Too many New York mornings are born in rage and drear.

          Rude howls of reality invade the healing unconscious. The telephone. Harsh proletarian alarm clock. Jack-hammers ripping at the blacktop. Last night’s coffee grounds in the unwashed carafe. Somebody has depleted the secret cache of Sara Lee croissants. And there are seeds in the grapefruit juice. Fish them out or filter them through morning teeth. It was not like this for the Empress Theodora. Mornings were surely more civilized for Madame de Staël.

          Let me go gentle into the blaze of day.

          Bring me breakfast in bed.

          Breakfast in bed is one of those unnatural acts that can be supremely delicious when performed by two consenting adults. I should have been rich and titled in eighteenth century France. I should have been a pampered courtesan…muse to some mad creative genius, a woman of modest intellect, great wit and fine consuming passions. But given the mean ascetic boundaries of democracy, I struggle and contrive. I play geisha to his prince, slipping softly away to bring fresh-squeezed orange juice and homemade bread and smart smelly Reblochon or runaway Brie…left on the counter overnight to mellow. And sometimes he is the weekend gamekeeper; splitting logs while I sleep the last precious hour, then coming into the bedroom dark with Hostess Twinkies, fresh bitter espresso, purple and green grapes in an old Shaker basket and The Times Book Review in the pocket of a squat-legged wicker tray scavenged from the Woodstock Library Fair for $3.

          Perhaps I have a faintly unrealistic attachment to bed. Some of us are bed-nesters. Eros tangles our love lines with Oh-God-the-birds-are-awake-what-am-I-doing-in-bed mates. I cannot bear to leave the cocoon. He leaps awake to 76 trombones. Who are these anal-compulsives who will not suffer breakfast in bed? The Adventuress encounters some rare primitives. Imagine! A man who can start the day without coffee. A New Yorker traumatized by a dab of sour cream. An army of eager achievers, wary of spills, ill at ease in a mountain of pillows, frazzled by strangers with bed trays, traumatized by a crumb. What anal-compulsives. What poor puritans. A crumb is not forever. Anyway, I plan to enlist my launderer in this decadent scheme. When my erotic novel goes into its third printing I shall have the sheets changed daily. (No one will be surprised to find three breakfasts in bed and one supper on the horizontal in the first 53 pages.)

          I am not intolerant. I accept the fact that there are some who prefer to read in a downy club chair and those who work best at a desk. There are romantics who scribble love letters at an écritoire and naturalists who favor breakfast beside the pool and sensationalists who prefer to make love in the bathtub.

          I’d rather…in bed.

          Breakfast in bed -- love it, hate it -- may be a sexist divide. Men seem more fiercely opposed “I don’t want to feel I’m turning into King Farouk,” was the thin self-analysis of one never-breakfast-in-bed male. “Women love breakfast in bed,” another observed. “It must have to do with passivity.”

          Faroukophobia never haunts me. Oh, for a measure of sheer decadence.

          Faroukiphobe is invited to leap out of bed and arrange my tray.

          How boring to wait for my birthday or the National Book Award. I want breakfast in bed this morning. Tuesday. If necessary, I will stand up without quite wakening -- squeeze, slice, steep and filter -- and carry it upstairs to myself on a tray. But give me a discreet stranger serving raspberries any day and I will give you back Imus-in-the-Morning.

          My fantasy wakening is tender. A whispered Madame or Milady…Ms., if you must. A hand at the curtain inching it ever-so-slowly along to permit a reasonable ribbon of light. How glorious to wake up gradually, one sense at a time. What luxury to test each limb slowly…just to see that they all still work. On a blurry soft morning after the night before when one’s excess was neither gastronomic nor alcoholic but wholesomely erotic.

          And then breakfast.

          Breakfast can be tightly scripted or wildly ad-lib. But fate is capricious. You may wake up one Sunday to find your body in his apartment and the champagne and fresh figs in your refrigerator. And there are mornings following nights that had little prospect but blossomed into greatness -- somewhere out of Zabar’s delivery zone.

          One can improvise. Rum-raisin ice cream is a sublime breakfast. Or the sausage stuffing from inside last night’s cold bird. Most neighborhood delis and luncheonettes will deliver. And Zabar’s smoked-salmon-on-wheels can be coaxed crosstown for a price.

          Of course the perfect breakfast in bed is a fresh-cooked miracle set on a tray that is balanced to perfection. A silent hand plumps my pillows and smooths the comforter. For me there must be espresso and fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice in crystal, and blue flowers and Georgian silver and a sensitive bedmate who knows I need Page One of The New York Times, kisses but no conversation for half an hour.

          What New York sybarites need is a kind of residential room service: the catered breakfast. And it would help to have a button by the bed that would unlock the front door -- all four locks, slip the bolt, dislodge the bar, unhook the chain and cage the dog in the bathroom so the caterer can slip into the kitchen with his omelette pan and his cold smoked trout.

          Sybarites! Ask, and the wizards below will deliver.

          Steve Bierman does an unobtrusive delivery. “Preheat the over to 350 degrees,” he said. “I’m on my way.” He assumed our guinea-pig breakfasters had china and flatware. They didn’t. But he improvised with odds and ends, serving mushrooms filled with steak tartare and caviar, seafood crêpes with lobster sauce, fresh strawberries in raspberry purée spiked with Grand Marnier, and Kriter, a sparking blanc de blanc, $45 for two. One half of this pleased tasting team was so tight he almost couldn’t get out of bed to watch the Celtics. Caterer Bierman also does a $35 breakfast: salmon-filled crêpes in a hollandaise, artichoke bottoms with spinach Mornay, lemon sherbet and hot brandied blueberry sauce…and champagne. He is quiet, serves discreetly, then lets himself out. AG 9-4594

          Mr. Babbington and Friend cook and serve from your own kitchen -- tender oysters, impeccably poached, on a bed of spinach with green sauce, fine ratatouille, strawberries in Beaujolais, French chocolate cake with crème Chantilly and a bracing eye-opener of champagne, orange juice and apricot brandy that transformed two-thirds of Sunday into a boozy blur, $35 for two. Quite frankly, one half of this tasting team never did attain the vertical. Mr. Babbington will also serve a smoked trout pâté, omelette with Danish ham, eggplant, chicken liver, and leeks, French apple torte and California Chablis for $35. Delivered to your door with instructions for warming, these breakfasts are $20 and $15. 850-1170.

          We Always Cook With Honey delivers and serves a mostly organic feast for $25. Nat Metz, plump red-bearded scion of the Queens catering family, will drop off breakfast and disappear, but he prefers to drape his patchwork quilt across the bed and serve his sun-cooked jams and home-baked bread and organic eggs, one course at a time. He would like at least a week’s notice to produce a really dazzling fast-breaker featuring blueberry soup and fresh coconut macaroons or pumpkin-raisin bread and homemade Granola and home-fried Jerusalem artichokes with farm-fresh eggs. But on 24-hour alert he improvised a banana bisque, clarion clear hand-squeezed grapefruit juice, Mary’s magnificent muffins -- giant homemade discs topped with Cheddar rarebit, alfalfa sprouts and spiced tomato -- his own coffee blend from McNulty’s, and papaya heaped with fresh strawberries in a lavender honey, lemon and wheat germ dressing that must be an acquired taste. There were dried flowers, Nat’s own Japanese bowls, and Nat himself, resplendent in a crocheted Afghan vest over a white undershirt. He washed everything too. 868-3330.

          Carol Guber Shachtman of Silver Spoonful, Inc. brings her own breakfast tray and china and the Sunday Times, on request, with your choice of breakfast: melon in port, croque-monsieur, poached egg on ratatouille, croissants and preserves, cold lemon soufflé and champagne-spiked orange juice, $25 for two. Fresh papaya juice, avocado and onion omelette, dried figs and prosciutto, a brioche with bilberry jam, assorted cheeses and coffee, $17.50. Service is $5 extra, but our breakfasters preferred to serve themselves. So Ms. Shachtman did a fast turn of her exquisite omelette, left Boursin and Gruyère, a scant thermos of coffee and cream, figs and brioche in a neat wicker basket, and made a graceful exit. Be sure to give her four days’ notice, please. 427-2717.

          The quiche is Eleanor Roger’s specialty, but for breakfast in bed, she will add salad and Kriter, sparkling blanc de blanc. With a sherry-scented lobster quiche -- a firm custard creation -- breakfast costs $20 for two. The vegetable quiche -- carrots, celery, onions, with fresh sharp Parmesan -- salad and wine is $16. Her salad dressing is a fresh lemony departure from cliché. Mrs. Rogers was ready to serve, but our tasters had been up since 6 a.m. and didn’t feel like crawling back into bed. Delivered to your door, the breakfasts are $16 and $12. 873-4178.

          Cleo’s La Cuisine will make the trip from Maplewood, New Jersey, to deliver and serve a hearty American breakfast for brunch in the French or Southern idiom if there is enough demand. She needs at least five reservations to make the trip more than philanthropy. Cleo’s benevolent breakfast waiters all wear black tie. They wake the palate with fresh fruit: sliced bananas in orange sauce, strawberries and pineapple in a pineapple boat, and sliced grapefruit. Then they do omelettes, pancakes, French toast, their own version of eggs Benedict, fried chicken smothered in gravy with homemade biscuits and grits, and crêpes filled to suit your whim. (Were our tasters still sitting upright at this point? They didn’t say.) Twenty-five dollars for two with white wine, and the breakfast served and tidied-up after; or $17.50, simply dropped at your door. (201) 761-4630.

          Summering sybarites in need of gastronomic pampering can call Christopher Idone and Sean Driscoll for fresh beluga caviar topped with cold poached egg and lemony mayonnaise in a fresh artichoke heart, hot brioche, strawberries and cream, and pink champagne, $50 for two -- that includes the drawing the curtain, setting the table and fetching the Sunday Times. The $30 breakfast begins with figs and prosciutto, then vol-au-vent filled with chicken quenelles in a cognac-perfumed cream sauce, served with a dry white wine; last, poached peaches in a raspberry sauce. Idone and Driscoll are based in New York but cater as far as Westchester. They summer in Southampton, but do breakfasts in the city if other assignments mesh. 421-1082; (516) 283-0715.

          Nothing could be saner or more elegant than Sunday in bed with fresh malossol beluga caviar. If you order the one-and-three-quarter-ounce tin from Zabar’s, they will throw in chopped egg, chopped onion, lemon, and Danish pumpernickel on the house. Or break the fast with Scottish salmon ($11 a pound) or sturgeon ($12), sweet country butter, the house’s crusty pumpernickel rolls, black olives, yeasty Russian coffeecake and a bottle of Perrier water. Zabar’s delivery minimum is usually $30, plus $1 for delivery on the West Side, $3 for the East Side or the Village. But ask for Murray Klein, say “breakfast,” and the minimum is $15. Sunday delivery time is one hour in a 25-block radius, two hours further afield. TR 7-93-10.

          If chef John Yip were having breakfast in bed, he would want har gow, fun gun, chew shew bow and har shew my -- a dumpling brunch with a side order of shrimp and water chestnuts. And that’s what he stir-fries to order in your kitchen, $14 for two. Yip arrives in spotless whites; he assumes you’ll have a skillet. Our tasters didn’t, so he cheerfully improvised for 40 minutes in a saucepan. Yip also does a $24 feast: rice soup, tuna pancake, a beef-and-mushroom dish with rice and noodles and son jok gow yuk -- beef roll and bean curd with tea, of course. He serves (on Saturdays and Sundays only), then disappears; he will not go out of Manhattan. DE 2-1622.

          Now that breakfast is tamed and the morning is sublimely civilized, I want to celebrate the horizontal supper.