Asklemmy

My wife sleeps in the middle, like a snow angel, so I always sleep on what's left.

Right, left if you're looking at the bed from the foot.

Stage right, stage left if you're looking out from the bed toward the foot.

I'd say it'd be from the perspective of laying in it, since no one cares what side of the bed is which unless they're going to lay in it

Forget left-right. Use port and starboard.

We use "my side" and "your side" so it's always correct from any perspective.

The answer is easy, but to get to it, a little bit of a thought experiment is probably helpful. I say, look to how we define our own left and right sides for guidance. When facing forward, our left hand is on the left side of our body, and the right hand is on the right side of the body. Perspective doesn't matter, and there is no ambiguity.

Now we need to extend this to the bed. A bed has a head, just like a person does. So where would its face be? It seems clear to me, unless you are sleeping on a dead mattress, that the face is clearly going to be looking upwards at the ceiling at the head of the bed. So the left side of the bed, if you are standing at the foot of the bed looking at it, would be on your right. Just like the left side of your friend, when you are standing in front of them and looking at them, is on your right.

Now if you just imagine the mattress to be perfectly spherical and in a frictionless environment.......

(Obviously just having fun with this answer, but it's also the right answer)

Stage left is the only definition that matters here, unless you have good reason to care about audience left owo

Either:

• you establish a convention and both learn to choose one perspective or the other
• one of you tries to do that and the other pretends not to agree, because it's cute and fun as a form of teasing

Pick one and I hope whatever you pick works for both of you. Agreement is easy, but teasing can be fun.

take a cue from the theater folk: stage left/right is defined by the performers' perspective. Call it "bed left" and "bed right" to talk about it from the perspective of someone on the bed, and "standing left" or "standing right" to talk about the perspective of someone looking at the bed

Although it's kinda silly to me that anyone's default orientation would be from looking at the bed, which is not the position most commonly associated with the thing famous for laying in it.

Imagine the bed is a clock. The 12 o’clock position is at the head — I don’t think anything else makes sense. That makes it unambiguous.

The positions are 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock.

Stand at the base.

Face the head

No right or left.

Window side or door side.

If this doesn't apply to your bed, then you have aligned the bed improperly.

If you lay in the bed, depending on if you are lying on your back or stomach, left and right still change.

Ususally a bed is positioned with the head against a wall, so if you are facing the bed from the foot end, left and right are always the same. So I vote left/right is as seen from the foot end of the bed.

Driver side, passenger side.

We customarily refer to the ends of the bed as "head" and "foot" which are analagous to the head and foot of a sail in nautical terms. Therefore "forward" in the ordinary bed naturally corresponds to the direction of straight up toward the ceiling, and the port side is the one on your left when lying in the bed facing that way.

I have a problem with right and left, and this question illustrates it pretty well. I tend to give directions as east, west, north, south. Left and right move around when you do, so can't really be assigned to stationary items like a bed. Our bed has a northwest side and a southeast side.

Following because this drives me nuts too

Someone save us, give us an authoritative answer

Obviously the perspective of lying on the bed face-up. Though I may be biased because our bed is next to the window (feet side) so you can't look at it form the foot of the bed -- either from the side or behind our heads

To avoid confusion, just say driver and passenger side.

I meant this to be a joke, but if you assume your bed drives forward toward the side with your pillows then it actually works. But if you read in bed with a reading pillow then I guess you probably want to drive your bed toward your feet side of the bed...