Different Beds for Different Times in Your Life

Each one of us, for each person at every age, there is a bed, a place that is harbour to our most intimate moments, our moments of abandon.

The cradle has always symbolised the dawn of a new life. Ready before birth, it expresses all the hope and passion of love and of lovers. The centre of their joy, it holds sway in the bedroom, a nest of pink or blue. Occupied for several months or several years, it is then tucked away in an attic where it patiently awaits a new birth. Then brought down, cleaned, and renewed, it resumes its place of honour.

Bigger and without the wooden bars of the crib, the child's bed reflects a budding independence. It is easy for the child to climb in and as easy for him to fall out. The child feels less as if he were in a nest and more as if he might take flight. He doesn't like to go to bed at night, and likes sleeping even less in the morning. Drifting towards sleep, during those long moments seem to last an eternity, he stares at the shadows playing on his walls and windows, by turns frightened and reassured. The sights seen from this bed and the sounds that surround it become a most valued and cherished memory. Imagination, fear and love, cries and laughter, all inhabit this first landscape of childhood. A place of dreams and nightmares, the bed is a refuge, a secret growing, and sometimes an impregnable fortress. The most beautiful moments are those the child shares with his mother who provides comfort, with his father who tells a story, or with another child who spends the night. He jumped up and down on it, discovering the pleasures of flight, the glee of pillow fights, and the enthusiasm of Indian tent games. Throughout it all, the bed remains a shelter during chickenpox, sore throats, and fevers. The covers protect, the sheets are cool, lights world, and the Chancellor, overcome with fatigue.

The bed of solitude is that of the adolescent. It is a bed that witnesses innumerable frustrations, a place where one senses are awakened, the yearning for company one moment, solitude the next. It is the bed of first dreams and first disappointments, of love and whispered confidences, the place where one finds oneself alone, sad, and misunderstood, providing in the childhood teddy bear. It is bed where one might read, write, study, or simply daydream. Youth is the Epoque idols. Their photos and posters decorate the walls, rock singers and bass players, actors and philosophers. One goes to sleep daydreaming of becoming marilyn, Madonna, or Albert Einstein.

The first bit of love is really a premeditated one. It is a bit of passion and a promise. It is not unexpected bed, a bed of adventure, a memory of a life. The young adult bed often consist of a mattress on the floor. Scatter cushions and books reflect an untidy life, a life of early efforts, the first success and sometimes failure. It is a better shelter's those frightening moments of love, so full of life and hope. The bed of newlyweds is large, sumptuous, and omnipotent. Greeted with great attention to detail, it sheets are chosen with scrupulous care, embroidered, and perfumed. In the days of kings and queens suspect was at the centre of the castle, a sacred place, where future ministers were conceived and born. Others, not your bed is offered in a hotel. It is a bed that is borrowed, but which keeps all its importance, the memory as the bed of the first night.

And then there is the bed that better symbolises the achievement of love, the better the first arguments; the lazy, intimate breakfasts; the conception, pregnancy, television, reading and even family picnics. It's a bed that evolves and protects the family unit. It changes as the years pass and tastes alter. It's a bed that has been designed, decorated; and almost perfect reflection of the couple that inhabit its. Sometimes it splits into two, becoming twin beds, or perhaps it takes on separate personalities, one feminine, the other masculine. As a bed separate, soda lives, becoming individual once again.

There are also temporary beds. Anonymous beds, where one stays on in leaps, hospital, hotel, or guest beds. They are witnesses to various conditions of life. And then there are beds and trains, which drawn to sleep, lulled by the worm sparkle wheels and tracks. There are other luxurious, rocking beds of cruise liners and even the bumpy bits of aeroplanes. He's beds that move up clouds, flying carpets, the sweep on the way towards answering horizons.

The light games and the bed becomes the place of final wisdom. As one dreams that last dream, that there is one loved will be blessed, the bed, witness to the most intimate moments, remain silent in the room, awaiting a new beginning.