Are you sleeping fine where you are? Then don’t worry.

If you are having problems sleeping, then it’s worth thinking about moving the bed. But where? It could depend on the house. It could depend on your birthdate. It could depend on the circumstances of the room or the house.

Feng shui considers your unique circumstances. It is not “one size fits all,” as many books would have you believe.

Why do many people stress sleeping north or south, and not southeast and northwest, or any other direction? Because of the crackpot theories of Robert Fludd (1574-1637), the founder of English Rosicrucianism. These nutty ideas have found their way into New Age versions of feng shui, and McFengshui.

Fludd believed there were two principles to all things:

• condensation (the boreal or northern virtue)
• rarefaction (the southern or austral virtue)

Fludd had similarly peculiar ideas about magnetism. He believed that humans had north and south poles like the Earth, and magnetism could only take place when humans slept in a boreal position. That was supposed to remove the harmful effects of the demons that Fludd believed were inhabiting the human body and causing all illnesses.

None of this nonsense has anything to do with authentic feng shui.

De Magnete by William Gilbert was published in 1600, when the West knew only a little about magnetism, and a lot of wild ideas were in circulation. Dr John Dee had his ideas. Fludd had his. It was a great time to have all sorts of wacky ideas, because Western experts (Gilbert, in this case) knew so little.

As Westerners obtained compasses and studied magnetism, crackpot ideas like Fludd’s were relegated to the fringe where they belong.

Western cultural constipation (ideas of the ancient Greeks and medieval Europeans) is why Chinese were awarded the Nobel in physics for the discovery of the nonconservation of parity.