Sarah, have you been hanging out with George Perec behind our backs?

Cuz your post totally reminds me of Species of Spaces and Other Places, the book where he pretty much catalogs all of Space--well, a lot of space, anyway.

I like this section, entitled A Few Banalities, which is part of the chapter devoted to beds:

We spend more than a third of our lives in a bed.

The bed is one of the rare places where we adopt roughly speaking a horizontal posture. The others are much more specialized: operating table, bench in the sauna, chaise-lounge, beach, psychoanalyst's couch...

Techniques of sleeping: the idea that lying down is something natural is quite inaccurate (see Marcel Mauss, 'Techniques of the Body, in Sociologie et Anthropologie, p. 378; the whole paragraph...would be worth quoting.)

And what about hammocks? And paliasses? And bedsteads? And box-beds? And divans deep as the grave? And straw pallets? And railway couchettes? And camp beds? And sleeping-bags resting on air-beds themselves resting on a carpet of earth?