SO WHAT DO YOU USE YOUR BED FOR...?

The number 2,920 may not strike you as especially significant. But believe me it is. It's the approximate number of hours you spend in your bed every year. Now the question becomes: Exactly what do you do there...?

I'm afraid the bed is a rather taken-for-granted piece of furniture in our lives. It's there...we fall into at night... hate to get up from it in the morning...and so it goes 365 times every year. However, have you ever considered your bed in all its splendid and nuanced features and functionalities? It warrants more than a perfunctory change-of-sheets every week. I submit, it calls for some serious reflection. Consider >>

* It's most obvious function is, of course, to sleep at the end of another gallant 16 hours in the raucous coliseum of everyday life. Hats off to its inventor whose name has been lost in the fog of history

* Don't forget its auxiliary function. A place to nap when age and/or trauma sometimes exhaust your resources in the middle of those 16 hours. Cats are famous for this lovely artform

* Then there's Shakespeare's wisdom: "To sleep, perchance to dream..." Science as yet has no sure grasp of what dreams are all about, but you and I intuitively know understand. Dreams are fascinating but shadowy worlds we can travel only in bed

* Depending on your philosophy of life, dreaming not only scoops you up into remarkable time/space travel, but sometimes into even more remarkable personal epiphanies. The ancients believed such encounters were the voice of God whispering to us... Freud believed the voices were in libidinal codes... my disgusting Army sergeant believed they were just my excuse for not getting to KP on time. I calculate they each had a point

Oh, you're wondering about that more primal function of bed...? Well, yes that too! However, as the "National Enquirer's" sophomoric tattletales prove issue after issue -- that function is always best done in your own bed in your own home.

Oops, is my Victorianism showing again...?