sleep salons
Season 1 ABECEDARY
By Sandra Huber
An abecedary is an ancient poetic form structured to follow the letters of the alphabet. The Sleep Abecedary uses the Sleep Salons themselves as an alphabet that inspires further variations. Each entry accompanies and expands upon themes from each Sleep Salon, condensing the conversations into a keyword and drawing them out into miniature essays, poems, or dreams.
The Sleep Abecedary works with the Sleep Salons vertically rather than horizontally — by falling into the centre of a single concept, each riff aims to pull out a thread behind the conversation that was maybe present all along.
See also the abecedary for season 2 of the Salons (in French).
Scale – Control – Resilience/Resistance – Wolf – Winning – Defenseless – Lull– Story – Soft
Sleep Salon 1: THE SOCIAL LIVES OF SLEEP
Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Carmela Alcántara, moderated by Alanna Thain
September 29, 2021
SCALE
Who am I when I am sleeping? At the level of the body, am I the same person asleep as I am awake? From a bird’s eye view, we come across an ebb and drift of daily habits. Bodies in houses, on streets, stocking shelves at a grocery store, handing a child a sandwich wrapped in crinkly plastic, ghostwriting the latest biography, watching wildlife, entering and exiting malls and relationships and theatres and hospitals. A man working a night shift at a copy shop steps out into the stillness of the street and stares. A woman, newly arrived in Montreal from Bogotá, is not used to sleeping alone and smokes a cigarette at an open window. Moving further out, we see bodies engaged in patterns of emigration and domesticity. Waves of acculturation, the limits and rhythms of borders and policies. From a 50,000-foot view, we blend into a point of data. We are a part of all these pulses, some more than others. I come down into the micro of myself.
Here’s how to write a biary. Take an inventory of your biological details: I am a body in a body of air. I measure myself when I wake and hire an app to monitor me when I’m sleeping. How much sweat and breath do I produce? My uterus is dragging downwards today. I have 10,000 recorded footsteps. At least 2 microaggressions and 2.5 regrets working their way out of my nervous system by 5 p.m. My skin sheds. I leak and leave dusty trails. At the end of the day, my body creates words and numbers, just like my mind. Is there power in the cycling moods of my biological gossip column? The problem about the biological is it never stays contained — it swims into the psychic realms, dreams and daydreams, fantasies and feelings.
How can we enflame the rote details of our statistical entities to create actionable and specific events? Taking up from where their talks weft and weave, Alanna Thain asks Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Carmela Alcántara, can dormancy be a space of political potential?
Sleep webs the waking to the waking, and the web itself is the dream of exiting to more fallow, voltaic vistas.
We are in this everyday together and every night together again. What are the speculative capacities of all our time together unspent?
Sleep Salon 2: THE HISTORY (OF THE FUTURE) OF SLEEP
Kenton Kroker and Benjamin Reiss, moderated by Josh Dittrich
October 13, 2021
CONTROL
Where am I when I am sleeping? Mostly in a bedroom, on a mattress, wheredarkness and lightness are under the supervision of curtains and blinds, where sound is under the management of doors and windows, and where I am contained and nestled from the noisy world of the waking. When sleep goes wrong, this bedroom shifts to another kind of room, a laboratory posing as a bedroom, where sleep is lifted from its invisible behavioural state and made legible through the gadgets of measurement. I have only slept overnight at a sleep laboratory once in my life, but it was enough to find out that when we enter the rooms of sleep pathologies, we enter the future of sleep, a sci-fi motion at once nostalgic and forwards facing, domestic and remote. The history of the sleep laboratory is the history of controlling sleep. It is a room that functions to make sure we sleep better — suggesting that somewhere along the way, sleep fell out of our control and needed to be adjusted. Sleep found us too often or it did not find us at all. It is not only a personal problem that gets unravelled in laboratories, but a societal problem that becomes addressed through architecture. Specifically, the architecture of the bedroom, the sleeping room.
Figure 1 Konstantin Melnikov, model for The Sonata of Sleep, 1929–30. Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, Russia
In the USSR in the late 1920s, workers were exhausted. The workday had been extended, causing productivity — who knew — to wane. The Soviet authorities launched a competition: why not design a space where workers go solely to recuperate? They called this The Green City. The more workers recuperating together, the better their work would be after recuperation. Konstantin Melnikov, an architect and painter, put an idea forward: why not 100,000 workers recuperating together? He called it The Sonata of Sleep. The Sonata was a building that had sloped floors in lieu of pillows and mechanized beds to rock the workers to sleep. Even, or especially, the air system was fastidiously controlled — including calming scents and asmr-like soundscapes.¹ Speaking of Melnikov, Kenton Kroker posits that it is not clear whether he (Melnikov) was joking or not with his proposition of the Sleep Sonata. In his 1899 book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud notes the similarity of the joke to the dream. In a footnote, Freud writes that an early critic of his book protested that in his (Freud’s) depiction of dreaming, the problem is that the dreamer, most often Freud himself, always seems much too witty and ingenious. Freud points out that he, in his waking life, has rarely been referred to as a wit. Yet dreams, he states, are witty: they use a similar logic that jokes do in order to get around the fact that the conscious mind would censor them in any other form.² Dreams use jokes as a tactic of surfacing.
Sleep is resourceful: it produces dreams, it cracks jokes, it produces more wakefulness, it makes the quiet hum of night. Yet us sleepers also exhaust resources, as Benjamin Reiss points out in his talk. To ensure our sleep, we must control the air: is it too hot or too cold? We turn on an air conditioner or crank the heat. The privacy of sleep in the Western world demands ever larger structures to fit our singular or at-times coupled or thrupled human bodies, each to their own cocoon. The sleep industry hocks expensive mattresses and silk pyjamas, eye masks and eye cream. The “American dream” is a sleeper leaving his footprint to control the comfort of his cozy bedroom.
Those without a room to sleep in also find themselves under the control of where and when it is acceptable to sleep. In Tio’tia’ke (Montreal), where I write from, arm rests are vaunted between seats at metro stations to keep people vertical; sometimes, benches are removed altogether in lieu of snake-like metal structures drilled to a wall. Not so much sitting as leaning, an action doubly removed from laying down.
I wonder how Melnikov slept. Perhaps rather than removing the workers from the workplace and creating an elaborate, isolated structure to hold them, as if sleep was the dirty underside of the accepted state of waking, the solution was much closer. Simply make a call to the workers to put down their tools, and, en masse, right now, lay down.
An experiment: sleep under a rumble of clouds. Sleep on the floor beside your cat under the kitchen table. Pull up a sleeping bag in a gallery and zip thyself up under an artwork you hate without the onus of performance. Sleep in a classroom to bother the demands placed on your attention.
To fall asleep, we have to lose control.
¹ See Tony Wood, “Bodies at Rest: Konstantin Melnikov’s Sonata of Sleep,” Cabinet 24: Shadows (Winter 2006– 07), https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/wood.php (accessed July 18, 2022).
² Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 316, fn 1.
Sleep Salon 3: TRAUMATIC SLEEP
Franny Nudelman and Judite Blanc, moderated by Alanna Thain
November 17, 2021
RESILIENCE / RESISTANCE
We are alive and this aliveness has many calibrations. One of them is sleep and sleep itself has many more. Here, the body is unglued from its habitual onus to keep itself together. We unwind, undo. Adjectives like strong or weak lose ground. Sleep disturbs distinctions between automatic and creative, attentional and diffuse. But sleep also offers a commentary on how the waking world receives us and what it demands of us. Sleep gives away our waking lives. And waking wears the troubles of our sleep.
In her talk, Judite Blanc notes how the “strong Black woman” schema in fact weakens the health of the strong Black women who are made to shoulder it. Black women, Blanc points out, are more likely than other racialized or ethnic groups to suffer from disorders such as hypertension and diabetes, not to mention worsened sleep caused by the everyday burden of racism at the workplace, in the streets, in private interactions. The burden to remain resilient. Sleep sees this and reacts, snapping backwards like an elastic.
A body under attack cannot rest and a body without rest cannot attack. The Nap Ministry, founded by Tricia Hersey, asserts that “Rest is Resistance.” Hersey, who describes herself as “Performance Artist. Writer. Theater Maker. Activist. Theologian. Daydreamer” promotes the radical act of rest, particularly where the Black body is concerned, and particularly as an act of resistance against the history of white supremacy — intertwined with and inseparable from capitalism — that forced and forces Black people to labour under terrible conditions and unjust compensation.³
Figure 2 The Nap Ministry, Instagram post, June 24, 2022
In a post from June 18, 2022, Hersey urges her Black followers to stop writing lengthy posts for a largely white audience on what Juneteenth stands for — “slavery is over and y’all don’t need to work for free any longer. Go lay down.”⁴ The Nap Ministry sprung into being around the same time as Amara Tabor-Smith and Ellen Sebastian Chang’s Black Women Dreaming (2017–19) project, which points us forward to Sleep Salon 6 where the two address their piece. Tabor-Smith, a dancer, and Chang, a writer, artist, and activist, provide Black women a space to sleep, while adding magical and spiritual elements, such as blessing the pillows and bedding, all together, before resting, and calling upon abolitionist and visionary Harriet Tubman as one of the spirit guides for their piece. Here, sleep is a routine that the two make into a ritual — the difference being that ritual is endowed with intention, as Tabor-Smith says in her talk, the intention of “our right to rest.” Much of their sleep project is undocumented,
Figure 3 A group of women blessing their bedding, from Amara Tabor-Smith and Ellen Sebastian Chang, Black Women Dreaming, part of House / Full of Black Women, Oakland, California, March 2017
for performance is always work, says Tabor-Smith, and resting is not performance, but rather the act of letting ourselves be. What is the infrathin between resilience and resistance? The Nap Ministry and Black Women Dreaming both explore this by framing napping and sleeping as necessary refusals and sacred space.
Yet the resistance of the sleeping body to act according to our waking standards can also be used against us. In her talk, Franny Nudelman underscores the insidious history of narcoanalysis, where WWII veterans were made to disclose their inner, private lives while under sedation. In this case, sleep holds out against our waking resistances and gives us away. Resistance, like resilience, is a double-edged sword.
Blanc offers that ultimately what defines resilience is the ability to bounce back creatively. This is the third word that sits between resilience and resistance and makes them sing. Often seen to be a positive trait, creativity, too, produces monsters, such as narcoanalysis, such as bombs and fossil fuels and the constant adaptation of viruses. The truth is that sometimes we are made to adapt against what is best for us, and this too is “resilient,” is “creative.” I keep seeing a meme floating around lately that reads, “what you call trauma, I call [badly translated sign on a restaurant] spicy memory.”
Sleep, like power, like creativity, is neutral. It absorbs the memories of the waking body and mind and spirit and resets and consolidates the potentials of them all. If we listen carefully, sleep holds out the secrets of resilience, of elasticity. Harriet Tubman is a good mentor for this. Tubman suffered from narcolepsy, a disorder in part signaled by overwhelming bouts of drowsiness and sleep. Yet for Tubman, this disorder was also a visionary event from which she obtained a considerable amount of insight and clarity to navigate the Underground Railroad in the mid 19th century, her own loop to the divine.
Sleep is a practice that knots us to other practices pushed back into the dark. The thing about the dark is that it is rife with depth. In lieu of light, it brings the earthy power of all that is underground, alchemizing, incubating. Trauma holds similar lessons, and is linked to grieving, to necessary transformation, not only individually but collectively, and over time, glacial. What we do with the sleeping seeds of resilience and resistance is the spark of our cumulative ability to become.
³ Tricia Hersey, http://www.triciahersey.com (accessed July 18, 2022).
⁴ The Nap Ministry (@TheNapMinistry), “Been seeing a lot of …,” Instagram post, June 18, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Ce7tAVxOIZ-/?hl=en (accessed July 18, 2022).
Sleep Salon 4: CONTROLLING DREAMS
Anthony Zadra and Elizaveta Solomonova, moderated by Claudia Picard-Deland
December 8, 2021
WOLF
In June of 2022, I attended a workshop by artist Cassie Thornton, who works on themes of debt, wellbeing, and speculative healthcare. Before the workshop began, she asked all the participants to introduce ourselves by answering the question, “what is your postcapitalist job?” There were many postcapitalist jobs: fungi tenders, revellers, cooks, gardeners, watchers of films, dwellers of trees, mystics, lovers. I thought mine would have to do with writing or cats or being a lone flaneur in foreign cities. But when it came my turn to speak, I realized that my postcapitalist job is to be a dream collector. Every morning after I wake up, I’ll collect the dreams of anyone who wants to talk about their dreams — we’ll analyze them or I’ll just listen. I won’t make a record, I’ll remember. When I heard Anthony Zadra and Elizaveta Solomonova’s talks, I decided this was a good time to start my postcapitalist work. But, as their talks address controlling dreams, I added in a directive element — I would try to influence a dream.
For my experiment, I recruited two participants (i.e. friends willing to entertain me). Before they went to sleep, I projected a word / image to each of them without their knowing what the word was. The first thing I noticed, even before the dreaming began, was that this brought me into a different kind of dialogue with my friends — they consented to receive my influence on their respective dreamlives for an evening and to tell their dreams to me the next morning. In this way, we were sharing something that we don’t usually share in such a focused way, and that habitually exists for many people in a more private realm. As Solomonova says in the question period after her talk, dreaming is not valued in our culture as a social practice in large part because subjectivity is not valorized as a social practice — this inspired my experiment. In the morning, after I collected my friends’ dreams, we opened a group chat dedicated to the event.
The word I sent my friends was “wolf.” It is an image that kept weaving its way through the Sleep Salon, and it began with an anecdote by Antony Zadra about a friend of his who kept having nightmares about a wolf when she was a young girl. When her father had suggested that she turn around and confront the wolf in her nightmare (and thereby banish it), she agreed. “This is my dream,” she, as a young girl, said to the wolf when she was back in her nightmare, “you can’t hurt me.” But the wolf only responded, “is that so?” and proceeded to tear the girl’s arm from its socket.
Wolves have a history of being a part of our night worlds; there is something visceral about the dream of a wolf. In her 1997 book Ghostly Matters, sociologist Avery Gordon includes a subchapter titled “The Wolf” in which she recounts an entry that psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein recorded in her journal between 1909 and 1912. At the time of her entry, Spielrein was reflecting on her love affair with Carl Jung (who had also been her analyst and mentor), which had ended when Jung had gone back to his wife. After writing the entry, and before she went to bed, Spielrein looked in the mirror. What she saw, gazing coldly back at her, was a wolf. “Everything that differentiates her experience of the uncanny from Freud’s rests on what she [Spielrein] did next,” writes Gordon. “She spoke to it … And lo and behold, it answered back. ‘The great chill is coming,’” it said.⁵
It is significant that Spielrein saw (and spoke to) a wolf, specifically. In her examination of the Early Modern European witch trials, particularly in Hungary, folklorist Eva Pócs notes the reoccurring image of the wolf in the forced depositions of accused witches, particularly the werewolf: half man, half wolf. Sometimes, this creature appears with what Pócs calls the “mora creature,” a vampiric, female monster that in German is called the mara / mahr / mare (but also Alp or Trut) and in French, cauchemar — the nightmare. As if the nightmare itself is separate from the wolf but related, co-appearing with it, a part of it, metonymic.⁶
Gordon ends her subchapter on the wolf by noting that the experience was transformative for Spielrein — she “woke up the next morning feeling ‘transformed’: ‘the air was cool, and I breathed in the coolness ecstatically.’”⁷ The word “ecstatic” can denote a sense of elation, but Iread it here more like its Latin root, ekstasis — to stand outside of oneself. Transformation is spatial; it takes us from where we stand and puts us somewhere else. It was as if Sabina Spielrein had looked into the mirror at Jung, saying, “this is my dream, you can’t hurt me,” and the wolf, looking back, begged to differ.
Not everything has a tidy ending. At the end of the Sleep Salon, Solomonova offers that we don’t always have to try to get rid of the bad stuff in our heads, nightmares included. Did my friends dream about wolves? Well kind of. One friend dreamt of a large grey bed (wolf pelt?), a forest path with a lot of trees (wolf habitat?), and a steak (wolf food?), while my other friend dreamt of a man with a Capricorn moon — Capricorn, being a hybrid creature of goat and fish, is not unlike the werewolf, and the moon needs little explanation.
⁵ Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 49–50. Journal entries of Sabina Spielrein qtd. in Aldo Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein between Jung and Freud, trans. Arno Pomerans, John Shepley, and Krishna Winston (New York, Pantheon, 1984), 19.
⁶ Eva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age, trans.
Szilvia Rédey and Michael Webb (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999), 34.
⁷ Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 50. Spielrein qtd. in Carotenuto, A Secret Symmetry, 19.
Sleep Salon 5: SLEEP AND LABOUR
Sarah Barnes and Debra Skene, moderated by Alanna Thain
January 12, 2022
WINNING
Each of our bodies is a 24-hour clock. If you listen closely to every person you pass on the street, you may detect a little ticking sound. Are they a functioning clock or a slightly delayed clock? A clock that runs too fast or skips a beat? Or maybe not a clock at all, but a tune or a tree or a river — for isn’t sleep organic rather than mechanistic, fluid rather than determined?
Figure 4 Ikea ad campaign, “The Wonderful Everynight,” with comments, Facebook, 2018
But even here, metaphors fail. For if we are solely natural beings, then how do we define “natural” in light of sleep and waking enhancements, such as caffeine and hypnotics, at times necessary aids to get us through our cycling states? In their talks, Sarah Barnes and Debra Skene convey the lived experiences behind the language that goes hand in hand with sleep, such as the clock of our inner rhythms or the onus of being a “good” or “bad” sleeper. Barnes shows an Ikea advertisement of a woman athletically high jumping into her bed in a series of still frames, ready to win at sleep and possibly any number of things. This was part of a 2018 ad campaign by Ikea called “The Wonderful Everynight.” The commercial features a sportscaster announcing, “the moment has come, there can be no hesitation, you gotta do what you’re prepared to do. Win at sleeping.” Especially illuminating are the comments that run alongside the commercial posted on social media by Ikea customers ostensibly losing at sleep or at least lost somewhere in the nowhereland of customer service emails, such as one commenter who posts that she is hoping to get a new pocket sprung mattress from Ikea and is answered by another commenter who writes, “dream on.”
The talks by Sarah Barnes and Debra Skene work eerily well together considering the industry of sleep — including the actual athletes and metaphors of athleticism it shines its light on — and the forced industriousness of those who are put in a losing position vis à vis sleep in the first place — shift workers, such as night nurses and firefighters and assembly line workers. Skene, in her talk on the constant negotiations that shift workers are put into with their inner circadian rhythms and clocks, asks, “do we really need 24-hour grocery stores?” Do we need all this light? Do we need all this winning?
CAREX Canada, an institution that investigates Canadians’ exposure to carcinogens, estimates that approximately 1.8 million Canadians work night shifts, which makes up 12% of labourers in the country, amounting in 2 to 5% cases of breast cancer. This includes health care and accommodation workers, manufacturing and social assistance sectors.⁸ What is carcinogenic, perhaps, is not being awake at night, but being part of a 24-hour, able-bodied, athletically day oriented cycle. The fact is that the night is not unsown, the night is populated, and even before capitalism came into full, garish bloom, there were those who chose the night. Likely sex workers are not included in the numbers generated by CAREX, but they are there and have been for a very long time. How are they, too, losing (at) sleep?
One question that comes up when we look at sleep as a sport is — who are we playing against? Who else is in the competition? Is it the sleeper v. the night? Or is it the sleeper v. the sleeper? A game played between (waking) self and (sleeping) self? Is the trophy we receive at the end of the game more productivity? If so, then is sleep the price we pay in order to wake? Elizaveta Solomonova, who spoke during the previous Sleep Salon on dreams, flips this script — what if the mind exists not in order to wake, she speculates, but in order to dream? In the game of winning at sleep, what sort of world is being dreamt into being, and what is it like to wake here? Or, to put it another way, if we disaggregate night from sleeping and day from waking, perhaps more hospitable habits could be created not only for the workers of the night, but also for those whose bodies themselves choose to wake with the stars and sleep with sun, exiting the rules of the game altogether.
⁸ “Night Shift Work Profile,” CAREX Canada, continuously updated, https://www.carexcanada.ca/profile/shiftwork (accessed July 20, 2022).
Sleep Salon 6: PERFORMING SLEEP
Amara Tabor-Smith, Ellen Sebastian Chang, and Jasmeen Patheja, moderated by Dayna McLeod
February 2, 2022
DEFENSELESS
This is a manifesto for defenselessness. We want to empty our pockets, our minds, and our hearts of sharp things and lift our faces to the sun. We want to lay down on the pulpy earth and let the midday heat burn off the buzz of our electric thoughts. We want to be edgeless and wafty, craftless and smooth, heavy lidded and lissom limbed. Twilight, sunrise, midnight, noon, we will float time zones like blades, now birds, now owls, crepuscular and liquidy in our sensuous habits.
Figure 7 Blank Noise, Museum of Street Weapons of Defence, 2005
Figure 5 Blank Noise, Meet to Sleep, circa 2014
We will wane like moons and hum like tides. We want to write runes rather than publications, stake no claims, file no complaints, and dance out the lines of our funny songs and badly. We will lie in languid heaps, weaving one another’s hair through our fingers in blades of warm wheat. We will not be protective or clever or reactionary or righteous. We will not have to be.
Figure 6 Blank Noise, Meet to Sleep, circa 2014
Our daily palettes will be black and violet, dawn and ochre, lucky and lithe. We will eat apples and berries and junk food and tarts. We will be creamy etcetera. They may say we are weak, but we will answer, well-rested. They may say we are soft, but we will say we are softer. This is an ode to defenselessness. If they say that sounds dangerous, we will say they are not listening, and we know they are dying to. This is not a beckon but a wave, not a manifesto but a way.
Sleep Salon 7: SLEEP AND SOUND
Gascia Ouzounian, Mendi + Keith Obadike, moderated by Devon Bate
May 6, 2022
LULL
We went looking for that cave
We had found when we were children
We had followed a strange sound
We had called into the cave’s mouth
Inside, people were sleeping and they had awakened
One had sat up and rubbed his eyes and answered back
It’s not time for us to wake up
– Mendi Obadike
Figure 8 Mendi and Keith Obadike, lull: a sleep temple, 2020
One syllable, sounds like lol. A space, a moment, an out-breath. As Mendi and Keith Obadike put it, “lull” points to “a need for a pause.”⁹ Another meaning for lull harkens back to the early 19th century: a period of quiescence in the midst of a storm.¹⁰ A calm before a breaking. A sound rolling from the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. Mendi and Keith Obadike’s eight hour durational piece, lull: a sleep temple (2020) is just such a calm in the storm of the present: sonic environment to hold participants in an ambient wash of distended notes infused with poetic prose. This is a piece that invokes altered states as healing sites. As the couple say in an interview with Tristan McKay, “sleep temples were sites in ancient Egypt where people went and entered a sleep-like state for healing and dreaming. In our cultures (Igbo and AfricanAmerican) dreams are still understood as extremely important. Sleeping and dreaming are understood as a way to connect to something larger than our conscious minds.”¹¹ How does one compose for the macro consciousness of sleep? Mendi remarks on her own writing process for lull during Sleep Salon 7 — how she focused less on plot and more on repetition and rhythm, on textural changes over time, on creating context over content. Space itself is a narrative, and sound poses questions about the space it occupies. As such, audience members are invited to interact with lull as a meditation. This is a lush invitation. To the first hundred registrants who signed up for their performance at Brooklyn’s Look + Listen Festival in 2021, the Obadikes gifted a sleep kit —lavender, poetry, flame.
Figure 9 Excerpt from a hypnotic induction text by Dr. Sidney Flowers, in David Mason, Key Hypnosis Induction Scripts (NorthCharleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2012), Kindle edition, n. p.
The Obadikes talk for Sleep Salon 7 draws out two discrete but connected threads that especially intrigue me — one is hypnotism, the other is dreams. Mendi speaks of being inspired, in part, by hypnotic induction scripts while writing the text for lull, alongside ancient myths and dreams. Induction scripts are textual artifacts that are rarely focused on as texts in their own right; they are presented to hypnotists-in-training as guidelines to induce a patient or a client into a state of trance, and they break down into distinct sections or steps, such as “seeding relaxation” and “reassurance.” Yet induction scripts are also a part of the contemporary Western cultural imagination, not unlike myth. Imitating a hypnotist, one might start out by saying, “you are getting very sleepy,” and moving their wrist side to side in the motion of an invisible pendulum. Not many people would fail to recognize this semiotic. Yet hypnotic suggestion is not meant to put one to sleep. A friend of mine, a hypnotist, used to say, “by being hypnotised, you are not being put in a trance, you are waking up from the trance you are already in.” This brings me to the unique way that the Obadikes speak about dreams. Just as lull can signify the calm in the pause of a storm — a space of suspense poised between the past and the future — and just as hypnotic induction scripts can wake one up from the trance of the distracted mind — dreams, too, can point to a temporal space of action, one that has political implications.
In their talk, the Obadikes touch on the way that the word dream has a galvanizing cadence, and they draw this out in their interview with McKay. It is worth quoting at length:
It is no coincidence that when articulating a vision for a better world, MLK said, “I have a dream,” a phrase he borrowed from Prathia Hall. Maya Angelou famously referred to herself in Still I Rise as the “…dream of the slave.” Marcus Garvey also talked about his early vision of himself as a leader and that of a future African Empire as a dream. The concept of imagining the world we want to create is connected to the activity of the relaxed and restored mind. We made lull while global political protests were happening in the name of BLM and the pandemic was raging. The common media euphemism for moments of political uprisings is a “period of unrest.” We have never liked that term “unrest” as a replacement for revolution, and we have recently felt the urgent need for rest. We have also specifically felt the need for dreaming, in order to realize personal and social transformation.¹²
In this passage, the Obadikes question why unrest is used to signify revolution, and how rest, especially as restoration, and dreams, especially as visions, point towards a more desired result — being able, being equipped, clearing a space, to stay in the lull. And from there, coming towards revolution from the direction of abundance. The lull as the revolution itself connects to Tabor-Smith and Chang’s Black Women Dreaming and to Hersey’s Nap Ministry, both of which I wrote about in relation to Sleep Salon 3, and it connects to the rise of rest as political resistance, particularly against white supremacy, the ultimate unrest machine. Hypnotic induction scripts too have the potential to be revolutionary — for they lead us into an area where a dream itself can be crafted — whether in sleeping states, waking states, or somewhere in between. Importantly, induction scripts do not just sit there on the page as text: they are activated by voice. The rest revolution is arriving in waves. The powerful temple of lull is not built from stones or rock or wood, but sound.
⁹ Quoted in Tristan McKay, “5 Questions to Mendi + Keith Obadike (lull: a sleep temple),” I Care if You Listen, April 28, 2021, https://icareifyoulisten.com/2021/04/5-questions-to-mendi-keith-obadike-lull-a-sleep-temple (accessed December 5, 2022).
¹⁰ Oxford English Dictionary, s. v., “lull, n.1,” continuously updated, http://www.oed.com.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca (accessed December 5, 2022).
¹¹ Quoted in McKay, “5 Questions.”
¹² Quoted in McKay, “5 Questions.”
Sleep Salon 8: WRITING SLEEP
Diletta de Cristofaro and Julie Flygare, moderated by Aleks Kaminska
March 23, 2022
STORY
What are the frameworks we put around our various experiences and how does the frame effect the experience itself? In her talk, Diletta de Cristofaro speaks about the frame of crisis that falls over sleep in novels such as Adrian Barnes’s Nod (2012) and Karen Russell’s Sleep Donation (2020). This framework exists on the macro level of society — a society without sleep or downtime, of voracious “progress” and development — and it exists on the micro level of our bodies and our experiences of them. Sleep crises, such as insomnia, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, or restless legs syndrome create pockets of dystopia in the ecosystem of our own flesh, flooding into our daytime experiences Aof what it means to be awake and how much we are able to generate from a space of sleeplessness. The framework of pathology is one that helps us get treatment for our ailments, but it is also one that has become so prevalent in contemporary Western society that is invisible as a scaffolding.
There are sleep disorders and sleep disorders and some are easier to understand and elucidate within the rubric of pathology than others. David J. Hufford, who blends folklore and ethnography with psychiatry in his work, opens an inquiry into sleep paralysis and why medicine has had such difficulty understanding and treating it. Part of the problem, Hufford contends, is the tension between contemporary medicine as a knowledge base established within the secular discourse of science, rooted in the history of Enlightenment, against the actual experience of sleep paralysis itself as a spiritual or supernatural encounter.¹³
Sleep paralysis is described by sleep scientists as a hypnogogic hallucination, one that arrives while the body is still under paralysis while the mind wakes up; in other words, it is a conflation of REM sleep (dreaming sleep) with waking consciousness, and it occurs most often in a liminal stage, when one is either waking up or falling asleep.¹⁴ It includes very specific and common sensations that are also horror tropes — a late-night demon crouching on the chest, a burglar breaking into and rummaging around the room, an abduction by a stranger or a strange being, and more amorphous visitations by ghosts or presences that the sleeper knows is there, yet cannot actually move their body to respond to. Sleep paralysis is a wakingish nightmare.
Hufford writes that because secular, mainstream American culture does not always legitimate stories about spirits or demons, the experience is often undocumented as sleep paralysis per se. It remains, therefore, mysterious both as an encounter and under the umbrella of curable pathologies. It is in part the absence of personal reports — i.e. of stories — involving sleep paralysis or experiencing presences, such as spirits — which gives the misleading impression that these experiences are less common than we think.¹⁵ This is what Julie Flygare addresses in her talk: the need for patients with sleep disorders to tell their own stories, to narrativize their experiences in order to make them more acute, more presenced.
Hufford’s mixture of folklore with medicine speaks to me. Rather than framing sleep paralysis as a pathology, he looks to stories. “In Newfoundland they call it ‘the Old Hag,’ an old English term for witch,” he writes. “The person who is paralyzed [i.e. experiencing sleep paralysis] is ridden by a hag.” He continues: “the sleep research term ‘sleep paralysis’ and the Newfoundland term ‘the Old Hag’ refer to the same event, although they do not ‘mean the same thing.’”¹⁶ This is key. They do not mean the same thing. Framing changes the meaning, and it changes the experience.
The first time I had sleep paralysis, I went from the assumption that it was a spiritual experience and not scientifically categorized. Only later, when I worked in the environment of a sleep laboratory, did I realize it was slotted under “sleep paralysis” — a pretty dry name, I thought, for such a visceral, out-of-body event. When I was armed with the scientific vocabulary, I felt more justified in speaking about my experience. And whenever someone mentioned their own experiences that resembled mine, I’d bestow upon them the language, too. “That’s called sleep paralysis,” I’d offer — but who am I to suggest a scientific framework to what another person may label a UFO visitation or an encounter with a spirit?¹⁷
The question about frames is a pragmatic one: how is each frame efficacious and towards what end/s? The problem with sleep paralysis is that it’s usually uncomfortable, ranging from unsettling to terrifying. Western medicine may offer some reprieve from the suffering. Yet there is no actual “cure” for sleep paralysis; rather, there are preventative suggestions, which involve sleep hygiene, such as following a regular sleep schedule or reducing caffeine and alcohol — or hacks, such as trying to wiggle one part of the body such as a toe or a finger if you’re able to realize that you’re experiencing sleep paralysis when it’s happening.¹⁸ Neuroscientist Baland Jalal offers the technique of Meditation-Relaxation (MR) for people having a sleep paralysis episode in order to distance themselves from the event. This involves having the presence of mind to accept that the event is happening, rather than resisting it, and anchoring inwards to a positive “internal object” (a pleasant thought or memory).¹⁹
Acknowledging that sleep paralysis has often been felt as a spiritual or supernatural experience not only reframes what sleep paralysis is or could be understood as, but what a spiritual experience is and can be understood as. Scientific frameworks and spiritual frameworks do not need to be discrete — and one may even expand the other into spaces it may not normally go. As Hufford writes, “there is nothing specific within our scientific knowledge of SP [sleep paralysis] that contradicts spirit interpretations.”²⁰ Cultures all over the world, Hufford continues, have linked altered states of consciousness to spiritual experiences — the frameworks of expanded consciousness and the expanded lifeworld of spirits easily blend. An event like sleep paralysis allows us to explore the overlay between the scientific understanding of the body and the spiritual as they are felt and as they are storied. Sleep paralysis furthermore challenges the boundaries between frameworks at all, particularly when we’re thinking of sleeping and waking as discrete states — sometimes the lines are not always clear: states are more fluidic than binary. Taking into account the mixture of stories, folklore, spiritual experiences, and phenomenological sensations that all form the assemblage of the sleep-related crises of our bodies might break open the perimeters of medicine and expand the range of interpretations and practices related to how we encounter the worlds within us, bring them outwards, and let them speak.
¹³ David J. Hufford, “Sleep Paralysis as Spiritual Experience,” Transcultural Psychiatry 42, no. 1 (March 2005): 12.
¹⁴ “Sleep Paralysis,” Stanford Health Care, continuously updated, https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/sleep/nighttime-sleep-behaviors/sleep-paralysis.html (accessed July 25, 2022).
¹⁵ Hufford, “Sleep Paralysis as Spiritual Experience,” 13.
¹⁶ Hufford, “Sleep Paralysis as Spiritual Experience,” 16.
¹⁷ For more on sleep paralysis as UFO encounter, see Nicholas D. Kristof, “Alien Abduction? Science Calls It Sleep Paralysis,” New York Times, July 6, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/06/science/alien-abduction-science-calls-it-sleep-paralysis.html (accessed July 25, 2022).
¹⁸ See, for example, “What You Should Know About Sleep Paralysis,” Sleep Foundation, updated, https://www.sleepfoundation.org/parasomnias/sleep-paralysis (accessed July 25, 2022).
¹⁹ Theresa Fisher, “Sleep Paralysis Cure Will Finally Vanquish the Demons of Our Ancestors,” Inverse, January 14, 2016, https://www.inverse.com/article/10232-sleep-paralysis-cure-will-finally-vanquish-the-demons-of-our-ancestors (accessed July 31, 2022).
²⁰ Hufford, “Sleep Paralysis as Spiritual Experience,” 41.
Sleep Salon 9: THE STUFF OF SLEEP
Tega Brain, Sam Lavigne, and New Circadia, moderated by Erandy Vergara
April 20, 2022
SOFT
Air, feathers, down, clouds — these are the muses of the polyester pillow that many of us sleep on every night. Rectangular puffy rest machines. Fluffy gentle neck saints.
Figure 10 A muse of the pillow: clouds. Berndnaut Smilde, Nimbus, cloud in room, part of Probe # 6, Suze May Sho, Arnhem, Netherlands, 2010
When we think of pillows, we think of softness, even idleness and profligacy, as Natalie Fizer says in her talk on her project, Pillow Culture. But when we look more closely at pillows, and even softness, we come up against edges. Particularly when we look not only at the pillows of the living, but also at the pillows of the dead. This is a story of the pillow as a companion species of our many states.
On November 4, 1922, the tomb of Pharoah Nebkheperura Tutankhamun was discovered in the Valley of Kings on the West bank of the Nile in Egypt. The Pharoah, who had died at the age of 19, and who had reigned for only a clutch of years, was found surrounded by precious jewelry, weaponry, shrines, gold, alabaster, silver, gems, chests, and — pillows. The pillows were intact and well — crafted for a world where more durability and longevity was needed, the land where the young Pharaoh would go after death. Specifically, the pillows were made of glass. The headrests found in Tutankhamun’s tomb are royal blue and turquoise, gold and beige and brown, the colours of the sky at the zenith of daylight. Analyses of their composition have revealed a plant-ash glass from the late Bronze Age.²¹ Not a substance we usually associate with rest.
Glass itself is fascinating as a medium linked to death (and, through the glass pillow of the Pharoah, linked to sleep). In their book, Glass, Alan McFarlane and Gerry Martin list off glass’ ingredients, many of which have persisted for millennia: silica, which comprises the earth’s mantle; soda and potash, which are essentially the ash of burned plants from sea or forest; calcium oxide, often made from seashells.²²
Figure 11 Lapis glass headrest related to Tutankhamen, circa 1570 to 1320 BCE, Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. Photo by Christian Eckmann
In her book, Victorian Glassworlds, Isobel Armstrong notes the transformative wonder that is held in the simple act of these individual materials turning to glass, a transformation that is like the reversal of death itself: “pure transparent matter derived from waste matter,” she muses, “artificial matter derived from primary matter, confirmed the magic of a transition from nature to culture: it even appeared to reverse the process of mortality, moving from death to life, a form of resurrection seizing the imagination with aesthetic wonder.”²³ From the sea to the forest, from breath to ash, from sands to sciences, glass is a fossil of the living and a creature of fire — heat is the invisible element that binds, seals, and energizes the transformation.
Even for the living, ancient Egyptian headrests were fashioned from materials we may not associate with clouds or air — like alabaster and wood. The raising of the head was not only a gesture in the service of comfort, but it also held symbolic value: the head was associated with the sun in ancient Egypt and the sun with resurrection. A new day for the living; a rebirth for the dead.²⁴ The Egyptian headrest seems a forgotten ancestor of the mass-market polyester pillow today, yet the things we consider to be soft and the things that actually materially make the various substances of softness do not always equate — polyester is made from petroleum, which itself is a crude oil, a fossil fuel, made from decomposing plants and animals, linking us again to the land of the dead; this time, the land of the non-renewable.
In 1966, artist Andy Warhol installed Silver Clouds at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, a room of inflated silver rectangles, poofing gently up against each other, guided by a soft stream of air keeping them afloat. The pillows in this case were made of Scotchpak,
Figure 12 Andy Warhol, Silver Clouds, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1966
a silver laminate used for army rations, and inflated with air and helium.²⁵ The balloons glide like clouds and yet look like metal, seeming to breech the softness of the contemporary pillow with the hard matter of its ancestors. Silver Clouds was also recruited as a dancer in the choreography of Merce Cunningham who used them in his piece, RainForest, which first showed in 1968 at SUNY in Buffalo. Here, an item known to be used for the body at rest became animate. The simple pillow is a flume of contradictions.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “soft, adj.” as “[p]roducing agreeable or pleasant sensations; characterized by ease and quiet enjoyment; of a calm or placid character; spec. (of sleep) undisturbed, untroubled.”²⁶ There can be a soft smell or a soft taste or a soft sound; but the implication is that sleep, here tied to the word’s definition, is soft by default. What links all these definitions is the ability to perceive and experience. Whether hard or pliable, moving or still, the pillow is always haptic. I was surprised, then, when I saw that a recent exhibition of Warhol’s Silver Clouds would be presented “touch-free,” a move that seems less animate, more immobile, than Tutankhamen’s tomb.²⁷ For among the things that make the pillow hard, not soft, are not only the materials that form it, but rather the relationships we form with it in our waking and sleeping spheres — touch, the sensual world. Each day we breathe.
²¹ Katja Broschat and Thilo Rehren, “The Glass Headrests of Tutankhamen,” Journal of Glass Studies 59 (2017): 378.
²² Alan MacFarlane and Gerry Martin, Glass: A World History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 204– 05.
²³ Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6.
²⁴ Jan Summers, “Pillows for a King — The Headrests of Ancient Egypt and Tomb KV 62,” European Scientific Journal (July 2016): 232.
²⁵ “Silver Clouds of Dissent,” AGO, August 25, 2021, https://ago.ca/agoinsider/silver-clouds-dissen; Fintan Fox, “Andy Warhol’s ‘Silver Clouds,’” Original Shift, Feburary 5, 2022, https://www.originalshift.co.uk/articles/1p5ordjcbb9z0yz82g6wf5matnl1pqtps/wwworiginalshiftcouk/news-page-url/new-post-title (both accessed July 30, 2022).
²⁶ Oxford English Dictionary, s. v., “soft, adj.,” continuously updated, http://www.oed.com.libezproxy.concordia.ca (accessed July 30, 2022).
²⁷ “Andy Warhol: Silver Clouds,” Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina, https://www.ashevilleart.org/exhibitions/warhol-silver-clouds/ (accessed July 30, 2022).