Going to bed with a stranger is, after all, complicated enough even when only two people are involved, let alone, four, six, eight.
In "The Silence" (1963) a boy languishes outside a hotel room where his mother has gone to bed with a stranger; in "Fanny and Alexander" brother and sister are locked away from the warmth of their mother in a drab room of the Bishop's house.
In one case in 1804 a London shopkeeper found his wife in bed with a stranger to him, who, following an altercation, offered to purchase the wife.
People who inhabit the ski town love it enough that they're willing to deal with rent prices that rival Canada's most populous cities, as well as precarious living situations such as having a literal closet as a bedroom or paying to share a bed with a stranger.
In "La Sonnambula," a soon-to-be-wed Swiss woman is afflicted with somnambulism and winds up in the bed of a stranger, causing her fiancé to lose confidence in her.
"But you can't sleep in my bed," she said; she didn't want her son to wake up and see her in bed with a stranger.
I imagined that, after recovering on a bed in a stranger's apartment, he had walked to our neighborhood and taken note of the checkpoints and the fatigues of the Presidential Guard.
They abandoned their beds to sleep in a stranger's doorway or amongst a heap of discarded rubbish, fleeing the dangers of abduction, rape and enslavement.
I've shared a bed with a stranger in Ibiza, I've stayed on a friend's farm where I literally had to work for my supper, and I've taken lengthy train journeys just because they worked out £50 cheaper than a flight.
