The pesky other arm

I watched a movie called Howl the other night.  It’s a very intelligent movie about Allan Ginsberg and his poem called Howl.  The movie centres around when the book was released and how there was a movement to have it censored and around the life that Ginsberg lived.  The movie was brilliant and whilst I should have been thinking about the filming and the story, I got distracted…

There is a scene where Ginsberg is in bed with an acquaintance and they decide to cuddle and this is where I got distracted.  By Ginsberg’s arm.  You see when two people cuddle in bed and then go to sleep there is always one arm left over.  And that arm when you wake up is dead not very comfortable.  But why is this?  Why can two people not cuddle to sleep and both of them not wake up with two perfectly fine arms?  In the scene, Ginsberg is the one doing the side cuddle whilst the other person is doing the lying on the back cuddle.  Ginsberg’s spare arm ends up sticking straight up in the air, which kinda shows the kind of awkward person that he was.  I have never ended up with an arm in the air, but have ended up with them in all other kinds of interesting poses.

The worst is when it gets trapped under the other person.  It might be under their neck, so when you wake up you are not only trapped, but have a sore or dead arm.  If you have somehow managed to spend the whole night like this, then there is nothing more painful than the blood returning to the arm in question.  I am sure that I have a bad shoulder from the other choice which is to lay half on your stomach and half on your side so that you have one arm over them and one out behind you, hardly a great position to sleep in.

I was discussing this with a friend of mine, who was telling me that after making a curry the other night and then seeing on the news that the mix that she had used had been recalled due to it being known to cause paralysis, she was very concerned when she woke up with a dead arm.  But was relieved that it was just cuddle arm.

So you can imagine why I was a little disturbed when I got distracted and could not stop thinking about this arm.  I was watching a movie that was about one of the most impressive and discussed poems of this century, something I was really interested in, but yet I was caught up with the issue of the arm.

There is another solution to the pesky arm, and that is to not be a cuddly sleeper.  But where is the fun in that.  There is nothing nicer than a cuddly sleep and problematic as finding the right non-dead arm position is.  In fact there is nothing quite so nice as a good hug/cuddle in general.  I am sure that I remember reading somewhere that the more hugs you have a day, the more well adjusted that you are.  I know that certainly feel better after a good hug.  I tend to get them most often at the pub – which sounds dodgy, but the English don’t really hug, so only tend to get them from the Kiwis, who are all concentrated at the pub, strange that.

So do you get cuddle arm?  Are you a cuddly sleeper?  Have you seen Howl?  Were you distracted by the arm or did you find more in the movie?