bed covers 2 – copyright erie chapman 2012

Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.
-Emily Dickinson

   How long since you have used the earth as your bed?

   Western society alienates us from the ground as a place to sleep. Why lie in the woods when we can climb in to our Serta Perfect Sleeper, our Sleep Number Bed, or our high-priced Tempurpedic?

   But, our beds are too powerful an image to be reduced to commercial names. Sacred things happen there.

   We were likely conceived in a bed. It is equally likely that we conceived our own babies there. 

   We could not rise from our first bed unaided until beyond our infancy.

   In illness, we take to our bed.

   We spend a quarter to a third of our lives in sleep. There we experience dreams that bend our consciousness. 

   It is remarkable how quickly we discard the stuff of our dreams. Desperate to reorient to the world's "reality" we cast off the "crazy" landscape we have just left.

   Yet, thinkers as far back as Plato have told us that life itself is a dream.

   Our everyday mind too often and too easily discards what it cannot at first understand. That is how we read our dreams.

   Beds are among the most intimate places we occupy. We even change our clothes (or wear none) to sleep in them. 

   Among the most powerful images of caregivers are those portraying them at the bedside.

   Our ultimate bed will be our last. We want it to be as Dickinson described:

Be its mattress straight,
Be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise' yellow noise
Interrupt this ground.