ShareThisSamuel Pepys, the renowned London diarist of the 17th century, had a distinctive way of ending his journal entries: "And so to bed," he would write.
What a good idea. If possible, take this column back to bed with you. If you are already in work clothes, put your PJs or nightie over them. My literary talents are such that you should be asleep again in no time.
Ladies, you should not be concerned about taking me to bed, if only in the literary form. I have always been harmless, thanks to my soporific effect on women. Indeed, the few women who slept with me when I was young actually slept -- never could wake them up. No, take it from old Mr. Horizontal, get your zzz's in while the zzz-ings are good.
This is the season of slumber. With a blanket of snow over much of the country, the urge to go to bed for a period of human hibernation is not easily resisted. (Admit it: You are getting drowsy.) How wonderful it would be to sleep in until spring, when daffodils spring from the sod like golden alarm clocks going off.
Sadly, the human species is not adapted to hibernation, except when it enters government. From the start, we were hunters and gatherers and no sleeping in was allowed. As cavewomen were apt to grunt to cavemen in that distant time, "If you think you can lie about here all day while I am out gathering, I'll arrange for a saber-toothed tiger to give you a wake-up call."
So not to bed, for ancestral history has doomed our species to be up at early hours. The main exception to this rule is that cohort known as teenagers, who, exhausted from exercising their thumbs in text messaging, believe they are sleeping in for the rest of us.
As one who considers himself a connoisseur of the unconscious, my dream is to restore respectability to slumber in its various forms -- sleeping in, napping, taking a siesta or indulging in sustained mattress bashing. In doing so, it is my hope to raise the bed to the highest place of honor in the ranks of furniture.
Unfortunately, to many people, the bed is just a mere slumber platform, a place to park the body for a night. To me, it is the darkened stage where dreams are born.
Think of it: If you sleep eight hours a night, you spend a third of your life asleep. This is not a lost opportunity; it is a great blessing. Surely, enough folly is packed into 16 hours a day to make the sleeper realize that he or she isn't missing anything.
Besides, some of life's most significant events occur in bed -- love and death among them. (The bed is always the best place to meet the Grim Reaper, because the sight of people in pajamas is said to amuse the spectral figure and make him a bit more jolly.) In the land of the living, they say there's no place like home, but I would suggest a revision to that old truth: There's no place like home in bed.
But here's a dripping faucet of a thought to disturb your rest: What is the future of sleeping? Can we just close our eyes and assume that it will go on as always, despite our increasingly hectic modern lives? Fortunately, the bed of the future is now available. A recent story in The New York Times' home section brought this welcome news from the 2010 winter Las Vegas Market furniture show. At first blush, it seems an odd thing to show beds in a city that never sleeps, but perhaps what stays in Vegas first happens in beds, making this a logical venue.
What caught my eye was the bed that allowed for a snoring partner to be elevated by remote control to 7 degrees for 15 minutes so that he -- the snorer is always presumptively a he -- will stop doing his wounded-hippopotamus impersonation. The old-fashioned method of stopping a partner's snoring, referenced in the Times story, was to give him a whack.
This could be a breakthrough in marital relations, although why the expression "let sleeping dogs lie" is not applied to husbands and lovers remains a mystery.
I don't know about you, but a great tiredness has suddenly come over me. Admittedly, this was a boring column, but it was written with that purpose and was field-tested by shepherds who found it more yawn-inducing than their own professional sheep-counting efforts. So mull its slumbering truths -- and so to bed.
(Reg Henry is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. E-mail rhenry(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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