Beds
I am writing in my journal while stretched out in my bed. It occurs to me that a good portion of my incarnation thus far has been spent in bed. I don’t know what happens at the point of death but if it entails a fast forward review of my life, the bedroom scenes will hopefully add some juiciness to the flick.
One of my earliest recollections of being in bed comes from when I was maybe three years old. I was hospitalized due to some mysterious condition that initially looked like a bad case of swollen glands that would not go away. Back then, doctors were happy to remove tonsils when faced with sore throats or boys with bad attitudes. Fortunately my tonsils remained in tact but I was kept in isolation in a hospital room for a few weeks. My mother was told that visiting me, even coming to the observation window, was not a good idea. I would only get upset. Since no one in my family was allowed to visit, I spent long stretches in bed wondering whether I had been abandoned. The bed became a place for crying into a pillow and waiting for something to happen. That might have been the circumstance in which I went through a bout of bedwetting.
Another stark memory pivots around praying before sleeping. We weren’t a church going family (especially my father) and so it seems strange that memories surface about kneeling bedside and reciting the Lord’s Prayer or the more dreadful one that goes: “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake. I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Hmmm… what little kid wants to reflect upon dying before drifting off to dreamland?
As the saying goes, “I lost my virginity” in a bed at age 15. It wasn’t my bed, and I wasn’t with someone that I even knew that well. Earlier in the evening, I was playing a music gig. It was the free love era of the sixties, and this seemed part of the package. She was more experienced than me and I remain grateful for her guidance and initiation in the dark. Different versions (that sounds like different ‘virgins’) of beds followed my lovemaking explorations: couches, cars, and a caravan (for real… not just for alliteration purposes). While lovemaking stoked the fires of ecstatic experiences, I equally developed a fondness for cuddling. That intimate act of spooning remains one of the great joys within my long-term relationship. Falling asleep in your lover’s arms smudges the borderland between self and other, resulting in the palpable sense of us.
Bedtime, for me, also includes the mystical act of dreaming. I’ve studied Jungian dream analysis and so I welcome the surreal themes and images that come with dreaming. Last night, while the moon was full, a biker dude drilled into my right leg with an ordinary, cordless drill. No anaesthesia or pain killers. Once he made a hole, the biker sucked some poison or bad energy out of my leg and spit it out like some traditional shaman. I’m fascinated with this image of the medicine man in me who rides a chopper.
Beds have also been places for me to mend. I recovered for several weeks in bed when, in mid-life, I was diagnosed with a nasty case of double pneumonia. My bed has also held me during times of grieving, visioning, meditating, or moving through a dark night of the soul. At some point I will leave this dimension while reclined on my deathbed - the bookend to a birthing bed. As I say farewell to loved ones, my deepest hope is that I don’t wet the bed again.