Episode 10: The Bedroom: Sleep & Sex

Robert Sudha Hamilton's Podcast

The bedroom is home to our inner prince or princess of the underworld. Here we find the nascent and sensitive self who passes back and forth between our states of consciousness. The most famous bedroom princess is Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, who was snaffled by Haides, god of the underworld, whilst playing in a flowering meadow and taken to his dark kingdom where she ate pomegranate seeds and thus was condemned to remain there for the most part of each year. To eat of the fruit of love with the dark lord and to consume his seed, would be my reading of the situation. Persephone becomes the goddess of spring, as it is then that she is able to return to the world above, and so she brings new life back from the inchoate darkness of the unknown. A very apt metaphor for our own unconscious realms and the role it plays in our own lives and especially in our creative dimensions.
Our bedroom is fundamentally a place, which contains a bed, and where we go to sleep. It is a portal between worlds, of the conscious and the unconscious. It is our temple of sleep, where we go, after our day’s labour and nightly feast, to lie prostrate upon a flat couch and quietly beseech the god of the underworld to come and take us to his realm. It is interesting to examine the bedroom in these terms, to see its function in light of the split between these states of being. I think that we would all agree that we rescind our autonomy when we go to sleep, and our consciousness is removed into the ocean like world of dreams. We no longer have the illusion of being totally in control of our lives and destinies.
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Robert Sudha Hamilton