THE INTIMATE TOGETHERNESS OF SLEEP

Or perhaps the prospect of a nocturnal voyage under the comforter with your lover condemns you to a night of insomnia or a longing to be somewhere -- anywhere -- else. In any case, how you sleep together and how you feel about it can be one of the most sensitive barometers of your relationship.

Sleeping is just about the most intimate thing you can do together -- more intimate than sex. Think about it. Two strangers can meet and throw themselves into uninhibited sensual passion. But sleeping together, without emotional closeness, seems strange, all wrong. A male writer puts it this way: "There's an intimacy to waking up with someone. If I've simply had a one-night stand, I usually find that whatever sexual feelings I had for that woman were unrelated to sleeping and waking with her. Most of the time, I can't wait to leave." This man remembers a decade of sleeping with his former wife: "I was always awed by that ultimate closeness. Before our marriage soured, sleeping together was a bond beyond words."

A Secure Interlude

Some people look forward every night to sleep as a long interlude of blissful security. For one woman, who works as a translator, sleeping with her longtime lover has a primal quality, an intimacy and safety that sustains her. "The best thing is knowing that when I wake up, there's someone hugging me -- even before he knows why," she says. "And before I'm really awake, I reach for him -- for the animal warmth and the familiar scent of his skin." She adds that 10 minutes later one of them could be yelling from the shower, and later he might do the most exasperating things. But during that long nocturnal voyage and the closeness that goes deeper than speech, they are truly mated.

For another woman, the twilight time with her husband -- just before they fall asleep -- is when she forgets the demands of her work as a corporate art consultant and her anxieties about dieting and when she leaves behind dark thoughts about the future. "Just the touch, the holding and being held, dissolves my worries. They don't seem important when I lie in that deep cocoon I share with {my husband}," she says.

Anyone who tries to interview people about "sleeping together" will discover that we often confuse "sleep" with "sex." The subjects recoil, afraid they will be asked about the classified secrets of their sex lives. But most people who report good sleeping relationships say that this bond goes beyond sex -- it's an even deeper sort of physical harmony.

In 18th-century New England, Holland and Great Britain, sleep was separated from sex in a courting custom known as bundling. This was a sleep-over date in which both partners wore lots of clothes and were accompanied by chaperons, who slept in the next room. Sometimes the couple was even separated by a board. It seems that a test of "sleeping together" -- without sex -- was a better indication of marital compatibility than a date. They may have been right.

Body Language

For longtime partners, sleeping side by side often can help keep them together. For those who thrive on touch, that sleepy, tactile togetherness can dissolve conflict better than anything else can. All it takes to cease hostilities between mates is one tentative foot touching another, says one doctor, a long-married woman. "It doesn't matter who was at fault -- you have made peace," she says resolutely.

What's more, how you sleep together says a lot about your relationship. A television writer who has been married for three years remarks, "When we sleep, my husband lies flat on his back, and my arms are around him. He loves me, I know, but I'm the one with the talent for nurturing, so I'm the one who hugs him." A certain emotional asymmetry is expressed in the way they sleep.

What else can sleep positions mean? A book has been written on the subject by New York City psychoanalyst Samuel Dunkell (Sleep Positions: The Night Language of the Body). From his patients' accounts, Dr. Dunkell notes how various sleep positions reflect a couple's relationship. For instance, there is the spoon position, where a couple embraces facing the same direction. According to Dr. Dunkell, this can reflect a male desire for dominance or a female desire to nurture.

And no matter who is outside the spoon position at the beginning, he adds, the couple will often reverse position during the night in what he calls a slow nocturnal pavane.

"Even in sleep, we use our bodies to communicate with or express our feelings about our partners," writes Dunkell. If a partner stakes out territory at the lover's expense, what he or she is really doing is showing feelings of hostility. Or, Dunkell says, when some partners withdraw to a narrow wedge of the bed, "guarding it resolutely with a hunched and hostile back -- as if they couldn't stand the sight of the other," they're signaling their rejection.

Like most psychotherapists, Dunkell has seen female patients who complain about their bedmates' postcoital coldness just when they want to be held, as well as male patients who fear being smothered and can't stand to be touched after sex. But in most cases this kind of coldness shouldn't be taken personally. A partner's way of sleeping may go back far beyond the current relationship.

In his book Touching, Ashley Montagu says the British and North American cultures deprive children of sufficient touch. Infants, he says, cry to be touched; ceaseless demands for a story or a glass of water mean that the child wants to be held and fears falling asleep alone. We may carry these frustrated feelings into adulthood and, rather than ask for touch, we reject it.

Still, if you feel rejected, that's the way you feel, even if you know your bedmate might be hampered by a "touch deficit" in childhood. What's more, some men are conditioned to feel uneasy about caresses that don't lead to sex.

But women, too, often carry these touch deficits into adulthood. "After sex, he falls asleep and snores, and I lie awake all night feeling ripped off," complains a social worker who went into therapy because she couldn't sleep next to her boyfriends. There are other objections and inhibitions about that voyage through the night. Some women fear being seen without makeup. "I don't want a man in my boudoir, where he will see me at my worst," a chic fashion editor states flatly. Running deeper than that, perhaps, are the reservations of a globe-trotting journalist. She speaks in extravagant terms about wanting to eject this or that lover from her bed. "Sleep," she says, "is a journey best taken alone. People move around at night -- I feel that's disruptive on a very dark and primitive level." This journalist -- like most women, according to psychiatrists and sleep researchers -- sleeps less well than her bedmate, "even without him snoring, and so many men do snore," she says.

When she does fall asleep she often has bad dreams. Most psychiatrists say that whom you are sharing your bed with does not necessarily affect the content of your dreams. You might dream about a person you're involved with, but you would do that even if he wasn't lying beside you.

According to the journalist, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had the right idea: separate bedrooms. In fact, many people in quite happy relationships secretly long for a room of their own, a place of privacy. But separate bedrooms were much more accepted (among those who could afford them) during the last few centuries than they have been in modern times.

When marriage is a consolidation of fortunes, as it was then, and when people are betrothed at infancy, the union is much less romanticized than we make it day. Women were expected to produce children, of course. But in certain eras, such as the 18th century, wealthy women commonly had lovers. And even when the couple shared the same bed, the wife was likely to sleep alone for long stretches when her husband was away at war or on business.

It was in the 17th century that the large, sturdy "matrimonial bed" came into popularity as a symbol of marital togetherness. But even today, as many loving spouses grow older, they graduate to twin beds, according to Dunkell. He believes this means they are emotionally secure without needing the reassurance of physical contact. But Montagu disagrees; twin beds, he insists, mean a drift toward separation and perhaps divorce.

Even playwright Tennessee Williams saw a couple's sleeping arrangement as a mirror of their relationship. In "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," Big Mama comments on her son's disintegrating marriage by patting his bed and saying, "When a marriage is on the rocks, the rocks are right here."

A Universe in Itself

All through history, people's bedrooms have said a lot. Compare neatly made twin beds in a frilly, pristine room to a large, rumpled, lived-in bed and you get some idea of the couple that inhabits it. For some people, a bed is a universe in itself. It's a place not only to make love, but also where you can argue, read, eat, discuss.

A transatlantic-shuttling scientist confides that after a long career of sexual exploits, what he enjoys most with a woman is simply to lie in bed with her. "Once the mystery of the body has been discovered," he explains, "sex loses its newness and becomes pretty much the same. After all, there really is only so much you can do. But the talk, the laughter, the cuddling in bed -- there you have endless variety."

That's why being alone in bed can be loneliness at its most intense. "The bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide," sings Joni Mitchell in "My Old Man." What's the solution? For one couple, it's a "sleep affair." Even though their relationship will always be one of friendship only, they often snuggle in each other's arms through the night after an evening out together. Both are without lovers, which means they have little touch in their lives. "I feel like I'm getting the most out of this," the woman says. "It's when I sleep best, utterly content and tranquil. Until someone else comes into my life, he's a wonderful comfort in the night."

Another woman, long divorced from a man she calls a "cold Swiss banker," has friends but no touch. Recently she bought a puppy. One long, forlorn night, she took it to bed with her. "I felt its live, beating heart," she smiles. "And, of course, it adores me unconditionally."

Like devoted love or exquisitely synchronized sex, sleeping together at its best offers the rich reward of being close with another body. But like many things that are superb at their best and unbearable at their worst, how we take the nocturnal voyage depends on who we are and whom we're with. There are enchanting voyages to be taken a deux, but there are also restful, satisfying evenings of sleep to be had while sailing solo. Sweet dreams can come from both.

Jacqueline Swartz lives in Toronto and is working on a book about male-female relationships.

Reprinted with permission of New Woman magazine.