Sleep Position

The clearest and most direct sleep position instruction Aajonus gave concerns anyone experiencing a breathing problem, whether from a cold, flu, pneumonia, or an active lung detoxification. His instruction was unambiguous: never lie down flat when the lungs are detoxifying or when the lung muscles are in a compromised, partially non-functional state.

His explanation of why lying flat is harmful in this situation is mechanical. When the lungs are repairing, many of the muscles supporting them are not working properly. He compared this to shutting down several lanes of a highway. When a person lies down in this state, gravity pushes the lungs shut. Without sufficient muscle tone and glandular and organ tone to hold the lungs open against gravity, the lungs collapse partially under their own weight, compressing the airways and making breathing worse.

The corrective position is sleeping at a slant or in a seated upright position. When the body is oriented so that the head and chest are elevated, gravity works in the opposite direction, pushing the lungs open rather than closed. Aajonus stated directly that if a person is going through a cold, flu, or pneumonia and cannot breathe well, they should not lie flat but should sleep sitting at a slant so that gravity assists the lungs in staying open rather than forcing them shut.

In his own case history involving bone cancer and extreme spinal damage from radiation therapy, Aajonus described in detail how conventional lying positions became impossible and how he arrived at sleeping in a bathtub as a functional substitute for a bed.

After radiation treatment cauterized his spine, he described the result as similar to taking malleable clay and firing it in a kiln, solidifying the spine completely. He was living on a hardwood floor because the softness of a bed moved in unpredictable ways that could pinch the nerve, causing him to wake screaming in pain. Even on the hardwood floor, he was never able to sleep more than ten minutes at a time due to the excruciating pain that came with any sustained pressure on any part of his body.

The bathtub solution emerged when, while trying everything he could think of, he put milk and sea salt and vinegar in his bath and fell asleep. When he woke, the pain was gone. When he got out of the tub, the pain returned within ten to twenty minutes at its former severity. He recognized that the water made the body buoyant, taking pressure off the back and spine entirely. This buoyancy alleviated approximately eighty percent of the back pain that any sustained lying position on a hard surface would cause.

He then began sleeping in the bathtub systematically. He had a large old claw-foot tub made of cast iron that retained heat longer than ordinary tubs, which allowed him to sleep in the hot water for thirty to thirty-five minutes at a stretch before waking. He would then let some water out, add scalding hot water, stir it to equalize the temperature, and go back to sleep. Using this method, he was sleeping fourteen hours a day in the bathtub, which he described as far better than the ten minutes at a time he managed on the floor. Being in the bathtub with hot water was the position that allowed sleep to happen at all during that period.

He later referenced sleeping in a hot tub at his property for four to six hours at a time and described this as where he did all his sleeping during one period, noting that people who sleep this way get well faster.

In a later injury situation involving a broken leg and being confined to Thailand, he described spending half of his days in a hotel bathtub with two cups of coconut cream in the water, which made the body slightly buoyant. Because the room was hot, a cool bath was comfortable. He would go back and forth between the bed and the bathtub, sleeping in the bathtub to avoid waking in pain, until by the third week he had enough recovery to use crutches.

In his discussion of sleep apnea, Aajonus gave another specific positional instruction. He explained that sleep apnea occurs when toxins stored in the nervous system, particularly from high adrenaline, caffeine, soda, and chocolate, or from Novocaine injections, drip down into the throat during sleep and temporarily paralyze the throat. He stated that sleeping on the back forces these poisons to run down the back of the throat, which causes the cessation of muscle reaction until thyroxin hormone is produced to restart breathing.

His positional recommendation for sleep apnea was to sleep on the side or face-down, rather than on the back, so that the accumulation and drainage pattern does not send those toxins directly down the throat. He was explicit that masks used for sleep apnea do not address this cause, and he paired the positional recommendation with dietary interventions: hot water bottles on the neck and eating cheese and honey together twice daily to supply the minerals needed to resolve the underlying nervous system toxicity.

Aajonus described personal instances of being without sleep for thirty-six hours and then stopping the car to sleep at a rest stop. In one instance, he reclined the seat and slept with his arm propped, managing three hours in that position. In another instance at a rural area near Sacramento, conditions made a similar rest impossible. These accounts are not prescriptive, but they establish that he considered any position allowing genuine rest to be worth taking advantage of, and that a reclined car seat was sufficient for genuine restorative sleep when the body needed it.

The thread running through all of Aajonus's specific sleep position guidance is that the body's condition determines the appropriate position, not habit or convention. For a person with healthy lung function and no pain condition, lying flat presents no problem in his framework. For a person with impaired lung muscles, flat lying actively prevents healing by collapsing the airways. For a person with severe back or bone pain, flat lying may make sleep physiologically impossible, and the solution is buoyancy in water rather than any particular dry-surface position. For a person with sleep apnea driven by nervous system toxins, back-lying directs the toxins into the throat and worsens the condition, while side or prone sleeping reroutes them.

He made no statements establishing a universally preferred sleep position for healthy individuals. His position guidance is entirely context-dependent and tied to specific conditions. The bathtub, the slanted seat, and the side-lying recommendation are all remedial adjustments to conditions that make ordinary lying positions counterproductive or impossible.

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