The Art of Lying Down (7 page)

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:

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.”

Goncharov’s novel offers the defining portrait of an apathetic, even superfluous, individual who retains our sympathy thanks to his unapologetic oddness. Every age seems to produce its own Oblomov. In 1968, for example, the French filmmaker Yves Robert directed
Alexandre le bienheureux
, known in English as
Blissful Alexander
. The film tells the story of a prosperous farmer who throws his village into an uproar when his domineering wife dies and he decides to spend the rest of his life in bed. Their stories may be entertaining, but inactive characters like Oblomov and Alexandre are poor role models. Their fates demonstrate that too much time spent lying down isn’t good for anyone.

Does taking drugs affect the tendency to lie down? Alcohol, at least in high doses, doesn’t mix well with a horizontal posture. While they can produce a range of moods, most narcotic substances are not conducive to relaxing on the sofa or bed. Anyone who has had the highly unpleasant experience of feeling the ground sway while lying intoxicated in bed will do his best to avoid this sensation in the future. Marijuana seems a much better choice for lying down; it tends to encourage contemplation and passiveness. Of course, we envision opium dens as full of hapless souls on the brink of unconsciousness. But smoking while lying down is a dangerous pleasure, too; it’s all too easy to fall asleep with a cigarette burning. The case of Ingeborg Bachmann proves that the consequences can be fatal: the Austrian writer burned to death in 1973, when she fell asleep in her apartment in Rome while smoking. Other such stories have happier endings. Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, a German nobleman known as a vain eccentric and hedonist, used lead-based mixtures to keep his hair pitch-black well into old age. In 1828, he “saw the light” in an unforgettable way: a lamp caused his hair to catch fire. Luckily, he was able to stifle the flames by burying his head in the bedclothes. Although he lost half his hair and then decided to cut off the rest, he responded to this misfortune with humor: “Fortunately my strength does not reside in my hair.” Fortunately for all of us, accidents like his are rare.

Consult your doctor or pharmacist for more information on risks and side effects

A comfortable and restful bout of lying down requires a flexible surface on which to lie. The hips should be able to sink into whatever they’re lying on; yet the waist must still be supported. When we lie on our back, the bed under us should hold up the spine without letting the pelvis sag. And to avoid hyperextending the neck, the head should not be as high as it is when we lie on our sides. If we roll over onto the stomach, the surface below must offer enough resistance to the lumbar region; otherwise, the small of the back curves in too much. Finally, if we use a pillow in this position, it should be a very flat one.

Along with a blanket and a mattress, a pillow is a necessary prop for comfortable reclining and sleeping. It serves to fill out the neck and shoulders area, hold up the head, and keep the neck flat. To avoid either pinching or overstretching the neck vertebrae, pillows shouldn’t be too soft. Some people swear by neck rolls or horseshoe-shaped neck cushions. In parts of Africa and Asia, people use neck supports made of wood or stone. In some cases, sleepers who lie on their sides turn to long body pillows as a way to get comfortable.

X-rays of Egyptian mummies reveal that humans have long suffered from back problems, and that our modern lifestyle is not solely to blame for back pain. At the same time, back pain that occurs during or after a night’s sleep seems to be more common now that most people don’t engage in as much physical labor as they did just a few generations ago. Today, our muscles are generally not as developed or regularly used. Furthermore, people were historically smaller on average and had fewer opportunities to eat, resulting in bodily dimensions that placed less strain on the spine and in fewer people having posture problems and the illnesses such problems can cause.

Today, in contrast, the muscles that hold the torso upright take a lot of punishment, creating special demands when it comes to where we bed down for the night. The spinal disks are critical; because they are under pressure during the day, they need relief at night. A horizontal position allows them to expand. The goal of lying down is to give all the parts of the body involved in physical movement, including the muscles, a chance to relax. It’s very difficult to feel well rested after a night in a worn-out bed—for example, when the spine sags between the pelvis and the shoulders because the mattress doesn’t offer enough support.

The coil spring marked a genuine revolution in
sleeping surface flexibility. The approach was borrowed from other contexts: on ships and in carriages, springs softened rocking, jolting, or bumping movements and helped prevent motion sickness. The patent for coil springs was filed in 1706 in England. The first springs were wedged between thin boards, but soon it became possible to join them together to form a wire mesh. Covered with stable fabric, these constructions could be sold as elastic, “airy,” easy-to-transport wire mattresses. Later, slatted bed frames added more flexibility. Switzerland’s Hugo Degen and Karl Thomas are credited with this invention, which was created with solid foam mattresses in mind.

Anyone who has studied the topic of mattresses knows how complex it can be. Not all mattresses are equal, and there is a dizzying range of manufacturers and styles—not to mention the different kinds of frame and support systems. Despite the poetic associations mattresses evoke—think of all those comparisons to “floating on a cloud”—understanding the particulars of mattresses and the secrets of their design is largely a question of technical expertise.

All mattresses—whether filled with foam, latex, down, water, or the latest development, gel—adjust better to the body they support than less sophisticated sleep surfaces. Multizone mattresses that combine foam of different densities even promise to
provide the right resistance for different parts of the body. Such point elasticity is particularly important when a bed is shared by two people who have different body weights or sleep in different positions and apply different amounts of stress to the same sections of a mattress. A mattress that is either too hard or too soft can cause back pain. But the sensation of softness or firmness depends on the individual. Because heavier people exert more pressure on the surface supporting them, mattresses seem softer to them than they do to lightweights. The older a person becomes, the more he or she is likely to prefer a soft mattress. Mattress retailers have no qualms about praising their products in the highest possible tones, but it takes at least a few nights to discover if sleeping on a particular mattress really feels like floating on a cloud; so trying it out in the store is practically useless. In some cases, it’s hard to tell which of the salesperson’s eloquent arguments are based in fact and which simply serve to shame us for our choice of bed so far. How could anyone be dumb enough to spend two decades on a no-frills feather mattress?