Listing to Port

1. There once was a curiously-carved four-poster bed in Bishop’s Stortford that became known as the Great Bed of Where, after that other great bed some ten miles to the West. The Bed of Where was large, but not unusually so. Instead, it had another interesting property; every so often, perhaps once a fortnight, the centre of the bed would collapse, forming a mysterious hole. Any occupants would find themselves tumbling down an earthy tunnel, usually still wrapped in the bedsheets. Reports of what was at the bottom of the hole vary. Most typically, the bed’s occupants found themselves in a strange, twilit cavern with a mossy floor, and numerous gnomelike people sitting around on cushions reading books and frowning at the disturbance. No-one was ever able to communicate with the denizens of the cavern, and the one book that was brought back up the tunnel self-combusted on exposure to sunlight. A new owner in 1870 reinforced the bed’s base with extra planking, after which the collapses ceased.
2. There was a farmer’s wife in the 1960s near Sydney who came into possession of a bed which seemed to generate exceptionally dull dreams. One could not spend a night in it without lengthy, sepia-toned visions of queuing, or scrubbing floors, or picking up gravel from one pile and putting it down in another. Sensing an opportunity, she entered into a partnership with a local doctor. As an initial experiment they hired the bed out for a nightly fee to one of her patients, an insomniac who was delighted to find that under the bed’s influence he spent sixteen hours shelling peas in a state of blissful sleep. The bed disappeared in 1977, along with five patients who had been hiring it and the farmer’s truck.
3. It is a little-known fact that Wilhelm Reich and Wernher von Braun briefly collaborated on the design of a bed-based rocket in the 1940s. Based on the concept of orgone energy, the rocket would have been entirely powered by the exertions of some sixteen copulating couples, who would be gently jettisoned post-climax in their small, parachute-equipped bed-chambers. A prototype is believed to have been developed by an unnamed country, but was abandoned when it was discovered that many of the participants had trouble achieving orgasm.  
4. There was a bedmaker in West Sussex who visited Walter Potter’s museum at Bramber in 1920. The museum invoked a kind of temporary insanity in him; two months later, he came to to find that he had constructed an elaborate homage to Potter in the form of a bed constructed entirely from taxidermied pigs. The bed had thirty-six legs, each still with a trotter on the end, and soft sheets of porcine leather. At each corner the bedpost was formed from the wide belly of a huge sow, still topped by a glassy-eyed head looking down at the pillow end, and with front legs extended trotter-to-trotter with the sows on the other posts. Needless to say, the pig bed was not a great success, and it languished in an outhouse for thirty years. Sometime in the 1950s it was sold to a hotel in London, which offered it as part of a specialised experience involving a large, sausage-based breakfast and a little light whipping.
5. There was a consortium of bed companies in the 1980s who managed to come up with perhaps the world’s most comfortable bed. It was a delightful confection of a sleeping-place; like sleeping on a cloud. Trials of the bed were dramatically halted in 1982, however, when the developers realised that the bed had become extraordinarily hard to get out of. At least ten bed testers became stuck, having to give up their day jobs and requiring regular deliveries of food and bedpans. Eventually the bed company installed a motor and wheels to allow the testers some measure of freedom. The testers responded by taking the bed out on the road and inviting bystanders to get in, in the hope of being ejected from the bed by sheer mass of occupants. At least five managed to make their escape in this manner, at the expense of thirteen local residents who became trapped in turn. It is believed that the bed is still on the road somewhere, probably having had several changes of occupants. Needless to say, if you encounter an overfull bed trundling down a public road, do not get in.