Few places in the world are as therapeutic as our own bed; our bed deserves to be recognised as the supreme location of mental reorganisation and consolation. Were we unable to travel any distance beyond its limits, we would still have a world of reassurance at our fingertips. A bed does not – of course – carry any overt glamour. We don’t earn respect or interest for revealing that we have, once again, spent the weekend, or even the whole holidays, sleeping and reflecting under the duvet. A bed lacks the grandeur of the desert or the edifying ancientness of a past civilisation. And yet it may, at points, be exactly what we need to dampen our mania or make sense of our sadness. A bed offers ideal conditions in which to think. It can be hard do so properly at a desk. The mind may release its better thoughts only when we are horizontal and are under little pressure to produce very much. It is then that our wilder, odder, more valuable ideas dare to make themselves felt – and we should be ready for them with an ample supply of notepads and pens. Thinking in bed, we can go back over a relationship, we can question our worries, we can push back against our self-doubt and impulses to self-sabotage. At other times, thinking itself will be too much. As small children well know, there are moments when it may be most sensible simply to burst into tears. Away from frightening or shaming eyes, we can give way to sorrow in the bedclothes in a way we won’t dare to in any other room. The pillows can absorb our tears, the duvet can muffle the crying. We can despair all that we need to: we can tell ourselves that nothing will ever be right, and that we have been a mistake from the very start. Exaggeration has its pleasures. And after a while of this form of limitless grief, we will be readier to return with perspective to our more hopeful thoughts. There might well be alternatives, there could be a way forward; a plan may start to emerge. Often, we’re brittle and desperate not because the problems are truly too large, but because we’re simply too tired. The distinction is easy enough to observe in the case of children. A three-year-old who throws their bowl of animal pasta on the floor and declares that they ‘hate mummy’ isn’t a monster, they’re just exhausted. After a good night’s sleep, they'll be a delight. We should extend the same kindly insight to our adult selves. We can, in addition – at quieter moments – use our beds as tools of travel. They may be physically weighty but they are nimble at carrying us back in time to journeys we have made and, without necessarily knowing it, minutely stored in our memories. When sleep refuses to come, we can journey back to summer evenings in the Mediterranean or to a friendship that we had made in a foreign city. Far more remains than we might have imagined; as our bed teaches us, we don’t always need to move our physical selves back to a place in order to feel as if we had returned to it. The planet offers us so many places in which we can find healing. We should not neglect the one that we are (hopefully) already cosily ensconced in – or not too very far from.
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