to guarantee a peaceful night’s sleep. Others might complain that bedtime reading like his is the best way to stay up all night. In any case, books are usually considered suitable for reading in a lounge chair when they are light and entertaining—as if too much plot would mar our vacations or weekends. Strange reasoning indeed.
Reading aside, just how much time can and should we spend in bed? According to an oft-cited statistic, we spend about a third of our lives sleeping. Another observation states that the longer we lie in bed, the longer we want to stay there. In his monumental The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton recommends limiting sleep to the amount that is absolutely necessary. “Nothing better than moderate sleep,” he says, then adds, “Nothing worse than it, if it be in extremes, or unseasonably used.” The right balance is what matters. “Waking overmuch” could be “both a symptom, and an ordinary cause,” of melancholy, “yet in some cases sleep may do more harm than good, in that phlegmatic, swinish, cold, and sluggish melancholy which Melanchthon speaks of.”
Nineteenth-century health gurus condemned the widespread habit of sleeping late. “The more sleep is enjoyed in moderation, the healthier it is.” Groucho Marx once said that “a thing that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing at all.” He was entitled to his opinion, but should we agree? Surely spending life in bed is not the answer. Muscles would atrophy, and blood circulation would slow to a crawl. Bedsores and other terrible physical consequences of excessive lying down can be seen all too clearly in
people with health problems that force them to stay in a horizontal position. In 1986, eleven people spent a year in bed at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow in an effort to study the effects of a zero-gravity environment. While exercise—in some cases done next to the bed—staved off the worst consequences, the subjects required two months of physical therapy before they could sit and walk normally again.
At a certain point, spending too much time in bed becomes a problem that affects every aspect of our existence. But when do we reach this critical point? Was the famed revival preacher John Wesley right when he wrote in 1786: “By soaking … so long between warm sheets, the flesh is, as it were, parboiled, and becomes soft and flabby.” Wesley practiced what he preached by getting up every morning at four.
Oblomov, the main character of the 1859 novel by Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov that bears his name, becomes the embodiment of a person who lies around too much—to the point of doing not much else. His image has become so embedded in people’s minds that it’s hard to imagine the horizontal lifestyle as anything different than the one he practices. “Whenever he was at home—and almost always he was at home—he would spend his time in lying on his back. Likewise he used but the one room—which was combined to serve both as bedroom, as study, and as reception-room.” Clad in a roomy oriental robe made of Persian silk, this Russian aristocrat, still in his early thirties, spends all his time daydreaming on the bed or divan. Life passes him by. “Through insufficiency of exercise, or through want of fresh air, or through a lack of both,” he appears puffy and bloated, like a sausage wrapped in a dressing gown. All the attempts of his visitors to rouse him are fruitless, and even falling in love does little to change his situation. “With Oblomov,” the narrator explains, “lying in bed was neither a necessity (as in the case of an invalid or of a man who stands badly in need of sleep) nor an accident (as in the case of a man who is feeling worn out) nor a gratification (as in the case of a man who is purely lazy). Rather, it represented his normal condition.”
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