ALANNA
THAIN
I am an Associate Professor of world cinemas and cultural studies in the department of English at McGill University. I direct of the Moving Image Research Lab (MIRL), dedicated to the study of the body in moving image media and expanded performance. I am former director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. My 2017 book, Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema, explores how cinematic experiences of unusual temporalities can create ethico-aesthetic opening onto what I term “anotherness,” including our own, intimate strangeness to ourselves. I am currently completing a book, Anarchival Outbursts, on dance as a survival strategy in post-digital media, and a new project, Sexo-Somatic Technologies, on desire, distributed embodiment, and feminist technologies. I direct the FRQSC funded research team CORERISC, the Collective for Research on Epistemologies of Embodied Risk, with its current focus on “Unruly Affects: Horror in Media and Performance.”
In a few words, explain what drew you to this project.
In sleep we are radically vulnerable in a way that challenges so many received assumptions about subjectivity, continuity, and agency. While this vulnerability is often a source of fear, I am fascinated by works and practices that seek to make this the ground for other affects, other actions, other ways of being in the world. Sleep allows us to feel our own opacity to ourselves not simply as a blank spot in knowledge or experience, but as a living, mobile, and insistent reminder of our own radical mutability.
Q & A
How would you describe your relationship to sleep?
Intense. I am a lifelong insomniac happiest if I can go to bed at 4am and sleep until noon—not the best fit for living in this world! I’m a vivid dreamer and I dearly wish there was a VCR to record our dreams, though they would probably be awful. And if someone offered me a pill so I wouldn’t ever have to sleep again, I would never take it.
Why do you find sleep a compelling site for research?
Sleep is fascinating because it is both so chronic and urgent. Sleepers are often portrayed as cut off from the world, but I am most interested in how sleep is a relational experience. Right now, for instance, I’m working on sleep in queer and feminist media and performance, and I’m struck by how often such works stage the act of sleep as a radically unruly behaviour—out of place, out of time, out of sync. The tension between our urgent need for quality sleep and the lack of options for people whose somatic habits and happiness falls outside of the 24/7 demands of daily life is one of the most urgent and intimate sites for “social dreaming” today: we need to cultivate a generous and radical sleep imaginary and pragmatics.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about sleep?
That it should happen at night.
Are you an early bird or night owl?
Night owl.
What is the strangest place you have ever fallen asleep?
The gardens of museums all around the world–the best places to sleep off jetlag.
Do you have a memory of a particularly good or bad night’s sleep?
I spent a few weeks once in an apartment in Sydney where my bed was eye level with the wall-to-wall window that looked out over nothing but ocean. Every morning I would wake naturally just before sunrise and watch it before falling asleep again, and this little ritual of splitting the night somehow made for a deeply refreshing sleep.
Do you keep a dream journal? Any tips for someone who would like to start one?
No, never. I like letting them go.
Do you have any favourites/recommendations for cultural works that address sleep in some way?
So many, but one of my favourite films is My Own Private Idaho, by Gus Van Sant, where River Phoenix plays a narcoleptic hustler. Apichatpong Weerasethakul has countless, tender images of sleepers across his works. Because I love sleeping at the movies, Christian Marclay’s 24 hour film The Clock has been the site of some amazing naps at the overnight screenings, where the film just bleeds hopelessly into your dreams. I love works that design spaces for rest and care, such as Pipilotti Rist’s 4th Floor to Mildness (2016), which at the end of a retrospective that increasingly moves us from vertical to horizontal viewing, you are invited to choose a bed to lie down in and watch films suspended on the ceiling. Or the incredible Black Power Naps project by Fanny Sosa and Navild Acosta, which designs collective spaces for deep and healing Black rest.
What is your favourite [song/podcast/video/audio book/tv show] to fall asleep to?
I’m the child of an intensive care nurse who worked mostly nights who used TV as a free white noise machine, so the TV has been my dream machine for a long time. Oddly, when I listen to music, my running mix of high intensity and somatically charged tunes is often my favourite choice.
Can you sleep "anywhere anytime" or do you need the comfort of your own bed to sleep well?
Neither.