Sleeping In Separate Beds Quotes

It was only after my head started reeling and my body started weaving and I tumbled into bed that I'd hear that soothing voice singing...The reverbations of that voice wandered sweetly, softly, working like a massage on the area of my heart that was the most tightly clenched, helping those knots to loosen. It was like the rush of waves, and like the laughter of people I'd met in all kinds of places, people I'd become friendly with and then separated from, and like the kind words all those people had said to me, and like the mewing of a cat I had lost, and like the mixture of noises that rang in the background in a place that was dear to me, a place far away, a place that no longer existed, and like the rushing of trees that whisked past my ears as I breathed in a scent of fresh greenery on a trip someplace... the voice was like a combination of all this.

I don’t know why we fight. It takes much too effort to stay mad at you. To dodge your skin in the hallway and leave the kitchen without bringing you a treat. It takes much too effort to stare at the sink so my eyes don’t smile at you in the mirror. It takes much too effort to look away as we undress and lie apart in the now bigger bed. It takes much too effort to stiffen my body because sleepy limbs forget fights and pride is always lost in dreams. It takes much too effort to awaken every hour to make sure we are islands with a gulf of white sheets separating us. I dread the light peeking through the parted curtains and empathise with your groans — I didn’t get any sleep either. I really don’t know why we fight. It takes much too effort to stay mad at one another when it’s so easy for us to love.

On a lazy Saturday morning when you're lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, there is a space where fantasy and reality become one. Are you awake, or are you dreaming? You see people and things; some are familiar; some are strange. You talk, you feel, but you move without walking; you fly without wings. Your mind and your body exist, but on separate planes. Time stands still. For me, this is the feeling I have when ideas come.

Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, each reads in the other the unwritten story. Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?

It is reason which breeds pride and reflection which fortifies it; reason which turns man inward into himself; reason which separates him from everything which troubles or affects him. It is philosophy which isolates a man, and prompts him to say in secret at the sight of another suffering: 'Perish if you will; I am safe.' No longer can anything but dangers to society in general disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher or drag him from his bed. A fellow-man may with impunity be murdered under his window, for the philosopher has only to put his hands over his ears and argue a little with himself to prevent nature, which rebels inside him, from making him identify himself with the victim of the murder. The savage man entirely lacks this admirable talent, and for want of wisdom and reason he always responds recklessly to the first promptings of human feeling.

I've had countless conversations with or about people who are "sleeping in separate bedrooms", as if sleeping in the same bed is all there is to staying married, but however bad things get, sharing a bed has never been problematic; it's the rest of life that horrifies.

Any second... now? No. I am a 'mourning person'. Not because anybody close to me has recently passed away, but because I use that term to describe my demeanour at daybreak and as a way of separating myself from what are known as 'morning people' - those high-functioning, grinning morons, who skip out their beds and pounce at the dawn as eagerly and energetically as a young puppy greets a hanging shoelace. My mornings are (with the exception of Christmas Day) dark and sombre affairs, spent grieving the sleep of which I've been robbed; morning is when blades of daylight hack viciously at the dreams that have kept you company through the night.

I don’t remember well, and in fact I know nothing absolutely nothing at all, about the women I have loved.' Papan answered: That simply means that you have never loved. You simply have no idea of love as an absolute concept. Loving is knowing. It is also like a crime since it involves death, burial, and resurrection. Love is something very serious. Today it is completely forgotten. Love in fact is a strange and secret chemistry, in which the androgynous is born. This is true and complete love; everything else is different. Have you ever noticed how impossible it was to fuse yourself with the person you thought you loved, even though sleeping in the same bed? There is always something separating you, a thread of air, a different dream. Can the lovers be truly united if each one dreams a different dream? If you ever begin to dream the same dreams as your love, then you will be able to create the new star, the star of Him-Her, El-Ella.

He imagined himself lying there, unable to sleep, thinking of his mother, separated from her by the unresponsive blankets tucked too tightly round him, feeling the ceaseless thumping of his heart in the silence of the night, the irrevocability of absence, the rigid stillness of repose, the agony of solitude and sleeplessness. If the room was a prison, the bed was a tomb.

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov stirred at half past eight to the sound of rain on the eaves. With a half-opened eye, he pulled back his covers and climbed from bed. He donned his robe and slipped on his slippers. He took up the tin from the bureau, spooned a spoonful of beans into the Apparatus, and began to crank the crank. Even as he turned the little handle round and round, the room remained under the tenuous authority of sleep. As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain. But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists—the aroma of freshly ground coffee. In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things. While closer at hand, a patient pigeon scuffed its feet on the flashing. Easing

We think we know the ones we love. Our husbands, our wives. We know them - we are them, sometimes; when separated at a party we find ourselves voicing their opinions, their taste in food or books, telling an anecdote that never happened to us but happened to them. We watch their tics of conversation, of driving and dressing, how they touch a sugar cube to their coffee and stare as it turns white to brown, then drop it, satisfied, into the cup. I watched my own husband do that every morning; I was a vigilant wife. We think we know them. We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know. We try to get past it to the original, but we never can. We have seen it all. But what have we really understood? One morning we awaken. Beside us, that familiar sleeping body in the bed: a new kind of stranger. For me, it came in 1953. That was when I stood in my house and saw a creature merely bewitched with my husband's face. Perhaps you cannot see a marriage. Like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it. That is how I think of it. That I must look at everything around it, all the hidden stories, the unseen parts, so that somewhere in the middle - turning like a dark star - it will reveal itself at last.

By the second day, the song lyrics had faded, but in their place came darker irritations. Gradually, I started to become aware of a young man sitting just behind me and to the left. I had noticed him when he first entered the mediation hall, and had felt a flash of annoyance at the time: something about him, especially his beard, had struck me as too calculatedly dishevelled, as if he were trying to make a statement. Now his audible breathing was starting to irritate me, too. It seemed studied, unnatural, somehow theatrical. My irritation slowly intensified - a reaction that struck me as entirely reasonable and proportionate at the time. It was all beginning to feel like a personal attack. How much contempt must the bearded meditator have for me, I seethed silently, deliberately to decide to ruin the serenity of my meditation by behaving so obnoxiously? Experienced retreat-goers, it turns out, have a term for this phenomenon. The call it 'vipassana vendetta'. In the stillness tiny irritations become magnified into full-blown hate campaigns; the mind is so conditioned to attaching to storylines that it seizes upon whatever's available. Being on retreat had temporarily separated me from all the real causes of distress in my life, and so, apparently, I was inventing new ones. As I shuffled to my narrow bed that evening, I was still smarting about the loud-breathing man. I did let go of the vendetta eventually - but only because I'd fallen into an exhausted and dreamless sleep

Elizabeth knew that if she climbed the ladder she would find that the twins were in the same bed, sleeping back to back. She could go up there now and separate them, but in the morning she would find them together again. They might bicker and wrangle endlessly during the day, but in sleep they could not deny the bond that had been forged in the warm dark waters of the womb. One day circumstance or age or both would separate them for good, but they were in no hurry for that day to come, and neither was Elizabeth.

Back in his room, Lale carefully places the precious flower beside his bed before falling into a dreamless sleep, but the next morning when he wakes, the petals from his flower have separated and lie curled up beside the black center. Death alone persists in this place.

It’s funny, but when I talk about this business of my father and Valentina with my women friends, they’re absolutely appalled. They see a vulnerable old man who’s being exploited. Yet all the men I talk to—without any exception, Mike” (I wag my finger) “they respond with these wry knowing smiles, these little admiring chuckles. Oh, what a lad he is. What an achievement, pulling this much younger bird. Best of luck to him. Let him have his bit of fun.” “You must admit, it’s done him good.” “I don’t admit anything.” (It’s much less satisfying arguing with Mike than with Vera or Pappa. He’s always so irritatingly reasonable.) “Are you sure you’re not just being a bit puritanical?” “Of course I’m not!” (So what if I am?) “It’s because he’s my father—I just want him to be grown up.” “He is being grown up, in his way.” “No he’s not, he’s being a lad. An eighty-four-year-old lad. You’re all being lads together. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. What a great pair of knockers. For goodness’ sake!” My voice has risen to a shriek. “But you can see it’s doing him good, this new relationship. It’s breathed new life into him. Just goes to show that you’re never too old for love.” “You mean for sex.” “Well, maybe that as well. Your Dad is just hoping to fulfil every man’s dream—to lie in the arms of a beautiful younger woman.” “Every man’s dream?” That night Mike and I sleep in separate beds.

In my own defence, I really believe that my distress arose somewhat less from the mere separation from dear little Flushie than from the consideration of how he was breaking his heart, cast upon the cruel world. Formerly, when he has been prevented from sleeping on my bed he has passed the night in moaning piteously, and often he has refused to eat from a strange hand.

Once, when he had just lulled her to sleep but she had gone no farther than dream's antechamber and was therefore still responsive to him, he said to her, "Good-bye, I'm going now." "Where?" she asked in her sleep. "Away," he answered sternly. "Then I'm going with you," she said, sitting up in bed. "No, you can't. I'm going away for good," he said, going out into the hall. She stood up and followed him out, squinting. She was naked beneath her short nightdress. Her face was blank, expressionless, but she moved energetically. He walked through the hall of the flat into the hall of the building (the hall shared by all the occupants), closing the door in her face. She flung it open and continue to follow him, convinced in her sleep that he meant to leave her for good and she had to stop him. He walked down the stairs to the first landing and waited for her there. She went down after him, took him by the hand, and led him back to bed. Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

When the high-speed chases and mandatory shoot-outs become too repetitive, I head over to the revival houses and watch gentler movies, in which the couples sleep in separate beds and everyone wears a hat. As my ticket is ripped, I briefly consider all the constructive things I could be doing. I think of the parks and the restaurants, or the pleasantries I'll never use on the friends I am failing to make. I think of the great city teaming on the other side of that curtain, and then the lights go down, and I love Paris.

Haven’t I tired you out yet, darling?” Ian whispered several hours later. “Yes,” she said with an exhausted laugh, her cheek nestled against his shoulder, her hand drifting over his chest in a sleepy caress. “But I’m too happy to sleep for a while yet.” So was Ian, but he felt compelled to at least suggest that she try. “You’ll regret it in the morning when we have to appear for breakfast,” he said with a grin, cuddling her closer to his side. To his surprise, the remark made her smooth forehead furrow in a frown. She tipped her face up to his, opened her mouth as if to ask him a question, then she changed her mind and hastily looked away. “What is it?” he asked, taking her chin between his thumb and forefinger and lifting her face up to his. “Tomorrow morning,” she said with a funny, bemused expression on her face. “When we go downstairs…will everyone know what we have done tonight?” She expected him to try to evade the question. “Yes,” he said. She nodded, accepting that, and turned into his arms. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” she said with a sigh of contentment and gratitude. “I’ll always tell you the truth,” he promised quietly, and she believed him. It occurred to Elizabeth that she could ask him now, when he’d given that promise, if he’d had anything to do with Robert’s disappearance. And as quickly as the thought crossed her mind, she pushed it angrily away. She would not defame their marriage bed by voicing ugly, unfounded suspicions carried to her by a man who obviously had a grudge against all Scots. This morning, she had made a conscious decision to trust him and marry him; now, she was bound by her vows to honor him, and she had absolutely no intention of going back on her own decision or on the vow she made to him in church. “Elizabeth?” “Mmmm?” “While we’re on the subject of truth, I have a confession to make.” Her heart slammed into her ribs, and she went rigid. “What is it?” she asked tautly. “The chamber next door is meant to be used as your dressing room and withdrawing room. I do not approve of the English custom of husband and wife sleeping in separate beds.” She looked so pleased that Ian grinned. “I’m happy to see,” he chuckled, kissing her forehead, “we agree on that.

Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?

Not much time had passed when he opened his eyes to find her standing over him. “Umm,” she said nervously. “Can you…? This is awkward. I’m still very squeamish about a man even seeing me on the treadmill, but could you share the bed, in your clothes, and manage not to do anything? I mean, even in your sleep?” “I’m okay right here, Brie. Don’t worry about me.” “I’m not worried about… I just thought, that couch isn’t big enough. And there’s a bed in the loft, but I just don’t want you way up there. And I… Could you lie beside me on the bed without—” “I’m not going to try anything with you, Brie. I know you can’t handle that.” “I don’t think I can sleep unless you’re…closer,” she said very softly. “Aw, honey…” “Then come on,” she said, turning back to the bedroom. He didn’t move for a moment, thinking. It didn’t take long. He wanted to be next to her, but he didn’t have to be. But if she needed him, he was there. He stood and got rid of his belt because of the big buckle, but everything else stayed on. And he went to the bedroom. She was curled up under the covers, her back facing out, leaving him room. So he lay down on the bed on top of the covers, giving her that security. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay,” she murmured. It wasn’t a big bed, just a double, and it was impossible to keep a lot of space between them. He curved around her back, spooning her, his face against her hair, his wrist resting over her hip. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay,” she murmured. He nestled in, his cheek against the fragrant silkiness of all that loose hair, his body wrapped around hers, though separated by layers of clothes and quilts, and it was a long, long time before he found sleep. By her even breathing, Mike knew she rested comfortably and that made him feel good. When he woke in the morning, she had turned in her sleep and lay in the crook of his arm, snuggled up close to him, her lips parted slightly, her breath soft and warm against his cheek. And he thought, Oh damn, she’s right—this is going to just break the hell out of my heart. *

These associations—Cavafy, my mother polishing the silver, a missionary aunt who fled the familiar turf of Tennessee for the otherness of Korea (presumably with the intent of teaching them something, hopefully with the result of being taught), my Mamaw’s fragrant old bureau with its smell of wax and polish—all of them would be brought to bear upon my painting of peppermints, but none of them would be visible; there’s no reason the viewer would know any of this. I could render only what can be seen—color and form, though the painter’s splendid artifice reveals to us texture, too, and rich associations of scent and flavor, all arriving through the gates of the eyes. And yet there is something more here, and that something is what nags at me to write this book, what tugs at my sleeve and my sleep. Why, if all that is personal has fallen away, should these pictures matter so? Why should they be alight with a feeling of intimacy? Interiority makes itself visible. In my imaginary still life, the “context and commentary” of my experience would be gone, but something would remain, something distilled and vibrant in the quality of attention itself. Is that what soul or spirit is, then, the outward-flying attention, the gaze that binds us to the world? Coorte’s asparagus, his gooseberries and shells, distill this quality down to its quietest, most startling essence: the eye suffuses what it sees with I. Not “I” in the sense of my story, the particulars of my life, the way my father tended his old asparagus beds each spring, the way my beloved loved the forms and colors of shells. But “I” as the quickest, subtlest thing we are: a moment of attention, an intimate engagement. Is that the lesson, then, that ultimately I becomes an eye? What is left of Adriaen Coorte but this? Isn’t that enough? […] That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of the sayable, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really separate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.

... sleeping with someone else and deceiving her husband, her poor husband, always so understanding and loving ... But only you know that this husband is unable to keep the loneliness at bay. Because something has been missing that even you don’t know how to pinpoint, because you love him and don’t want to lose him. But a shining knight promising adventure in distant lands is a much stronger lure than your desire for everything to remain as it is, even if at parties people stare at you and whisper among themselves that it would be better to tie a millstone around your neck and toss you overboard than let you be a terrible example. And to make matters worse, your husband quietly puts up with everything. He doesn’t complain or make a scene. He believes it will pass. You also know it will pass, but now it’s stronger than you. That’s the way things go for a month, two months, a year ... and everyone quietly puts up with it. But it’s not about asking permission. You look back and see that you also used to think like these people who have become your accusers. You also used to condemn those you knew were adulterers and imagined that if you lived somewhere else, the punishment would be stoning. Until the day it happens to you. Then you come up with a million excuses for your behavior and say you have the right to be happy, even for a little while, because dragon-slaying knights exist only in fairy tales. The real dragons never die, but you still have the right, just once in your life, to live out an adult fairy tale. Then comes the moment you tried to avoid at all costs, one that you had been putting off for so long: the moment you must decide to stay together or to separate forever. Along with this moment, however, comes the fear of making a mistake, no matter what decision you choose. And you hope someone will make the choice for you, throw you out of the house or bed, because it is impossible to go on like this. After all, we are no longer one person, we have become two or many, each completely different. And since you’ve never been through this before, you don’t know where it will end. The fact is that now you are facing a situation that will make one person suffer, or two, or many. But mostly it will destroy you, whatever your choice.

Consider the life of a pregnant sow. Her incredible fertility is the source of her particular hell. While a cow will give birth to only a single calf at a time, the modern factory sow will birth, nurse, and raise an average of nearly nine piglets — a number that has been increased annually by industry breeders. She will invariably be kept pregnant as much as possible, which will prove to be the majority of her life. When she is approaching her due date, drugs to induce labor may be administered to make the timing more convenient for the farmer. After her piglets are weaned, a hormone injection makes the sow rapidly “cycle” so that she will be ready to be artificially inseminated again in only three weeks. Four out of five times a sow will spend the sixteen weeks of her pregnancy confined in a “gestation crate” so small that she will not be able to turn around. Her bone density will decrease because of the lack of movement. She will be given no bedding and often will develop quarter-sized, blackened, pus-filled sores from chafing in the crate. (In one undercover investigation in Nebraska, pregnant pigs with multiple open sores on their faces, heads, shoulders, backs, and legs — some as large as a fist — were videotaped. A worker at the farm commented, “They all have sores. . . . There’s hardly a pig in there who doesn’t have a sore.”) More serious and pervasive is the suffering caused by boredom and isolation and the thwarting of the sow’s powerful urge to prepare for her coming piglets. In nature, she would spend much of her time before giving birth foraging and ultimately would build a nest of grass, leaves, or straw. To avoid excessive weight gain and to further reduce feed costs, the crated sow will be feed restricted and often hungry. Pigs also have an inborn tendency to use separate areas for sleeping and defecating that is totally thwarted in confinement. The pregnant pigs, like most all pigs in industrial systems, must lie or step in their excrement to force it through the slatted floor. The industry defends such confinement by arguing that it helps control and manage animals better, but the system makes good welfare practices more difficult because lame and diseased animals are almost impossible to identify when no animals are allowed to move.

My bedroom is separated from the main body of my house so that I have to go outside and cross some pseudo-Japanese stepping stones in order to go to sleep at night. Often I get rained on a little bit on my way to bed. It’s a benediction. A good night kiss. Romantic? Absolutely. And nothing to be ashamed of. If reality is a matter of perspective, then the romantic view of the world is as valid as any other - and a great deal more rewarding. It makes of life and unpredictable adventure rather that a problematic equation. Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a hundred times more sexy than a sunburnt palm tree, and more primal and contemplative, too. A steady, wind-driven rain composed music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things. Obviously, then, the Pacific Northwest's customary climate is perfect for a writer. It's cozy and intimate. Reducing temptation (how can you possibly play on the beach or work in the yard?), it turns a person inward, connecting them with what Jung called "the bottom below the bottom," those areas of the deep unconscious into which every serious writer must spelunk. Directly above my writing desk there is a skylight. This is the window, rain-drummed and bough-brushed, through which my Muse arrives, bringing with her the rhythms and cadences of cloud and water, not to mention the latest catalog from Victoria's Secret and the twenty-three auxiliary verbs. Oddly enough, not every local author shares my proclivity for precipitation. Unaware of the poetry they're missing, many malign the mist as malevolently as they non-literary heliotropes do. They wring their damp mitts and fret about rot, cursing the prolonged spillage, claiming they're too dejected to write, that their feet itch (athlete's foot), the roof leaks, they can't stop coughing, and they feel as if they're slowly being digested by an oyster. Yet the next sunny day, though it may be weeks away, will trot out such a mountainous array of pagodas, vanilla sundaes, hero chins and god fingers; such a sunset palette of Jell-O, carrot oil, Vegas strip, and Kool-Aid; such a sea-vista display of broad waters, firred islands, whale spouts, and boat sails thicker than triangles in a geometry book, that any and all memories of dankness will fizz and implode in a blaze of bedazzled amnesia. "Paradise!" you'll hear them proclaim as they call United Van Lines to cancel their move to Arizona.

Monitor baths: For some children bathtime winds them up. If that is the case, do it earlier in your routine, or leave it for the morning. For others, it is calming. • Avoid electronics and TV, which can have a reawakening effect on many children. They seem calm and cozied in as they watch TV, but then they are excited when the video is done. Best not to use electronics or TV close to bedtime. • Keep routines short and simple. They should take no more than an hour (at most, if you are including the bath), and thirty minutes is even better. Lengthier routines get children stirred up as they have extra time to anticipate the inevitable separation. • Let them have simple choices. “Would you like to read Curious George first or Goodnight Moon?” Such simple questions give them some, but limited control and keeps you moving forward to bed. • Sing or listen to a lullaby—either can be soothing. Some parents like to add prayers or a quiet review of the day. • Try to create a cozy corner in their room for sleep once your child moves to a bed. Make sure the bed is against a wall, ideally in a corner, and feels like a comforting place. • If one parent is coming home late, do your best not to have it during the good-night routine. For many children, the return of that parent stirs them up. Better that they see you, when they are refreshed, in the morning.

Some people assume that there must be something wrong with a relationship if they discover that partners are sleeping separately. But why? OK, human beings have sex and procreate, but whoever said they had to spend the whole night together in the same bed?

Hold up, you two,” Kevin stopped Alex and Andrew before they could claim separate beds. “There are only four beds, and since you two are twins, you’re going to be sharing one of them.” “WHAT?!” The shout came from them both. “That’s not fair,” Alex whined. “Yeah, why do I have to sleep with this idiot?” “Don’t act like you’re the victim here. I’m the one who’s gonna be stuck dealing with your antics, you damn bed-hogger.” Blink. A vein throbbed on Andrew’s head. “A bed-hogger, am I? Well, who’s the one who’s always stealing the sheets? Huh! Huh?!” Blink. Blink. “At least I don’t still wet the bed!” Massive blinking. “You… you promised you’d never tell anyone that! And I haven’t wet the bed in, uh, well… a while! Besides! Who was the one who left his bed a sopping mess the other day?!” “Why you… that was a special moment! SPECIAL!” Kevin, Eric, and Justin watched as the two fraternal twin brothers tackled each other to the ground. They rolled around on the floor, pushing and pulling and biting and hitting and clawing. It was like watching two dogs trying to chase each other’s tails. “Ne, Kevin, do you know what those two are talking about?” asked Eric. “No.” Kevin shook his head. “No, I don’t.” A pause. “And I don’t think I want to know.” “… Hehehe…

Lale carefully places the precious flower beside his bed before falling into a dreamless sleep, but the next morning when he wakes, the petals from his flower have separated and lie curled up beside the black center.

Sleeping Arrangements In many societies, children sleep with their parents at least through infancy and sometimes much longer. Some do so because they don’t have much space, but also because they believe co-sleeping to be an essential way to feed, comfort, protect, and bond with their babies and children. Here is a sampling of sleep arrangements in some traditional communities compiled by Carol Worthman and Melissa Melby: • In the leaf huts of Efe foragers of Africa, no one sleeps alone. Two adults, a baby, other children, a set of grandparents, and even a visitor routinely crash in the same small space. • Gebusi women in Papua New Guinea sleep together in a narrow area, about seven and a half feet wide, packed like sardines along with infants and children of varying ages. Men and older boys lie on sleeping platforms in a nearby space. • For the Gabra nomads in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, sleeping arrangements include separate beds for husband (and small boys) and wife (with infant and small children) in the sleeping portion of the tent. • The Balinese in Indonesia are social, even in sleep: “Being alone for even five minutes is undesirable, even when asleep, so widows and widowers who sleep alone are viewed as unfortunate and even socio-spiritually vulnerable,” Worthman and Melby wrote. • The Swat Pathan in Afghanistan and Pakistan allow a bed for each person, but no one gets his own room.

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov stirred at half past eight to the sound of rain on the eaves. With a half-opened eye, he pulled back his covers and climbed from bed. He donned his robe and slipped on his slippers. He took up the tin from the bureau, spooned a spoonful of beans into the Apparatus, and began to crank the crank. Even as he turned the little handle round and round, the room remained under the tenuous authority of sleep. As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain. But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists—the aroma of freshly ground coffee. In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things.

Instinctively, Cody glanced over but all he could see was the gaping silver-rimmed muzzle of a snub-nosed large caliber revolver an inch from his eye. The cylinder revolved, filled with dull lead bullets, as the trooper pulled the trigger. There was a tremendous explosion of light and thunder. He could no longer see out of his right eye, but it was more than that. There was no pain, only tremendous silence. Then he was floating, light as air, as if his lungs had filled with helium. He passed through the sheet metal roof of his pickup into the night, which was no longer cold. As he rose his eyesight was restored but he no longer had feeling in his limbs and his arms hung loose at his sides. He looked down. He could see the top of his pickup from above, the bed of his truck which was empty except for a crumpled fast-food wrapper in the corner, then the rusted metal roof of the First National Bar. The windows of his pickup strobed three more times but there was no sound and he felt nothing. Cody’s life didn’t pass before his eyes, but he clearly saw the photo of Justin in his football uniform and a vision of Jenny sleeping in bed from years before they separated the first time and he rose until he could see the river and the ribbon of highway through the valley and Jimmy and the truck driver emerge from the bar and stand on the porch and he knew what happened to those poor girls and he felt both cheated and angry at the same time and he wished he could do it all over again, everything. Especially the last five minutes. Then nothing. No sound, smell, or sight. Peace.

Meanwhile, Murray and Alexander each required additional goosing to get out of bed. Erica deftly picked the locks on both their rooms so we could wake them. Alexander had slept through the four separate alarms he had set for himself, swatting each one off in his sleep. (Somehow he’d even managed to toss the hotel’s alarm clock in the toilet without waking up.) He was dreaming when we roused him, murmuring, “Don’t worry, Princess Daphne. This isn’t the first nuclear bomb I’ve defused.” When we roused him, he snapped awake, startled and disoriented, and promptly fell out of bed, tangled in his sheets. But at least he got up. Murray, on the other hand, did everything he could to stay in bed. He cocooned himself in his blankets, buried his head under his pillows, and groaned, “Can’t you guys infiltrate this place without me? I’m only borderline competent anyhow. I’ll probably screw everything up.” Normally, that would have been a decent argument, but we knew we couldn’t let Murray out of our sight. Rather than debate the point, Erica simply went to the bathroom, filled a cup with frigid water, and upended it over Murray’s head.

This is what it had come to. The people who had nursed him from the beginning of his life, whose energies he had harnessed for his own use up until this moment, were now called upon to care for him as he faced his last days on earth—sitting up with him at night, sleeping on pallets around his bed to be ready to hear when he called out in need, in fear, or out of simple loneliness. These African Americans, whom he had sentimentalized as having the best hearts of any people in the world, had given their lives to him—followed him about, cleaned up after him, no doubt worried about him, for his sake and their own—slept with him, and borne him children. He had held them as chattel, trying, in the case of the Hemingses, to soften a reality that could never be made soft. While he claimed to know and respect the quality of their hearts, he could never truly see them as human beings separate from him and his own needs, desires, and fears. In the end, all he really knew of their hearts was what they were willing to show him, and they carried enough knowledge in their heads to know his limitations and the perils of giving too much of themselves in the context of their society.

For the last week, Emma has crawled into our queen-sized bed every single night to sleep. Fortunately, Noah and I sleep with a gap the size of the Atlantic Ocean between us.

Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn to the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?

He should have shot the lamb the night before. That was true, too; he ought to have done the proper thing, the manly thing. Clyde couldn't tell, couldn't imagine, why he hadn't gone through with it. But the night before, after he and Beulah had bedded down the ewe and her offspring in the stall, he had lain awake on his cot listening to the hearth fire. At first, every snap of cinder and spark had been distinct, but as sleep settled into him, the crackling fire had blurred and blended to a low and steady music. It was one sound, one song, the wind across the prairie was one endless breath, a body that never stopped sighing. It put Clyde in mind of the dream--the fever dream, and the certainty of oneness that had come to him then--all separate and distinct sounds merging into one endless hum.

You’re going to what?” It wasn’t anything Sean hadn’t asked himself every five minutes or so since getting sucked into Emma’s plan, but it sounded different when his cousin said it. Or maybe it was Kevin’s subsequent pointing and laughing his ass off that changed the tone. “It’s only a month,” Sean said, maybe a little defensively. The shorter, dark-haired waitress—Darcy, he thought her name was—put a beer in front of him and he took a long pull. He’d been looking forward to it all day. Kevin looked skeptical. “A month of living with a total stranger, pretending you’re so madly in love with her you’re going to marry her? For real?” “No, not for real, moron. For pretend. That’s the point.” His cousin laughed some more, then pulled out his cell phone and started texting. Sean craned his neck, but couldn’t see the screen. “What the hell are you doing?” Kevin chuckled. “Telling my wife.” “You could have waited until I went upstairs.” “No, I really couldn’t.” Kevin shut his phone, but it was only a few seconds before it chimed. He looked at the screen, chuckled, then was texting again. Sean pulled out his phone and opened a new message to Kevin. I’m still here, asshole. Send. A couple minutes later, Kevin grinned and slid his phone back in his pocket. “Beth wants to know the sleeping arrangements since there’s no way even a grandmother will buy a separate-bedrooms story.” “Beth wants to know, huh?” “Trust me, by now the whole family wants to know.” Sean was tempted to bang his head against the bar, but he wouldn’t be able to knock himself out, so he didn’t waste the effort. “There’s a sofa in the bedroom. She’ll sleep on it and I get the bed.” “Chivalrous.” “I’m too tall for a sofa.” “I don’t know Emma well, but I seem to recall she’s not exactly short.” Kevin gave him a knowing look. “Not exactly hard on the eyes, either.” That she wasn’t.

There’s something else, too, Miss Emmie.” Stevens had gone bashful now, and Emmie was intrigued. “Here.” Stevens beckoned her to follow him out the back of the stables, to where a separate entrance led to a roomy foaling stall. “He said you needed summat other’n t’mule, and you’re to limber her up, as Miss Winnie will be getting a pony soon.” A sturdy dapple-gray mare stood regarding Emmie from over a pile of hay. She turned a soft eye on Emmie and came over to the half door to greet her visitors. “Oh, Stevens.” Emmie’s eyes teared up again. “She is so pretty… so pretty.” “He left ye a message.” Stevens disappeared back into the barn and came out with a sealed envelope. “I can tack her up if ye like.” Emmie tore open the envelope with shaking fingers. How dare he be so thoughtful and generous and kind? Oh, how dare he… She couldn’t keep the horse, of course; it would not be in the least proper, but dear Lord, the animal was lovely… My dear Miss Farnum, Her name is Petunia, and she is yours. I have taken myself to points distant, so by the time I return, you will have fallen in love with her, and I will be spared your arguments and remonstrations. She is as trustworthy and reliable a lady as I have met outside your kitchen, and at five years of age, has plenty of service yet to give. Bothwell has been alerted you will be joining him on his rides, should it please you to do so. And if you are still determined not to keep the horse, dear lady, then consider her my attempt at consolation to you for inflicting Scout on the household in my absence. St. Just He’d drawn a sketch in the corner of Scout, huge paws splayed, tongue hanging, his expression bewildered, and broken crockery scattered in every direction. The little cartoon made Emmie smile through her tears even as Winnie tugged Scout out behind the stables to track Emmie down. “Are you crying, Miss Emmie?” Winnie picked up Emmie’s hand. “You mustn’t be sad, as we have Scout now to protect us and keep us company.” “It isn’t Scout, Winnie.” Emmie waved a hand toward the stall where Petunia was still hanging her head over the door, placidly watching the passing scene. “Oh.” Winnie’s eyes went round. “There’s a new horse, Scout.” She picked up her puppy and brought him over to the horse. The mare sniffed at the dog delicately, then at the child, then picked up another mouthful of hay. “Her name’s Petunia,” Emmie said, finding her handkerchief. “The earl brought her from York so I can ride out with the vicar.” “She’s very pretty,” Winnie said, stroking the velvety gray nose. “And not too big.” The mare was fairly good size, at least sixteen and a half hands, and much too big for Winnie. “Maybe once I get used to her, I can take you up with me, Winnie. Would you like that?” “Would I?” Winnie squealed, setting the dog down. “Did you hear that, Scout? Miss Emmie says we can go for a ride. Oh… We must write to the earl and thank him, Miss Emmie, and I must tell Rose I have a puppy, too. I can knight Scout, can’t I?” “Of course you may,” Emmie said, reaching for Winnie’s hand. “Though you must know knights would never deign to be seen in the castle kitchens, except perhaps in the dead of winter, when it’s too cold to go charging about the kingdom.” “Did knights sleep in beds?” “Scout can stay with Stevens above the carriage house when you have repaired to your princess tower for your beauty sleep.” “I’ll ask Scout.” It

Shall I get you something to eat?” Smiling, Cam shook his head. “Not before I have a good, thorough wash.” There were many things they needed to discuss, but it could all wait. “Go to bed, monisha—you look weary.” “So do you,” Amelia said, standing on her toes. Cam held very still as she pressed her lips to his cheek. A long hesitation, and then she asked tentatively, “Will you come to me tonight?” The shy invitation nearly undid him. Here was an opening—a sign of acceptance—but he cared too much about her to take advantage when she was obviously tired. “No.” He took her into his arms. “You need to sleep more than you need my groping and fondling.” She flushed a little, and leaned harder against him. “I don’t mind your groping and fondling.” Cam laughed. “What a testament to my lovemaking skills.” “Come to me,” she whispered. “Hold me while we sleep.” “Hummingbird,” he returned, his lips brushing her brow, “if I hold you, I don’t trust myself not to make love to you. So we’ll sleep in separate beds.” He looked down at her with a smile. “Just for tonight.

The New England wilderness March 1, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees Somebody was tapping Mercy in the ribs. It couldn’t be Tommy, who pounced, or Sam, who jabbed. It wasn’t John, who kissed, or Benny, who snuggled. Whichever brother it was had wet the bed in the night, and wet Mercy with him, and so far it was still warm, but the moment she separated from that sleeping brother, it would be cold and awful. But the tapping would not stop, and Mercy woke to see a deerskin legging with a painted running deer. “Up,” said her Indian. The paint had partly peeled off his face, giving him a patchy smeared look. She remembered the day before backward: the marching, the carrying, the slipping, the snow. She thrust memory away, folding it closed. She would not think about the attack. Lord, please, she prayed. Let me see Sam and John and Tommy and Benny. Let Uncle Nathaniel and Aunt Mary and the cousins be here. Let it not be true abut Marah. Let Stepmama and the baby be safe and sound and walking fast enough. The Indian stooped to take her hand and pull her to her feet, giving a slight grunt as he did. For the first time she saw that he too had been hurt and that the paint on his side was his own dried blood, and Mercy knew then that she had experienced war, and that it was true about Marah. She did not take his hand, knowing what it had done. Rolling Daniel ahead of her, she was out of the snow hole and on her feet in a moment. There was some sort of assembly going on. The prisoners were stumbling toward Mr. Williams, who stood alone, his hands raised to the sky. How extraordinary, thought Mercy. They’re going to let us pray. She was glad, because a day without morning prayer was unthinkable, but it didn’t seem like something the Indians would permit. French Indians were Catholic, though, converted by priests from France itself. Mr. Williams often said that if you were Catholic, you hated God and were evil and stole little children from their beds. The warriors had gathered in clumps. Yesterday had been complete victory for the Indians, and yet there was no rejoicing among them. Her captor’s eyes were on a bundle in the snow. She had seen enough death in her life to know it. One of the Indian wounded had not survived the night. The posture of her Indian was human. It was grief.

Virgil held intricate unconventional beliefs, not necessarily Christian, but not necessarily un-Christian, either, derived from his years of studying nature, and his earlier years, his childhood years, with the Bible. God, he suspected, might not be a steady-state consciousness, omnipotent, omnipresent, timeless. God might be like a wave front, moving into an unknowable future; human souls might be like neurons, cells of God’s own intelligence. . . . Far out, dude; pass the joint. Whatever God was, Virgil seriously doubted that he worried too much about profanity, sex, or even death. He left the world alone, people alone, each to work out a separate destiny. And he stranded people like Virgil, who wonder about the unseen world, but were trapped in their own animal passions, and operated out of moralities that almost certainly weren’t God’s own, if, indeed, he had one. Virgil further worried that he was a guy who simply wanted to eat his cake, and have it, too—his philosophy, as a born-again once pointed out to him, pretty much allowed him to carry on as he wished, like your average godless commie. He got to “godless commie” and went to sleep. And worried in his sleep. FIVE HOURS LATER, his cell phone went off, and he sat bolt upright, fumbled around for it, found it in his jeans pocket, on the floor at the foot of the bed.

Divinely sanctioned wife-beating “There is no basis in Islamic theology to support domestic abuse of any kind,” declared Qanta A. Ahmed, author of In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom, in May 2009.43 But it all depends on one’s definition of “abuse:” wife-beating exists in all cultures, but only in Islam does it enjoy divine sanction. The Koran tells men to beat their disobedient wives after first warning them and then sending them to sleep in separate beds (4:34)—a punishment that suggests the Koran regards women as sexually insatiable and needing to be kept under control. This is, of course, an extremely controversial verse, so it is worth noting how several translators render the key word here, waidriboohunna:              Pickthall: “and scourge them”              Yusuf Ali: “(and last) beat them (lightly)”              Al-Hilali/Khan: “(and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful)”              Shakir: “and beat them”              Sher Ali: “and chastise them”              Khalifa: “then you may (as a last alternative) beat them”              Arberry: “and beat them”              Rodwell: “and scourge them”              Sale: “and chastise them”              Asad: “then beat them”              Dawood: “and beat them

Femi turned around as he heard the door swing open. Chioma appeared in a white thick towel tied around her sexy body, from above her small and well-rounded breasts. Her artificial hair took refuge under a transparent shower cap. Even with a washed-up makeup-free face, her beauty radiated and penetrated every inch of the tastelessly furnished room. Tension traveled across the floor that separated the pair as they stared hard and awkwardly at each other’s sexy figure. After a momentary loss of consciousness, the two were brought back to their senses. ‘You need to turn around so I can get dressed,’ she purred. As a gentleman would, Femi, without any utterance, quickly turned away without nurturing a second thought. He stared through the window, again, at the police van parked outside. He tried to observe what was going on inside the van, but nothing. His attention was brought back to Chioma as he stared at her from the back of his eyes. He went into whirlwinds of impure thoughts. ‘Femi… Femi… Femi!’ He was brought back to his senses as Chioma repeatedly called out his name. He slowly trained his sight upon Chioma who was dressed in a sexy, semi-transparent, cream nightgown that revealed shades of her nakedness. The nipples of her erect boobies were stiff and swollen. The gown terminated far above her knees, exposing her succulent fresh thighs. Femi’s heart began to race fast. He cleared his throat and quickly caught his breath. ‘Where do I sleep?’ Chioma asked in a half-sexy voice. ‘You have the bed. I’ll have the rug,’ Femi proposed. ‘Are you going to be comfortable sleeping on the rug? We can sleep on the bed together as long as you promise to remain on your side of the bed.’ Femi considered the very tempting offer, but summoned the strength to turn it down. ‘Don’t worry about me. I will be comfortable on the rug. I sometimes sleep on the rug when I’m alone.’ Chioma slipped into the bed in her nightgown and camisole, while Femi strolled to the light switch fastened to the wall.

When Prince Charles arrived home from a recent private visit to France she found his presence so oppressive that she literally ran out of Kensington Palace. Diana phoned a friend who was grieving over the death of a loved one. She could sense that her chum was crying and said: “Right I’m coming over now.” As her friend recalls: “She came instantly for me but when she arrived she was visibly unsettled. Diana told me: “I’m here for you but I’m also here for me. My husband appeared and I just had to fly out and escape.’ She was all of a dither.” As far as is practicable they lead separate lives, joining forces only to maintain a façade of unity. These reunions merely give the public a glimpse into their isolated existences. At last year’s soccer Cup Final at Wembley they sat next to each other but never exchanged a word or glance during the ninety-minute game. More recently Prince Charles missed his wife’s cheek and ended up kissing her neck at the end of a polo match during their tour of India. Even their notepaper which used to have a distinctive intertwined “C and D” has been discarded in favour of individual letterheadings. When she is at Kensington palace he will be at Highgrove or Birkhall on the Balmoral estate. At Highgrove she has the large four-poster in the master bedroom; he sleeps in a brass bed which he borrowed from his son, Prince William, because he found its extra width more comfortable after he broke his right arm during a polo match. Even these distant sleeping arrangements have led to marital discord. When Prince William asked for his bed back, his father refused. “Sometimes I don’t know who the baby is in this family,” commented Diana caustically. The days when she affectionately called him “Hubcap” are long gone. As James Gilbey notes: “Their lives are spent in total isolation. It’s not as though they ring each other and have sweet chats each evening and say: ‘Darling what have you been doing?’ It simply doesn’t happen.

How’s the orange juice?” Sara asked. “Tastes like paint thinner,” he replied. “What time is it?” “Seven a.m. Did you sleep well?” “Not really,” he said. “I don’t like sleeping in separate beds.” “Neither do I,” Sara said, “but my bed is only a yard away.” “Makes it worse. Sort of like being able to see the Holy Grail and not grasp it.” “How poetic.” “To put it somewhat less poetically, I want your bod.” “And

I will set the safeguards and sleep a few feet above you to ensure your protection,” Jacques said softly. He had lost his sister to the assassin; he was not about to lose his brother. He needed the rejuvenating soil himself. Even with Eric and Byron to replenish him, he knew he was still weak and needed the healing sleep. Mikhail lifted an eyebrow. “Five minutes in her company, and you are ready to mutiny.” A small, weary smile softened the hard line of his mouth. He closed his eyes tiredly, guilt washing over him. It would be Raven who bore the brunt of this night. He would be deep in the ground, far beyond pain, beyond knowledge of separation, beyond grief and the hatred for his species. Raven would be surrounded by the assassins, in danger every moment. More than that, she would have to endure the loss of their mind touch. Csitri--little one. He put a wealth of love in his summons. You are better? Relief. I am getting there quickly. Are you in bed? Always the bed thing.

Jesse was moaning in her sleep. She was a delicate woman of thirty-five with long curly red hair. She lay deep in a shapeless feather mattress, cradled in a wooden bed which hung from the ceiling on four rusted chains. Somewhere in the big rambling house a clock chimed. She must wake up. Two hours until the Vampire Lestat’s concert. But she could not leave the twins now. This was new to her, this part unfolding so rapidly, and the dream was maddeningly dim as all the dreams of the twins had been. Yet she knew the twins were in the desert kingdom again. The mob surrounding the twins was dangerous. And the twins, how different they looked, how pale. Maybe it was an illusion, this phospherescent luster, but they appeared to glow in the semidarkness, and their movements were languid, almost as if they were caught in the rhythm of a dance. Torches were thrust at them as they embraced one another; but look, something was wrong, very wrong. One of them was now blind. Her eyelids were shut tight, the tender flesh wrinkled and sunken. Yes, they have plucked out her eyes. And the other one, why she make those terrible sounds? “Be still, don’t fight anymore,” said the blind one, in the ancient language which was always understandable in the dreams. And out of the other win came a horrid, gutteral moaning. She couldn’t speak. They’d cut out her tongue! I don’t want to see any more, I want to wake up. But the soldiers were pushing their way through the crowd, something dreadful was to happen, and the twins became suddenly very still. The soldiers took hold of them, dragged them apart. Don’t separate them! Don’t you know what this means to them? Get the torches away. Don’t set them on fire! Don’t burn their red hair. The blind twin reached out for her sister, screaming her name: “Mekare!” And Mekare, the mute one, who could not answer, roared like a wounded beast. The crowd was parting, making way for two immense stone coffins, each carried in a great heavy bier. Crude these sarcophagi, yet the lids had the roughened shape of human faces, limbs. What have the twins done to be put in these coffins? I can’t stand it, the biers being set down, the twins dragged towards the coffins, the crude stone lids being lifted. Don’t do it! The blind one is fighting as if she can see it, yet they are overpowering her, lifting her and putting her inside the stone box. In mute terror, Mekare is watching, though she herself is being dragged to the bier. Don’t lower the lid, or I will scream for Mekare! For both of them- Jesse sat up, her eyes opened. She had screamed. Alone in the house, with no one to hear her, she’d screamed and she could feel the echo still. Then nothing but the quiet settling around her, and the faint creaking of the bed as it moved on its chains. The song of the birds outside in the forest, the deep forest; and her own curious awareness that the clock had struck six.

But if it were possible to see everyone who has retired to their beds in a great city at night, in London, New York or Tokyo, for example, if we imagined that the buildings were made of glass and that all the rooms were lit, the sight would be deeply unsettling. Everywhere there would be people lying motionless in their cocoons, in room after room for miles on end, and not just at street level, along roads and crossroads, but even up in the air, separated by plateaus, some of them twenty metres above ground, some fifty, some a hundred. We would be able to see millions of immobile people who have withdrawn from others in order to lie in a coma throughout the night. Sleep’s vertiginous link to primordial times, not just with human life as it first unfolded on the plains of Africa three hundred thousand years ago, but with life on earth in its very first form, rising out of the sea and coming ashore four hundred million years ago, would become apparent. And a bed would no longer be merely a piece of furniture acquired from a shop, but a boat that every human being has and which we board every evening to let ourselves be carried through the night.

He bends and gently picks the short stem. He will find a way to give it to Gita tomorrow. Back in his room, Lale carefully places the precious flower beside his bed before falling into a dreamless sleep, but the next morning when he wakes, the petals from his flower have separated and lie curled up beside the black center. Death alone persists in this place.