On Sleep

On my commute to work, I see the billboard that makes me shudder.

I turn up the radio to drown out the anger and anxiety the billboard provokes in me. A few minutes later, I park in the staff lot, greet my coworkers at the front desk, walk up the carpeted stairs, set all my things down, and arrange myself in front of the machine, where I will sit for the next eight hours.

At some point, not quite consciously, I decided to “become a poet.” Since then, I’ve tried to organize my life around what writing demands for me: time and space to think, a community of writers to talk and think and laugh and love and fight with, and a paycheck consistent enough that I can concentrate on things other than money. I’ve chosen to live in the Bay Area with its long-lived, ever changing writing communities and its hugely expensive rent. I haven’t had kids, so I’m free from time-consuming childcare responsibilities. I’ve had a series of entry- and mid-level jobs at not-so-evil organizations where I am treated OK and left with enough time to write talk think listen laugh love and fight.

But exchanging the brief time one is alive on this earth for the opportunity to merely survive is… pretty bleak. Being habituated to labor so many hours, day after day, year after year, is all the more appalling because sometimes the situation doesn’t seem “so bad”—after all, at least the robots haven’t taken my job yet. And just to be clear, if the robots and AI that are constantly appearing before us were somehow backed by an anticapitalist politics aimed at freeing everyone from pointless labor—if the robots actually did all the labor no one wants to do and freed us up to do more rewarding things with our time—I’d be all for them, the robots, but that’s not what’s happening.

Moral of my bemoaning: life is short, and we spend it working. I hope I don’t die regretting what I didn’t get enough of while living. Lyn Hejinian writes, “Goethe’s last words were, so they say, ‘More light.’ I could imagine a variant of these: ‘More sleep.’”

I’m a good sleeper—I consistently get eight hours a day, for which I feel lucky, grateful. I love to sleep and I’m good at it. I consistently get eight hours a night, and have always felt a bit guilty for that, lightly self-ashamed, like I should have grown out of this lazy habit by now. But I’ve organized my life around being a poet, and I consider sleep part of that vocation. I believe in restful slumber’s restorative impact on physical and mental health. I don’t care about being “productive” in the terms this world defines, and I don’t believe the “successful” people who swear by as little sleep as possible. I am aware, as well, that my uninterrupted eight hours are the sleep of a childless white woman—the sleep gap^[1] is yet another disastrous effect of white supremacy.

Through some recent bedtime reading (The Circadian Code and Why We Sleep), I’ve finally got the hard-hitting data to back up my intuition that sleep is absolutely fundamental to health, happiness, and poetry. As a poem has a rhythm so too does the human body. When we don’t get enough sleep and disrupt our internal clocks, our bodies suffer. The negative health effects attributed to disrupted circadian clocks are well known. Our bodies have not (yet?) evolved to sync our internal clocks to the demands of the modern world. But where these self-help pop-science books seem focused on helping people learn to “flourish” within the gross demands of the modern world, I want to overturn this world and its demands of relentless productivity and growth. Which is perhaps why I am a poet rather than an entrepreneur.

Sleep, like poetry, is unproductive from the perspective of profit, but sleep makes all kinds of things happen. Jacqueline Risset writes, “Sleep defies us. Every day it carries us beyond the threshold of our own understanding.” Sleep is a nightly release from the endless production and reproduction one manages in waking life. There is vulnerability in sleep, in lying prone, in the restful atonia of our bodies after they have been tensed and contorted in being put to capital’s use all day. Sleep gives us access to a different kind of cognition, unconnected from our self-awareness of it. Diana Hamilton writes, “Writers should go to sleep / when they need help.”

Unless we are lucid dreaming, in dreams we are not in control of our interpretative processes, and our difficulty in accounting for dream-leaps in logic—their common lack of narrative and sequential continuity—is a respite from the bureaucratic and disciplining environment of the office. Cognitive associations during sleep are looser and lead to exploration of possibilities not examined in waking life.

The dreamer and the poet trust, and study, their intuition. In dreams and poetry, we know things although this knowledge would not meet the proof-standards of waking life. In dreams and poetry, we are made aware of how malleable “reality” is. In dreams and poetry, we exist in a more fluid world, and this world is as wide and true as the waking world.

Yet the gaps between the horrors of waking life and the landscapes of poems and dreams are wide. They’re real. Alice Notley writes, “I want real and dreamed to be fused into the real / rip off the shroud of division of my poem from my life.” To that I add, I want to sleep like the people of the cave and wake to find the reign of "imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy" is over. I want to hibernate through the election cycle and wake up to find the facade of democracy has been torn down along with the White House, Congress, Pentagon, FBI, CIA, ICE, Border Patrol, and all borders and prisons. An expanse of waking and sleep in their place. A No-Nation of Sleepers.

My extreme supine impulses may be at odds with the revolutionary philosophy of vigilance. Of course, we need people out in the streets and aggressively fighting the forces of immiseration, terror, and death. Yes and sometimes I wonder if the traditional self-sacrificial revolutionary impulse is tainted by the same workaholic ethic we find in our laboring lives. The realities of activist burnout and depression, structural inequities in domestic and emotional labor, and the sheer scale of our planet-sized problems call for a diversity of tactics. Diane di Prima says, “NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us / shoving at the thing from all sides / to bring it down.” I wonder what shoving with absenteeism, withdrawal, the church of sleep, and temporary autonomous zones of slumber could do. Cells of sleepers doing dream research. Cells of sleepers being creative in dreams, waking up with new approaches to seemingly intractable problems. Am I only dreaming or is this burning an eternal flame?

Can you kill the boss by sleeping against his orders? Probably not. The bosses who threaten our lives and livelihoods are innumerable. But thankfully they haven’t yet developed a program to change the physical demands of our human bodies, as a species, as animals in an ecosystem. We remain embedded in the rhythmic oscillations of solar light and darkness, try as we might to overcome these conditions. What if we committed to sleep hygiene and aligning our circadian cycles to their natural human-animal rhythms rather than the cycles of the workday? What if one of the ways we could begin to upend labor discipline and capitalist domination is by refocusing our sense of (revolutionary) time by insisting on sleep?

E.P. Thompson writes, “In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labor force merely to ‘pass the time’.” Jonathan Crary echoes Thompson’s insight, noting that sleep is one of the “offenses” we are capable of: “The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.” I want to live by a time which organizes itself by the day’s needs rather than by compelled alienated labor. I want to cultivate “nonchalant indifference to the passage of time” and live in world where “no one dreams of mastering, using up, or saving” time. (E.P. Thompson quoting Pierre Bourdieu).

I want to observe Saint Monday. I want to extend my absenteeism into Tuesday, and Wednesday and on and on. I want a less compulsive relationship to time, not “time is money,” but time is the beat my heart keeps, the clocks inside my organs.

The owners of capital are invested in extracting every last ounce of productive capacity from us, without concern for our well-being (as long as a body of some kind shows up at work). They want to transform the human body into a subject better coinciding with continuous work and consumption. I want to be the antithesis to that subject. I want my poetry to be a spell against that world. I want to expunge its tendrils from my body, my affects, my dreams. I want a dark night sky. I want a dark night sky free from advertisements. I want to disrupt the surveillance, data-mining, and financialization of everything. I want to be a lantern smasher.

During “the Paris revolutions and rebellions of the 19th century, lantern smashing - until then an individual, libertine phenomenon - became a collective, plebeian movement.” Lantern smashing was “above all a practical strategy in street fighting against the forces of the state. The darkness that spread as lanterns were smashed created an area in which government forces could not operate.” “The darkness that prevailed after the lanterns had gone out stood for disorder and freedom.” (Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century).

I want to dream under dark, profitless skies and make writing and resistance from what I access there. Sleep and dreams are slippery and mysterious in a world where everything is surveilled, quantified, and known. Sleep is a need that has not yet been colonized by profit. They may sell us sleeping pills and all kinds of products to “treat” sleep disorders, but they haven’t yet figured out how to make a sleeping person work or shop.

But maybe right now teams of undercover agents—I mean software developers—are developing tools to do just that. Maybe agents are inventing some software addition to the Fitbit so the device will first subtly (“hey, look at this cool data my Fitbit tracked!”) and then explicitly alter our dreamscape—when and how we dream, what we dream about, and who is permitted to dream. A cool new smart technology to infiltrate our sleep and turn us into ever more law-abiding subjects. Maybe that world is coming. In the meantime, let’s make the most of sleep while we can.

Cook or poet
Businessman or carpenter
Everyone loves laziness
Leisure, sleep, and dreams
For dreams are spectacles
A dream is a lucky ticket
That night gives as a gift to the dreamer
Luck that is our due
It’s an everyday miracle
A night without dreams
              Without love
              Is lost.
 
—“La Clef des songes” by Robert Desnos