I’m teaching storytelling at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health this week.
This morning, I returned to my room to find a note from housekeeping:
“You don’t need to make the bed.”
I laughed. I didn’t make the bed. When I went to sleep last night, I climbed onto the bed and simply fell asleep atop the sheets and blanket. It was a warm, summer night, so I had no need to slide beneath the covers.
When I woke up in the morning, I was still in the same position, lying flat on my back in the center of the bed. I stood up, leaving a perfectly made bed behind me.
I told some people in my workshop about the note, and they looked at me like I was a monster.
“You just fell asleep on top of the covers?” one woman asked. “Who does that?”
“I can’t fall asleep if I’m not under the covers,” said another.
“What kind of monster are you?” a third asked.
There were mentions of Frankenstein as well, and one person suggested that I might be a robot.
I really didn’t expect this reaction.
I’ve always been able to fall asleep this way. At summer camp as a boy, I often slept atop my sleeping bag because of the heat. I’ve taken naps at work when I was sick by lying down on the carpeted floor and falling asleep during my lunch hour. When I was homeless and living in my car, I slept on the backseat, where blankets and sheets were impossible.
Is this really as strange as the folks in my workshop made it seem?
