Sleeping Beauty and Our Retreat from the World
Copyright © 2026 by Lois E. Wilkins, PhD, APRN
All rights reserved.
Lately, I have noticed how many people are living from their beds. I do not mean only teenagers sleeping well into the afternoon, nor those who are ill and need the restorative quiet that a bed can provide. I mean adults who awaken and reach for the laptop, answer email beneath the covers, conduct business with pillows behind their backs, eat, read, scroll, stream, talk, and sometimes spend most of the day in the same place where they slept the night before. At first, I thought I was simply noticing a contemporary habit, but the longer I watched, the more the image began to trouble me, not because I thought there was necessarily anything wrong with it, but because the bed seemed to be carrying something larger than our desire for comfort.
As so often happens when an image stays with me long enough, another image came to join it. This time it was Kevin, a small mouse with an old story to tell. Kevin comes from a long line of mice who have made their homes along the edges of fairy tales, slipping beneath doors, disappearing into walls, and witnessing things the larger characters sometimes fail to see. According to Kevin, one of his ancestors lived long ago in the castle of Sleeping Beauty and was there when the spindle pierced the princess’s finger and sleep moved through the kingdom. The story has traveled through his family ever since, passed from one small storyteller to another, until it eventually came to him. Kevin has a way of appearing when an old story begins stirring inside the life we are living now, and lately he has been reminding me of that sleeping castle. We tend to remember the beautiful young woman surrounded by a hedge of thorns and waiting for one hundred years to pass, yet Kevin’s ancestral memory asks us to look beyond the princess because she does not sleep alone. The king and queen sleep with her, the horses sleep in their stalls, the dogs sleep in the courtyard, and the pigeons settle upon the roof. The cook stops in the middle of his work, the fire grows still, and an entire kingdom enters a strange suspension in which ordinary life seems to have stopped. Seen through the eyes of a mouse whose family has carried the story for generations, Sleeping Beauty begins to look less like the story of a sleeping girl and more like the story of a sleeping world, and suddenly the old tale comes alive again, finding new relevance in an age that may need its wisdom as much as those who first told it.
I have lived long enough to remember when going to bed meant leaving the world for a while. Work remained somewhere else, shopping required going somewhere, meals were generally eaten at tables, and entertainment occupied another room. We dressed to enter the public world and undressed when we withdrew from it, moving through dozens of small thresholds so ordinary that we scarcely recognized them as thresholds at all. We got out of bed, bathed, dressed, made coffee, opened the door, got into the car, and entered the office, the store, the classroom, the library, or someone else’s home. I do not remember that world sentimentally, nor do I imagine it was necessarily better, but I do remember that the boundaries were clearer. The body crossed from one place into another, and something within us crossed with it.
Those small passages helped tell us where we were and who we were being asked to become in that particular place. Today the world can come into bed with us. The laptop brings the office, while the phone brings friends, news, banking, shopping, food, entertainment, conflict, affection, and nearly everything else that once required us to go somewhere. We can awaken, work, eat, converse, shop, watch the world, and finally fall asleep without ever crossing the threshold of the bedroom. We may be doing more than ever while moving less than we ever imagined possible, and I wonder what the psyche makes of such a curious arrangement.
In Sleeping Beauty, the castle does not simply become quiet while everyone sleeps. A hedge begins growing around it, and year after year the briars become thicker until the castle itself can no longer be seen. They protect what is sleeping within, but they also make it increasingly difficult for anything outside to reach it.
I think about our own briars because much of what now surrounds and protects us began as something genuinely useful. Working from home returned hours once lost to commuting, delivery services made daily life easier, and technology allowed us to remain connected across enormous distances. We discovered that meetings could happen without travel and that many kinds of work could be accomplished from almost anywhere, creating freedoms I would not want to dismiss. Still, the briars can grow quietly, and what protects us from unnecessary demands can eventually begin protecting us from encounter itself. What starts as refuge can slowly become enclosure as the room grows softer and more controllable while the world beyond it begins to feel increasingly intrusive.
The more interesting question, then, may not be why people want to remain in bed, but what has happened in the world outside the bedroom that makes leaving it feel increasingly difficult.
Another fairy tale enters here because The Princess and the Pea tells us about a young woman placed upon mattress after mattress, with featherbeds piled one upon another, who nevertheless remains disturbed by one tiny pea beneath them all. We have become remarkably good at cushioning ourselves as we regulate temperature, choose the softness of our beds, control the light, reduce unwanted sound, select what we watch, order exactly what we want to eat, and increasingly determine who may reach us and when. We keep adding mattresses, yet we do not necessarily seem to be becoming more comfortable. As the environment becomes increasingly adjustable, what cannot be adjusted may become harder to bear, leaving me to wonder whether sensitivity can finally be soothed by adding another layer of comfort.
Goldilocks offers a brief variation on the same longing as she searches the bears’ house for what feels just right. There is something tenderly human in her search because most of us understand the longing for a place where the temperature, chair, food, and bed finally suit us. Yet the tale refuses to let Goldilocks remain indefinitely inside that perfectly arranged environment because the bears come home, bringing with them the unexpected other and reminding us that life cannot remain entirely arranged according to our preferences.
Snow White carries the image into a more troubling place. After eating the poisoned apple, she remains so beautiful and seemingly alive that the dwarfs cannot bear to bury her, placing her instead inside a glass coffin where she can be seen but cannot be touched. I find it difficult now to encounter that image without thinking about our screens. We have never been so visible to one another while being so capable of remaining physically separate, yet visibility is not the same as presence. Snow White can be seen through the glass, but she has not yet returned to life.
Then I remember The Twelve Dancing Princesses, whose shoes are inexplicably worn through each morning even though the young women have supposedly remained inside their bedroom all night. Their story cautions us against assuming that a person whose body remains in one place is necessarily inactive. From beneath a comforter, someone can conduct meetings, write, shop, watch events unfolding across the world, and travel through countless digital and imagined realities. The body may scarcely move while consciousness travels everywhere, leaving us with the peculiar exhaustion of a time in which the body has traveled almost nowhere while the mind has traveled everywhere.
Yet these other tales keep returning me to the sleeping castle because Sleeping Beauty asks something different of us. It would be easy to turn this retreat into bed into an argument about laziness, technology, or self-indulgence, but the fairy tale does not allow such an easy judgment. The princess must sleep, and the hundred years cannot be hurried. Young men attempt to penetrate the hedge before the appointed time and become caught in the briars, while no one awakens the princess by telling her that she has slept long enough or reminding the kingdom that there is work to be done. The tale insists that whatever is occurring within this enclosure must be allowed to complete itself.
This is important before we criticize our own collective retreat. We live in a world that asks almost continuously for our attention, where messages arrive at every hour, news never ends, work follows us home, and images of suffering from places we may never visit can enter our awareness before we have even put our feet on the floor in the morning. Other people’s needs, accomplishments, illnesses, celebrations, opinions, fears, and anger travel with us in the small devices we carry everywhere, so it is hardly surprising that some part of us begins seeking enclosure.
The bed can therefore become more than a bed, serving as sanctuary, womb, dream chamber, sickbed, office, refuge, and hiding place, sometimes all within the same day. It offers something the outer world increasingly fails to provide, the experience of having a boundary. There can be considerable wisdom in withdrawal, but the fairy tale also asks us to recognize when the protected interval has accomplished its purpose and movement toward life needs to begin again.
After one hundred years, something changes in Sleeping Beauty. When the prince approaches the castle at the right time, the thorns that destroyed those who came before him no longer behave as thorns but open into flowers, allowing him to pass through the hedge. I have always loved this image because nothing has been hacked away and the protective enclosure has not been violently destroyed. What once needed to remain closed has simply become ready to open.
Here, I think, is the distinction we need when considering our own retreat into bedrooms and beds. Genuine rest carries within it the possibility of return because we sleep and awaken, withdraw and re-enter, enter solitude and eventually become curious about the world again. The world beyond the protected room begins calling to us, and we discover that we want to answer. Withdrawal becomes something different when that reciprocal movement disappears, because then the bed is no longer somewhere we go for restoration but becomes the place from which we attempt to conduct our lives.
When Sleeping Beauty finally awakens, she does not awaken alone because the awakening moves through the entire kingdom. The king and queen awaken, the horses rise, the dogs stir, the pigeons lift their heads, the flies begin moving upon the wall, the cook resumes his interrupted gesture, and the fire begins burning again. What returns is not simply consciousness but participation in an embodied world.
This is the image that matters most to me because awakening, in this sense, is not simply a matter of getting out of bed. It is a return to relationship with a world that will never be entirely adjustable to our preferences. We put our feet on the floor, wash and dress, make coffee, open the door, notice the weather, walk somewhere, sit across from another person, enter a shop or library, eat at a table, and encounter people and circumstances we did not arrange. The room will sometimes be too warm or too cold, someone will irritate us, and the chair will sometimes be uncomfortable, yet this small resistance of the world may be part of what reminds us that we are alive.
I no longer think the most interesting question is why so many people are spending so much time in bed. I wonder instead what kind of world has made the bed feel like the safest place from which to live, what psychic necessity our collective retreat may be serving, and what we need to understand about ourselves before we rush to correct it. Fairy tales have always known about these periods of enclosure because they know about forests, towers, caves, sleep, enchantment, and the long intervals during which nothing appears to be happening, even as life within the story prepares to change.
Our task, as I see it, is not to drag ourselves prematurely through the briars, nor to remain forever inside the sleeping castle, but to become attentive to the moment when the quality of the enclosure changes. Restoration turns toward participation, solitude begins longing for relationship, and the protected interior opens toward the unpredictable world beyond it.
I return to Kevin, although by now I understand more clearly why he came. Mice live close to thresholds, moving between the visible rooms we inhabit and the hidden spaces within the walls, belonging completely to neither and traveling easily between both. Kevin seems to know his way through those passages. He carries old stories into the present and, when we have forgotten how to hear them, leads us quietly back toward the door through which they entered. He does not tell us what Sleeping Beauty means, nor does he awaken the kingdom before its time. Like the generations of storytellers before him, he simply carries the story forward, trusting that an old image will recognize the moment when it is needed again.
I imagine him now moving quietly along the edge of the sleeping castle, much as his ancestor once did, while the kingdom waits inside its hundred-year sleep. Somewhere beyond the walls, the world continues, and somewhere within them life has never entirely disappeared. Kevin knows both territories. That may be the particular wisdom of a creature who lives between worlds, because he knows when to remain inside the walls and when to find the opening that leads outward again. Our own return may be just as quiet, beginning when we put our feet on the floor, open the door, and cross the threshold into a world that will never be entirely comfortable, predictable, or under our control. By then Kevin may already have disappeared into another passage, carrying another old story toward wherever it is needed next, while behind him the hundred years have passed and the briars that once protected our necessary sleep are beginning to flower.