Inside the Sleeping Room, all was quiet.
Beyond the tapping of laptop keys and the slight rustling of textbook pages, the East Lounge of the Indiana Memorial Union was peaceful on a recent Tuesday morning.
Some people were studying. As always, others curled in chairs and sprawled across couches in serene abandon, their chests rising and falling rhythmically, their slightly open mouths allowing the occasional drowsy sigh or muttered word of sleep talk to slip through.
From their portraits on the surrounding walls, past IU presidents from Herman B Wells to Myles Brand watched over the sleepers. Though they camped out among strangers, the students left backpacks and laptops at their sides, unguarded. In their own worlds, they slumbered on.
A little after 9 a.m., freshman Alexis Velez walked into the lounge. She had seen the nappers before but had always been too self-conscious to rest beside them. Now she debated whether to give in to temptation. What if she talked in her sleep?
But she had less than an hour before her next class, Finite Math. Exhausted, she wondered if the potential embarrassment really mattered. The other sleepers were willing to take the risk.
So Velez surrendered to the tradition that generations of IU students have embraced before her. She found an open sofa, let go of her vanity and drifted off.
When she woke, someone asked if she’d been dreaming.
Velez thought for a second. She’d dreamed, she said, of changing her Facebook status.
“What did the new one say?”
She smiled.
“Best nap ever.”
***
The wooden rafters above the Union’s East Lounge have been collecting student dreams for more than half a century.Now, the Sleeping Room remains a place where students feel comfortable enough to drop their boundaries and doze for a few minutes or hours. In the middle of the busy stream of campus life, it is an island of tranquility.
The lounge was built in 1959 during the expansion that created what is now the Biddle Hotel and Conference Center. A brochure, housed in the IU Archives, advertised the new Biddle Continuation Center with a photo of the East Lounge. In the photo, students are shown reading in chairs or studying.
The caption reads: “Quiet lounges, complete with taped music, provide a pleasant atmosphere for conversation and relaxation.”
Decades later, the East Lounge continues to radiate stillness in the heart of the Union, down the hall from the Commons food court and just up an open flight of stairs from the hotel lobby doors that welcome about 14,000 people every day, said Bruce Jacobs, the IMU’s executive director.
The public napping is made possible through the unspoken rules within the lounge. Students leave each other alone and speak softly, if at all. Inside the room’s hush, time seems to slow. Daily pressures fade.
A few yards away, on the tiled corridor just beyond the edge of the lounge’s carpet, the noisy river of University life rushes by.
Campus tour groups walk past, craning their necks at the sleepers. People gossip on their cell phones, trading stories from the night before.
On rainy days, students squeak by in rubber boots, and when the Rotary Club meets in the adjoining Frangipani Room, amplified voices seep through the wooden paneling.
In the bubble of the lounge, sleepers feel safe. Like a family, they expect mutual respect.
“From the start, this has been the living room of the campus,” Jacobs said. A living room, he said, is a place where students should feel relaxed. The napping doesn’t bother him. In fact, he said he likes it.
“It’s a space for students to come and hang out, and, if they want, sleep. There are some unions in the country that have made conscious decisions to put in short sofas so that students can’t sleep on them. Guess what? Students are sleeping on the sofas anyway, or they’re sleeping next to the sofa. In my mind, it shows a degree of comfort with a place.”
Refurbishments have been tailored to ensure maximum coziness and
durability.
The carpeting’s color scheme plays well with other furnishings and muffles the footfalls of those looking for a place to snooze. It’s also easy to clean. The lighting in the lounge is mostly natural.
And the same leather couches and chairs have held sleepers for nearly 20 years. That’s by design, Union Associate Executive Director Thom Simmons said.
During a 1992 remodel, they selected the strongest- possible fabric for the nappers, studiers, sitters and all the others.
“It feels like a room at home. That’s what we were trying to capture,” Simmons said.
***
To the nappers, furniture matters.As students step into the muted confines of the lounge, they scan the room for their favorite sofa or chair like miners panning for gold.
Alumni Wilma and David Bammer, on campus for Homecoming, sat together on a red leather couch and reminisced about how much they loved the East Lounge as undergraduates.
The couple graduated in 1964 and 1967, respectively. They both said they remember feeling at home here. Wilma liked to study on a certain couch, now gone. David liked to sleep here when, as a fraternity pledge, he wasn’t allowed to come home between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
“It looks exactly the same,” Wilma said. “The wallpaper hasn’t changed. Nothing.”
Decades later, the feel of the room remains the same, too. Students seek refuge here from the harried pace of exams and papers.
The other day, freshman Carly Rudolph sat down in an armchair, opened her laptop and started video chatting with a friend. When a sofa was vacated four feet away, Rudolph paused her conversation to carry her computer, and her video call, over to the vacant spot.
“I got a couch,” she said.
She finished her call, put her computer back into her backpack and set it on the floor. She folded her hands under her head, closed her eyes and dozed.
When she woke a few minutes later, she stretched and blinked before heading off to class. While she snoozed, she said she’d dreamed of taking a long nap back in her dorm room at McNutt Quad.
***
For the unlucky few who can’t find a vacant seat, there is always room on the red, green and gold leaf-patterned carpet. The broad, inset panels separating the lounge from the Frangipani Room next door harbor most of the floor-sleepers. They lie close to the wall, where they’re less exposed.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, sophomore Daniel Busch was one of the unlucky ones. When he discovered all of the couches were taken, he just went for the floor. He lay on his back, pulled his knees up toward his chest and used his backpack as a makeshift pillow.
He slept for half an hour or so. The floor was harder than the couches, he admitted after he woke, and the nap didn’t really measure up to others he’d taken on the furniture.
For freshman Howard Richardson, the floor was comfortable enough. When Richardson walked into the lounge with a friend, he just wanted a place to doze between his Professional Writing class and his African American Studies
discussion.
He didn’t waste much time looking for a sofa — there weren’t any open — and he went straight to the carpet. When he woke, he admitted he prefers the couches, but he’ll take what he can get.
“This is a perfect place to sleep,” Richardson said.
***
Custodian Linda Weddle said she plans her cleaning schedule around the nappers spread across the lounge’s carpet. Weddle has been keeping the IMU tidy for 13 years. She cleans the East Lounge soon after her shift starts at 5 a.m. Once the students come in and start sleeping on the floor, they make it too hard to vacuum. “There ain’t no way you can get around all those bodies,” Weddle said as she dusted the landscape paintings just outside the room. “It looks like someone dropped a bomb in there.”
Weddle thought for a second.
“Sometimes I wish they’d let me take a nap in there.”
***
Like a baby in the womb, Lauren Miller slept in a ball in an armchair. A green quilted jacket covered the freshman’s socked feet as she napped with her knees pulled up to her chest, her head turned away from the world. Next to the chair, her patterned rain boots and umbrella sat just out of reach. Her backpack was there, too. A book poked out of the top — a green and gold copy of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”
Miller sleeps in the East Lounge at midday every Tuesday and Thursday, between Astronomy 100 and her Detective, Mystery and Horror Literature class. Her room in Forest Quad is too far away, and she’d get less sleep if she trekked back to the dorm. So twice a week, she drops her books and gear beside the chair in this communal space.
Miller said she has never slept in any other public place. She feels safe in the East Lounge, at least in part, because she knows her parents slept here, too, when they were students.
Miller’s father Scott is a radiologist in New Palestine, Ind., and a 1986 graduate of IU.
“We teased Lauren when she got there that she couldn’t leave without sleeping in the lounge for even a few minutes,”
Scott Miller said by phone. He slept in this lounge, as well as the South Lounge, when he was a student.
Some of his best memories, he said, are of curling up for naps on cold winter nights.
Lauren said she likes the chairs because they don’t sink in at the ends. Her father preferred the couches.
He said he doesn’t worry about his daughter napping in public. He takes comfort in the fact that in the lounge, she’s surrounded by other people.
“Seems safe as kittens,” he said.
That sense of collective safety keeps students coming back to the sleeping room.
“I know that everyone else does it, so I can do it too,” Lauren said after. “It’s warm and quiet, and I know no one’s going to take my stuff.”
The freshman paused.
“But I don’t know why I know that.”
