The Art of Lying Down (5 page)

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.

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:

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:

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 disturbance 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:

But, one is tempted to add, he loses something in the process.

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.