The Art of Lying Down (14 page)

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:

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

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 explains 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

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.