At 1:30 in the morning, Julie Collins, program developer at the Field Museum of Natural History, figured what the heck. She had always had the fantasy, and now she had her chance. She said to herself, “Go ahead. Do it. Do it.” First she spread her sleeping bag and two pillows on the carpet in the Indians of the Southwest hall. Surrounded by a couple of colleagues and several glass cases filled with antique clothes and relics of the Mogollon and Hohokam tribes, and just a few cases away from a stuffed bison, she did a couple of cartwheels. Then she tucked herself in and slept like a log.
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In the morning, there were more stories. A woman who’d slept in the hall of Eskimo artifacts felt hands going all over her body in the middle of the night. She wasn’t scared, though. “It gave me a comfortable, calming feeling,” she said.
Some people couldn’t stop dreaming about 500 million years of the earth’s history. Tossing and turning, they thought of botany and geology; the ghost of Bushman the gorilla, dead since 1951 and now stuffed and residing in a glass case; the mummies, Egyptian bodies interred before the Dynastic period; stuffed deer, manatees, elephants; dinosaur bones; cavemen dioramas. . .
Collins says inviting people to sleep over makes the Field Museum seem an accessible place: “It says anybody can come here and learn something about other cultures.”
“Why are you using a toad?” a sweet, mild-mannered guy asked his fair- haired little girl.
