When I was a little girl, I thought it was fun to sleep upside down.
And by this, I mean that I’d take my pillow and put it at the end of the bed where I usually had my feet. It’d become the head of the bed, in effect, on random nights. And I’d go to sleep flipped around that way, pulling the covers over me.
It was a simple change, much easier than moving around the furniture, and a lot simpler than sleeping in another room or on the living room couch or something.
But the view was completely different. Same rooms, different walls, different orientation.
And at the time I don’t think I could have explained to you why I did this. It was natural. And it was fun. Sometimes I had really interesting dreams because of it, because I was sleeping upside down.
But it was a really risky thing to do. And that was for a reason that came as a shock the first time it happened — and I don’t completely understand even now: It really bothered my mother.
The very first time I did this, the first time I slept upside down, I woke to my mother screaming at me. Wanting to know what the hell I was doing sleeping like that. Sleeping all weird.
Sleeping the wrong way.
And even though there was no hope of my getting back to sleep again, I was clearly up and awake for the day, since someone yelling at you isn’t exactly conducive to sleep, my mother demanded that I put my pillow at the head of the bed and flip back around “the right way, for cripes’ sake.”
The right way. The wrong way. My mother had a clear notion of which was which, and she seemed personally offended when I didn’t abide by those guidelines.
If I were a good child, an obedient one, the kind of child my mother surely wanted, this would have been the one and only time I ever slept upside down.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, I still did it from time to time. I fell asleep while sleeping upside down, or as my mother would say, “the wrong way.” But tried to take careful pains to readjust sometime during the night, so that when morning came I wouldn’t get in trouble.
And I think about this a lot, usually when someone is getting upset at me because I’m doing something “the wrong way” when I’ve seen plenty of other people do it that way as well.