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“I am vertical/But I would rather be horizontal,” wrote Sylvia Plath, meditating on the consequences of a treelike existence. A team of researchers from the Vienna University of Technology recently announced another perspective on arboreal repose. Using sophisticated laser scanners they created images of trees during the night, when their metabolic processes slow down, and found that their branches had perceptibly drooped. They had “gone to sleep”, in the team’s words. “I am vertical/But I would rather be horizontal（我是直立的/但我宁愿自己是水平的），”思考了像树一样的生存状态是什么样子之后，西尔维娅•普拉思(Sylvia Plath)这样写道。维也纳科技大学(Vienna University of Technology)的一个研究小组最近宣布了一种看待树木的睡眠的新角度。他们通过精密的激光扫描仪，对夜晚的树木成像，发现夜间新陈代谢过程放慢时，这些树木的的枝条明显下垂。用这个小组的话来说，这些树“睡着了”。 It is hardly a revelation: if your fluid pressure is reduced, you sag. What’s more interesting is the researchers’ language and their resorting to the ancient metaphor of “sleep”. Finding analogies between the physical forms and processes of trees and our own vertical life seems to be compulsive, a habit that goes back through Plath to the Romantic poets and beyond. We anthropomorphise them in a directly corporeal way. We talk of limbs and crowns and trunks. When a tree is felled we see a body, severed from its earthly roots and killed. Our empathy is understandable, and helps the world seem a more joined-up place, but it does a huge and damaging injustice to the tree world. | 
