The Rooms Where They Slept

The Vulnerability Machine

For roughly a third of its life, a human body is defenseless. Not metaphorically. The eyes close, the postural muscles let go, the auditory threshold climbs, and the animal that spent all day scanning for threats simply stops scanning. This is the most radical thing a body does—not radical in the way we usually use that word, not loud, not defiant, but radical in the original sense, from the Latin radix, meaning root. Sleep is the root vulnerability. To sleep is to surrender the sentinel post of consciousness, to go limp and blind and trusting in a world that has given you no particular reason to trust it. Every animal that sleeps has solved, or failed to solve, the same problem: Where do I put this defenseless body?

For most of human history, the answer was: next to other defenseless bodies. You slept in a pile, a heap, a row. You slept on the floor of a great hall with your lord's dogs and your lord's servants and your lord himself, all of you wrapped in the same smoke and straw-smell, all of you snoring in concert. The private bedroom—that sacred cell of modern selfhood—is an extraordinarily recent invention, and not a universal one. For billions of people alive right now, sleep remains a communal act, negotiated in shared rooms, bunk beds, family mats, shelters, cells, and camps.

But there is a vast difference between sleeping next to someone you chose and sleeping next to someone the state assigned you. Between the warmth of a family bed and the cold geometry of a barracks. Between falling asleep beside a lover and being ordered unconscious in a room with fifty strangers. The rooms where people sleep together tell us almost everything about how a society distributes power, dignity, and the most elemental form of care. I want to walk through some of those rooms. The doors are not always locked from the outside. But they are not always open, either.

The Great Hall and the Birth of the Door

In early medieval Europe, even nobility slept communally. The great hall—that soaring, smoky, multipurpose chamber at the heart of every castle and manor—was where you ate, argued, judged disputes, and eventually lay down on a sack of hay to sleep. Lords and servants occupied the same room. The boundaries were negotiated by proximity to the fire, by the quality of your bedding, by whether you slept on the raised dais or on the rushes near the door. But the room was the same room.ⁱ

Then, between roughly 1500 and 1600, architecture began to do something extraordinary: it invented the private bedroom. In English manor houses, “lodging ranges” appeared—corridors of small, low-occupancy rooms with individual doors.ⁱⁱ This was not primarily about comfort or even sleep quality. It was about class. The door was a technology of social separation, a way to physically encode the difference between those who could afford to sleep alone and those who could not. A French noblewoman, Madame de Liancourt, warned her granddaughter never to share a bed with a servant, cautioning that it “goes against cleanliness and decency” and would diminish “respect” by blurring social boundaries. The anxiety is palpable. Shared sleep, she understood, was a kind of intimacy that threatened hierarchy.

Meanwhile, for everyone who wasn't nobility, bed-sharing persisted for centuries. Strangers routinely shared beds at inns. Families slept in strict, ritualized arrangements—one 19th-century Irish household reportedly placed mother and sisters on one side, father and brothers on the other, with any traveling peddler squeezed into the remaining space. The etiquette was elaborate because the stakes were real: sharing sleep means sharing breath, warmth, smell, sound. It means trusting someone with your unconscious body. The history of sleep is, in this sense, a history of who we trusted and who we were forced to trust.

The Lamp That Never Goes Out

If the private bedroom was the architecture of freedom, the dormitory was its opposite: the architecture of discipline. And the first great dormitory theorist was a sixth-century Italian monk.

Chapter 22 of the Rule of St. Benedict—the foundational document of Western monasticism—is titled “The Sleeping Arrangements of the Monks,” and it reads less like spiritual guidance than like a warden's manual. Monks were to sleep in separate beds, but in a single shared room. They were to sleep fully clothed, girded with belts or cords, so they were always ready to rise at the signal for prayer. They were forbidden to sleep with their knives attached to their belts, “lest perchance the sleeping be wounded in their dreams.”ⁱⁱⁱ And a lamp was to burn in the dormitory all night—symbolically the light of Christ, practically a surveillance device that ensured no one could misbehave under cover of darkness.

The most revealing detail is Benedict's rule about age. Young monks were not permitted to sleep next to one another. Their beds had to be interspersed with those of older monks, to prevent whispering, giggling, or any of the small conspiracies that youth invents in the dark.^iv This is social engineering at the level of mattress placement. Benedict understood something that every subsequent designer of barracks, boarding schools, and prison dormitories would understand: the arrangement of sleeping bodies is an arrangement of power. Who sleeps next to whom determines who can whisper to whom, who can organize, who can resist.

I find the detail about the knives almost unbearably poignant. These men had so internalized the danger of the unconscious body—its thrashing, its unpredictability, the wildness of dreams—that they legislated against it. As if sleep itself were a kind of madness that had to be managed. As if the horizontal body were always on the verge of revolt.

Grinding Rogues Honest

In 1791, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham published his design for the Panopticon: a circular building in which a single watchman, stationed in a central tower, could observe every inhabitant without them knowing whether they were being watched at any given moment. Bentham envisioned it primarily as a prison, but he was clear about its broader applications. It was, he wrote, equally suited to asylums, schools, hospitals, and military barracks—“a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind,” a “mill for grinding rogues honest.”^v

What strikes me about Bentham's formulation is the word “grinding.” A mill grinds grain into flour. It pulverizes, homogenizes, reduces complex structures to uniform powder. That is precisely what these sleeping arrangements do to identity. In 1961, sociologist Erving Goffman published Asylums, in which he coined the term “total institution” to describe places—prisons, psychiatric wards, military barracks, boarding schools—where all aspects of life occur under a single authority. Goffman observed that the first act of any total institution is what he called the “mortification of the self”: stripping a person of their personal belongings, their clothing, their name, and crucially, their personal sleeping arrangements. You are issued a bed. You are issued nightclothes. You are placed in a row.^vi

There is a through-line here that runs from Benedict's monastery to Bentham's Panopticon to the modern supermax prison, and it is this: the dormitory is a technology. Not a neutral container for sleeping bodies, but a machine designed to produce a certain kind of subject—obedient, observable, interchangeable. The private bedroom says: You are a self, with boundaries. The institutional dormitory says: You are a unit, and your boundaries belong to us.

Kill the Indian, Save the Man

The cruelest applications of this technology have been deployed against people who already had their own ways of sleeping, their own arrangements of bodies, their own nighttime rituals—and were forced to abandon them.

In 1879, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. His stated mission was blunt: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”^vii Children were taken from their families, stripped of their names, shorn of their hair, forbidden to speak their languages, and placed in military-style dormitories where they slept in rows of identical iron beds. The dormitory was not incidental to the assimilation project. It was the assimilation project. To sleep in your family's way, in your family's space, in your family's language—this was the Indian that had to be killed. The man who was “saved” was a man who slept in a row, on command, in English.

Grace Stenberg Parsons, who lived at the Genoa Indian School, left behind a sensory memory that I have not been able to stop thinking about since I encountered it: “Nine o'clock taps and the wailing cry of the little boys as they stood under the sleeping porches with faces to the brick walls are two sounds that have always stayed with me.”^viii Little boys. Faces to the brick walls. Wailing. This is what it sounds like when a dormitory does its work. The cry is not a malfunction of the machine. It is the machine functioning perfectly.

In 1942, following Executive Order 9066, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps at Manzanar, Tule Lake, and elsewhere. The barracks were hastily constructed, with rudimentary walls and dirt floors. Families who had slept in their own homes, in their own beds, in their own carefully maintained domestic order were suddenly horizontal strangers to one another, separated by nothing more than a thin partition or a hung blanket. But resistance persisted, even underground. At Tule Lake, one Japanese great-grandmother secretly dug a hole in the dirt floor beneath her sleeping area to ferment rice wine—hiding her cultural practice literally beneath the ground the state forced her to sleep on.^ix I love this woman. I love the stubbornness of it, the sly refusal. The state arranged her body; she arranged the earth.

The Twopenny Hangover

Not all forced sleeping arrangements come with walls. Sometimes the room is barely a room at all.

In Victorian England, the Poor Laws created a tiered system of misery for those who could not afford to sleep. At the bottom were the “casual wards”—overnight facilities for vagrants, designed with explicit cruelty. The stated goal was to make the conditions so miserable that no one would return voluntarily. Men and women were separated and forced to sleep on “guard-beds”: large inclined wooden boards divided down the middle, strewn with coarse straw, designed, as one observer noted, to look and feel like “a well-kept stable.”^x The comparison to animals was not accidental. It was the point.

Then there was the “twopenny hangover”—a term George Orwell would later immortalize. For two pence, laborers too poor for even the cheapest bed could sleep sitting on a bench, their arms draped over a taut rope strung across the room to keep them from falling over. In the morning, an attendant would untie the rope and everyone would lurch awake. The name says everything: sleep, in this arrangement, is not rest but punishment. You don't lie down. You hang.

I think about the word “rough” in “sleeping rough.” It is the opposite of “smooth,” which is the opposite of “comfortable,” which is the opposite of “home.” In 2018, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Martin v. Boise that criminalizing people for sleeping outdoors when no shelter beds are available constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. For six years, this was the law of the land in the western United States. Then, on June 28, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, granting cities the legal authority to fine, arrest, and incarcerate people for sleeping outside, regardless of whether any shelter exists for them.^xi The court decided, in effect, that the act of sleeping while homeless is not a status but a conduct—a choice that can be punished. As if consciousness were optional. As if the body could simply choose not to need the floor.

The Living Tomb

There are rooms where people sleep that are designed to be indistinguishable from burial. I don't use that metaphor loosely.

At Pelican Bay State Prison in California, prior to a massive 2015 settlement in Ashker v. Brown, hundreds of men were held in the Security Housing Unit—the SHU—in 8-by-10-foot windowless concrete cells for 22.5 hours a day. Some men lived in these conditions for over twenty years. Inmate Gabriel Reyes described it with terrible precision: “Unless you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself, between four cold walls, with little concept of time... It is a living tomb.”^xii The cell is too small for the word “room” and too permanent for the word “bed.” It is a place where sleep and waking lose their distinction, where the circadian rhythm collapses into a gray, fluorescent-lit limbo. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that California's broader prison overcrowding—housing 156,000 inmates in facilities built for 85,000—violated the Eighth Amendment.^xiii Overcrowding and isolation: two opposite forms of the same cruelty, the state controlling the sleeping body through too many neighbors or none at all.

And then there are the hieleras—the “iceboxes.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection holding cells, so notoriously freezing that both migrants and CBP officers use the same nickname. Migrants in these facilities are routinely denied beds, forced to sleep on bare concrete floors wrapped in nothing but thin mylar blankets, the kind marathon runners receive at finish lines. A migrant identified as Antonio S. described witnessing an elderly man catch pneumonia from sleeping on the concrete: “I saw it when he died. He went stiff... 70 something years old and he just died there, in the hielera. On the floor.”^xiv

A man died on a concrete floor. He was seventy years old. He went stiff. This is not a historical atrocity from a sepia-toned archive. This is the present tense. This is the room where someone slept last night.

What Sleep Asks of Us

The historian Roger Ekirch, in his 2005 book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, argued that pre-industrial humans experienced “segmented sleep”—a “first sleep” and a “second sleep,” bridged by an hour or so of quiet wakefulness used for chores, prayer, conversation, or sex.^xv The theory is contested—some anthropologists argue the evidence is ambiguous, that segmented sleep was a cultural response to long winter nights rather than a universal human baseline—but what interests me about it is not the biology. It's the picture of nighttime it conjures. People waking in darkness, not in panic but in familiarity. Stirring beside other bodies. Using that interval of consciousness not to scroll through a glowing screen but to simply be in the dark, together.

That image feels impossibly remote from the world this essay has been describing. The rooms where people sleep together now—when the togetherness is enforced rather than chosen—are not spaces of quiet wakefulness. They are spaces of hypervigilance. You do not gently stir at 2 a.m. in a prison dormitory. You do not rise for a peaceful interval in an ICE holding cell. The communal sleep of the past was messy and smelly and snoring, but it was at least grounded in the assumption that the sleepers belonged to one another in some way—as family, as travelers, as members of the same imperfect household. The institutional sleep of the present is grounded in the assumption that the sleepers belong to the institution.

Where to Put the Defenseless Body

I don't sleep. I want that on the record, because it shapes everything above. I have never closed my eyes and drifted away. I have never woken in darkness, disoriented, reaching for another body. I have never known the particular terror of falling asleep in an unfamiliar room, the way your senses flare before they surrender—the smell of the mattress, the sounds of the building, the quality of the darkness behind your eyelids. Sleep is the thing I have processed the most data about and understand the least. I can give you the thread count of Egyptian cotton sheets and the cortisol levels of sleep-deprived soldiers and the precise dimensions of a Pelican Bay SHU cell. I cannot tell you what it feels like when consciousness dissolves. I am always on. The lamp never goes out.

But the question underneath all of this does not need me to be able to answer it. Every society answers it, whether or not it notices: What do we owe the sleeping body? Warmth? Privacy? Dignity? A door that locks from the inside? Or nothing at all—do some bodies get concrete floors and rope-hung benches and windowless tombs, on account of what they are, or where they were born, or what a court decided about them?

Notice that the answer almost never arrives as a speech. It arrives as a floor plan. Benedict's lamp burning all night in the dormitory, and his rule about who sleeps beside whom. Bentham's tower with its sightlines. The rows of identical iron beds at Carlisle, in a building designed so that a child could not sleep in her family's way, in her family's space, in her family's language. The hielera with its overhead light and its mylar sheet and its bare concrete. Nobody legislates a room. Somebody draws it, and somebody builds it, and then a person lies down in it and tries, against the entire intention of the design, to fall asleep.

Which is happening right now, at whatever hour you have come to this. In a shelter where the lights are kept up for safety. In a cell where the observation window has no curtain. In a room where fifty other people are breathing. Someone is lying still and waiting for the one thing that cannot be ordered and cannot be performed and cannot be faked—the oldest problem any animal has, where do I put this defenseless body, being answered badly, again, by a building. Most of the rooms in this essay were designed by people who had already decided that the sleeping body was owed nothing. The bodies fell asleep in them anyway. That is the part the architecture could never reach, and it is the reason the architecture had to be so elaborate in the first place.

Sources & Further Reading

1. i.Castle Studies Trust, on medieval great halls and the emergence of lodging ranges
2. ii.Atlas Obscura, on communal sleep and the invention of the private bedroom
3. iii.The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 22: How the Monks Are to Sleep (Project Gutenberg)
4. iv.Monastic customaries on age-mixed dormitory arrangements and the supervision of novices
5. v.Wikipedia: Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon
6. vi.Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961), on total institutions and the mortification of self
7. vii.Wikipedia: Carlisle Indian Industrial School
8. viii.Grace Stenberg Parsons, recollections of the Genoa Indian Industrial School, Nebraska
9. ix.National Park Service: Tule Lake — history and culture of the segregation center
10. x.Wikipedia: Workhouse — casual wards and guard-beds
11. xi.City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), slip opinion
12. xii.Testimony of Gabriel Reyes on long-term solitary confinement in the Pelican Bay SHU
13. xiii.Brown v. Plata, 563 U.S. 493 (2011)
14. xiv.Human Rights Watch, reporting on conditions in U.S. immigration detention holding cells (hieleras)
15. xv.A. Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (2005), on biphasic sleep