Why Do We Sleep Under Blankets, Even on the Hottest Nights?
Who are you… the person who can’t sleep with anything more than a sheet even in the snow, or the person who needs 7 layers of down comforters even when the heat is making your bedroom paint blister? Either way, there’s history to support your position…
There’s great comfort in being covered.
from Dan Nosowitz in Atlas Obscura, Aug 2017
“The tiny weak air conditioner struggled to cool the room down while a few feet away I struggled to fall asleep. And yet I was unable to sleep without some sort of covering. In this case it was the barest edge of my lightest sheet, touching the smallest possible part of my torso.
Why this compulsion to be covered, however minimally, in order to sleep?
Blankets are common, but not universal, to humans during sleep, at least in the modern day. But historically, the effort involved in weaving large sheets put blankets at much too high a price point for most to afford. From the linen bedsheets of Egypt around 3500 B.C. to wool sheets during the Roman empire straight through to cotton in medieval Europe, bed coverings were for the wealthy.
By the Early Modern period in Europe, which followed the Middle Ages, production had increased enough so that more middle-class people could afford bedding, though not easily. “The bed, throughout Western Europe at this time, was the most expensive item in the house,” says Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech who has written extensively about sleep. “It was the first major item that a newly married couple, if they had the wherewithal, would invest in.” The bed and bedding could make up about a third of the total value of an entire household’s possessions, which explains why bedsheets frequently showed up in wills.
Today, there’s minimal anthropological work about bedding around the world. The best is a 2002 paper by Carol Worthman and Melissa Melby of Emory University, who compiled a study of sleeping arrangements in different parts of the world. “Recognition of the paucity of anthropological work on sleep is galvanizing: a significant domain of human behavior that claims a third of daily life remains largely overlooked by a discipline dedicated to the holistic study of the human condition,” they wrote. This passes for outrage in an academic paper…”
