The Art of Lying Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

They were also not subject to the constant noise that makes itdifficult 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:
    We know what a terrible place the edge of sleep can be. It is perhaps one of the quieter reasons for making love, or rather for being each other’s companions in our beds—we try to be present when the people we need most have to drop into the other little death and we like to feel them there for us when we surface badly, when we are afraid and pulling the sheet up over our faces will make no difference, will not save us.
    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 tobed, 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:
    When I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was,