S l e e p e r

This Just In: Separate Bedrooms Are Allowed

Finally, it's in the paper of record. You heard it here first, you knew it in your heart; now architects are designing homes with separate bedchambers and sleeping nooks.

By the time you read this, a contractor will have just finished installing a neat hammock in someone's library, to the delight of the partner of a snorer, or someone who likes to like awake and read for hours after the co-sleeper has retired. Someone will be rejoicing that his toss-and-turn spouse will have a separate room in which to thrash about till four. It's all so sensible and intelligent.

Your mission now, sleepers, is to help erase the stigma that still lingers about this.

Because you know that alternative co-sleeping has nothing to do with that subject this site is not devoted to.

Now read the New York Times article ("To Have, Hold and Cherish, Until Bedtime").

Then turn out the light and get to it.

Freud and the Two Beds!

Now listen. It's not really breaking news that Sigmund Freud was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who lived with Sigmund and Martha for 42 years, is it? Does this surprise you at all?

Let's move on to the important thing: The room at the Schweizerhaus, the Alpine inn the two shared. Room 11, to be exact.*

Sleeper isn't saying two beds are necessarily sexy, but isn't there something about the double feather puffs that makes you want to tumble all over them? Sigmund and Minna, side by side on their sofalets, he smoking, she teasing him with a stockinged leg? Splashing up in their twinnie sinks and, afterward, he snoring away in the clarifying Alpine air, she peacefully dormant across the two-inch divide?

It's not that they couldn't get a room with a king bed. It's that there were no king beds.

Lie back, my darlings, and think about it.

*Yes, this is it. The television is new. Sleeper wagers that, if it were available in 1898, Sigmund and Minna might have watched Animal Planet in the morning.