1. Bed frame
In order to keep thirsty gnats away during sleep, sixteenth-century naturalist Thomas Moffett recommends building a “Fen-canopy” out of hardened cow dung. The smell will draw away the bugs, letting you slumber “without any disturbance or molestation at all.” If bedbugs bedevil you, John Locke advises surrounding your bed with kidney bean leaves.
2. Midnight snack
Avoid meat. If you can’t, English physician William Bullein suggests in a 1558 work, lying on your right side and placing your hand on your breast to aid digestion. If you enjoy eating cheese before bed, be careful: a 2005 British Cheese Board study found you can avoid nightmares by eating Cheshire cheese instead of blue Stilton, which might cause visions of talking animals, vegetarian crocodiles, and warrior kittens.
3. Bedmates
“No man prefers to sleep two in a bed,” Herman Melville writes in Moby Dick. “I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping.” If you don’t have a choice, at least be considerate. “If you share a bed with a comrade, lie quietly,” cautions Desiderius Erasmus. “Do not toss with your body, for this can lay yourself bare or inconvenience your companion by pulling away the blankets.”
4. Nightclothes
Nightdresses are now out of fashion, while pajamas, which drifted west from the Middle East in the nineteenth century, are in, according to an 1895 article in the Louisville Courier-Journal: “If a woman ever sleeps in pajamas on either a very hot or a very cold night, she will cast aside the nightdress with its great possibilities of daintiness and beauty without a qualm.”
5. Toothbrush
Brushing your teeth gets easier in fifteenth-century China when someone attaches bristles made from a hog’s neck to bamboo—an improvement on the Babylonian technique of shoving a twig with a split end in your mouth. If you still have gunk in your gums, an ancient Egyptian recipe recommends creating a tooth powder by mixing crushed rock salt, mint, dried iris flower, and pepper.
6. Chamber pot
If your bedchamber stinks, don’t immediately blame your bedmate—perhaps your chamber pot tipped over? If you share a bed with diarist Samuel Pepys, check the fireplace, where he was known to defecate if a chamber pot could not be found. In Shakespeare’s day, the chamber pot was often called a “jordan,” possibly an irreverent allusion to the vials of holy water often brought back from the sacred river.
7. Bedroom door
Protect your house from fire while you sleep by using a technique from eighteenth-century Germany: encase the stomach of a black hen, a shirt soaked in a virgin’s menstrual blood, and an egg laid on the Thursday before Easter in wax and bury it under your threshold. Hanging a West Indian amulet containing alligator teeth on your door might also offer protection.
8. Pillow
Keep your neck free of strain with a ceramic pillow from medieval China. Choose from the shapes on offer: a tiger-shaped pillow to scare off demons, or one with a deer pattern that promises longevity. If ceramic makes you toss and turn, try traveling to nineteenth-century South Africa, where headrests made of wood can be procured, or go all the way back to ancient Egypt for a stone headrest that you can reuse in the afterlife.
