Insights on Sleep, Rest and Dream Experience
Perspectives from the Arts and Humanities
Reflections from Maria Sledmere, Kevin Leomo, Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez
May 22, 2025 | Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh
I can never remember the difference between ‘hypnagogic’ and ‘hypnopompic’. To be between sleeping and waking, waking and sleeping is to oscillate one’s cognitive frequencies in creative crisscross. One might be the beginning, the other the ending; so to conflate both is to exist in perpetual twilight. This feels appropriate to the times. Our workshop invited alertness and drift. How else to think about sleep, rest and dreams? We wrote and talked continuously, we gathered ideas in eddies and folds; we did not see a paper as self-contained, but an opening to accretive thought.
Going to Edinburgh on what kept getting billed as ‘the last sunny day of the year’, Kevin, Adriana, and I started the day on the train together. That we would get on a train and come back on a train added a dreamlike feel to proceedings. Both Kevin and I spilled coffee on our clothes (me, before I’d even left the house; Kevin, thanks to the Scotrail). We had to pass the bright green fields of West Lothian to reach our destination. Once in the lovely IASH buildings, I made (more) atomic coffee for everyone and pondered the stacks of Romantic poetry and criticism.
PANEL 1: “Topics on dreaming, sleep experiences and transitory states” (Dr. Alcaraz-Sánchez, Dr. Bernini, Dr. Cowan
We began the day with a trio of provoking critical papers. Adriana welcomed everyone to the workshop and Kevin and I said a few things about Project Somnolence. We’re particularly keen to highlight the interdisciplinary ethos of the event and the possibility that it might lead to further projects and collaborations down the line.
All day, I kept an eye on the OWL, or the OWL kept an eye on me. It’s a day after we all found out about Alice Notley’s passing. With her feminine epic The Descent of Alette in mind, I try to reimagine the OWL as a guardian and not a surveillance camera. Notley’s owl issues a quest to our heroine to slay the tyrant. Our OWL serves as the audiovisual oracle: a medium through which advice, comment or request may be passed by our various online listeners. Its head turns whenever I seem to look up, blink like I might be the next to speak. Has anyone done performance art in collaboration with such an OWL? Oracle comes from the Latin oraculum, from orare to ‘speak’. We speak through the OWL, but we do not record the day. We wanted the workshop to feel inherently ‘live’: as testament to the contingencies and alchemies of thinking that can happen when people feel like they are in a space and time together and not just recording for the future. Through the OWL, we were instructed to turn the volume up! This is a good way to kick off.
In his paper, ‘Dreams and Heightened Narrowed Immersivity: Combining Saturation and Presentationality’, Marco Bernini provided a compelling critical toolkit for thinking about consciousness, dreams and literature. Taking detours through philosophy and narratology, we learned words such as ‘innerscapes’, ‘saturation’ and ‘presentationality’. I found the concept of ‘saturation’ particularly useful for conceptualising literatures which do not offer rich explanatory and causal detail but rather leave space for readers to infer and fill in the gaps. Such literatures would be low saturation (Bernini gives the example of Samuel Beckett’s fiction and radio play, Ember). Bernini’s work was rich, dense and something I’ll definitely come back to as a repertoire of approaches to dream cognition in relation to everyday cognition. The point that dreams share with much fiction the property of ‘incomplete storyworld saturation’ resonates and I immediately started thinking more about this through the porosity of poetry. One of my favourite quotes from his talk was: ‘to give a narrative synopsis of [David Lynch’s] Inland Empire would feel like violating someone’s sleep’. As someone who has always struggled with linear narratives and plot summaries, it was good to hear that basically it’s okay for texts to elide these features.
Often I find myself teaching fiction writers who use a more or less standard approach to plot, but haven’t found the best way to stitch the narrative together. I try to prompt the question, well what is your narrative logic? The why? Such a question pulls in all sorts of factors: the importance of dramatic irony, knowledge as power, desire, revelation, empathy, deferral, memory, genre, form. One thing that emerged usefully in a later discussion was the slightly different way ‘narrative’ might be used across disciplines (cognitive neuroscience, say, versus literary studies). Elizabeth Reeder brought up the question of ‘mess’ and how narrative makes sense of it. How in her own work, there is always this commencement point of mess that works itself out through play. Bernini chimed in with examples of Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses as two fictional texts whose narrative logic unfolds from the desire for one thing e.g. going out to buy flowers for oneself. Reading Courtney Bush’s new book A Movie (2025), I was struck by this passage:
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I remember in elementary school, when I was learning about the principles of narrative, a teacher said something scary.
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There are only two types of stories.
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Someone comes.
- Or someone leaves.
The ‘scare’ factor here is perhaps not just the shocking fact that all texts can be boiled down to this binary but the suggestive relationship between narrative and fear. That there will be an ‘unknown’ and a change in every story. That this could be an arrival or a departure. You immediately take the logic and start to fold and click it into your own life. Then stories emerge. The simplicity is mathematically beautiful. Does it hold for everything?
Bernini is followed by Robert Cowan’s talk on ‘Ordinary and Exotic Dreaming’. The basic premise is: ‘What can we learn about ordinary dreaming from a consideration of unusual e.g. lucid dreaming?’. Cowan outlined the two dominant theories of dreaming in philosophical history: the orthodox theory (dreams are made of the same stuff as ordinary waking life) and the imagination theory (dreams are an intensified and immersive imagination). A question he posed was: are lucid dreams just narratives where the dreamer knows they are dreaming or are lucid dreams ‘real’ in the sense that the dreamer really is aware that they are dreaming? The latter seems to gather weight when we consider studies by Hearne (1976) and LaBerge (1981) which offer evidence for the ‘reality’ of lucid dreaming (for example, dreamers were able to evidence their awareness through delivering prompted eye movements during their dreamstate — I think again of the OWL, its ocular twitching). Cowan suggested that the evidence to date seems to support the imagination theory of dreaming. I’m happy to be on the side of imagination. I thought of the famous final line of William Butler Yeats’ poem ‘Among School Children’: ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ In a way, it’s a question of how do we separate the subject from the world they are part of making. Yeats’ speaker asks ‘Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?’ and in doing so the reader might suddenly become any number of these object details. How can we know the ‘I’ from its arrangement? How can we know the dreamer from their dream? The emphasis on ‘know’ however suggests this is as much an epistemological inquiry as an ontological one.
In lucid dreaming, it appears that subjects are both dreaming and nondreaming, says Cowan. The juicy part of this is: what can we say about those extraperceptive states? What can we know or discover of them? Are they akin to hallucinations?
Before this workshop, I thought the philosophy of mind stuff on dreams and perception was something ‘over there’. After a day of pursuing moments of synthesis and emergence between disciplinary approaches, I feel confident that perspectives from neuroscience and philosophy are vital for many things but for me in particular, filling in the ‘gap’ that is understanding readerly experience and its relation to literary form. By understanding, I mean developing testable models or frameworks — not solely in the lab, on the page, or through philosophical arguments but in the careful machination of these elements in relation.
Adriana rounded off the panel with a lively paper on ‘Hacking the Sleeping Mind: exploitation of the dreamspace’. She looked at various examples of contemporary technologies which claim to enable users to lucid dream. The key points here are: how will technology manipulate people’s dreams and what potential is there for dreams to be hijacked? Adriana showed us the Coors Light ‘Big Game Commercial of Your Dreams: Dream Study’ (2021) campaign, which borrowed heavily from Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) and our collective pandemic obsession with dreams to ask ‘Do you think it’s possible to put a big game commercial in someone’s dream?’. There was something metamodern in this endeavour in that I couldn’t tell if the irony or the sincerity was the point. You can watch the actual ‘dream film’ (with direction from Sean Hellfritsch and compositions from Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith) here. Coors had partnered not only with artists but also Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett. It raises interesting ethical questions about the role of academics in commercial endeavours, something which happens constantly in STEM but perhaps more sparingly in the Humanities. I tried to think of the kind of questions a professor should ask before being approached by a for-profit company.
Adriana introduced us to other examples of commercial dream engineering, quoting Cressida J. Heyes who says that ‘sleep is the new sex’ in terms of what sells. This reminded me of Sophie Lewis writing in Mal Journal in 2020 about our ‘collective turnoff’:
- it is my view that one of the many crimes of capitalism’s terraformers – besides incubating coronaviruses by destroying biodiversity – is their theft of untold proletarian sex hours via the imposition of work, and the concomitant disappearance from history of gigawatts of cumulative erotic bliss
Prophetic AI’s ‘The Halo’ ‘is designed to induce lucid dreams’ through:
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dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activation during naturally occuring dreams by utilizing emerging technologies such as transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) and generative transformer architectures, along with established technologies like electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
In a recent substack post, ‘on astral projection’ (2025), the author Savannah Brown writes of her lucid dreams:
- My dreams are frequent and long and rich with symbol. I document them with precision and reverence, pinning butterflies. They visit me, or, no! I visit them; every night there’s a glow in my chest, remembering I’m headed to the place they’re allowed to exist.
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I love dreaming. I even love what others call nightmares. To me the nightmare/dream dichotomy is too clean for what happens in that place, as if terror and awe are ever truly apart. Even when dreams are disturbing in content, they’re never dark in feeling; they all come with a sense of safety and familiarity, a ‘knowingness’, wisps of profundity that buffet me through the day.
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Something else: often, pieces of old dream come back to me right before I fall asleep. Just pieces – their spatial memory, mood, logic. I remember none of this in language or image but in feeling. Sometimes these fragments are many years old but perfectly preserved. It’s clear there’s a swath of ‘forgotten’ felt information stored in me, that does not age – catalogued away, in some vast neural library, and I do have a key – but the key only turns when I’m not turning it.
The pinning of dreams like butterflies has a collector’s drive to it, but we’re operating in wild terrain here. Nobody has quite dreamt like you have. No matter how influenced you might be by the metanarratives of psychoanalysis, New Age philosophy or internet dream diagnosis, you have to devise a sort of idiosyncratic poetics to your dream reports. In what order do you write things down? Do the details come back in a flood, or drip slowly throughout the day? Do they read like narratives, lists or spiky poems? I love reading about how Brown relates to her dreams as a kind of personal replenishment: they offer ‘a sense of safety and familiarity’, they produce ‘a glow’, they are ‘wisps of profundity’ that come from ‘a place they’re allowed to exist’. Reminders, perhaps, that such a place is in us. And yet so much of dream resists autonomous engineering: ‘the key only turns when I’m not turning it’. This reminds us that we are both dancer and the dance; we are rarely the directors. How can we cultivate, if not control, the space? At some point, Bernini says the phrase ‘learning by undoing’ and I imagine a kind of slackening that lets the key turn. Via mixing up, matching and so on, the messiness of dreaming helps us deal with the ‘overfitting’ of conscious precision.
LUNCH
At lunch, one of us sniffed the courtyard laburnum while others spoke of the joys of institutional catering. We pulled chairs into the sunlight. Such convivialities as open space, normal sized plates and decent fare encouraged talk. I found myself discussing my recent struggles as an academic integrity officer and how my thinking around issues of dream were filtering into my pedagogy — predominantly from musing on the question of how can we restore play, joy and the delight of work itself, of critical and creative thinking, to the university assignment? How to foster a more processual approach so that students are less tempted to use AI tools to simply ‘produce’ a polished paper?
PANEL 2: “rest as resisted; rest is resisted” (Dr. Reeder, Dr. Jones, Dr. Callard, Dr. Sledmere)
After lunch, we returned to our familiar room in the IASH building, somewhat restored and somewhat rested after our solar and plant-based nourishment.
Maria led a lively and grounded panel discussion which was named after The Nap Ministry’s founder Tricia Hersey’s best-selling Rest is Resistance: Free yourself from grind culture and reclaim (2022). Mel Monier’s article“Rest as Resistance:” Black cyberfeminism, collective healing and liberation on @TheNapMinistry’, explores Hersey’s Black (cyber)feminism and the personal and political nature of rest.
Three panelists shared generous and critical provocations exploring rest as resisted; rest is resisted, interweaving personal and lived experiences of rest with research and practice-led approaches.
Elizabeth Reeder presented some beautiful writing exploring themes of rest, gravity, and the body. Fatigue and the spiky inconsistence of autism can lead to a shattering of linear progress; luscious tears in fatigue can be a brilliant act of self-preservation. Rocks posed in angles of no strain, leaning; resting. Reeder urged us to trust where we are, to know our formidable minds. There are seven types of rest; make a list… Energy is movement; a flowering sharing in the room.
Sophie Jones spoke to the problem of project time in academia - the system of the project consisting of the beginning, the middle, and the end. We considered the limitations of this type of temporality, particularly health-related conditions which usually don’t fit into the project timeline and system in which we operate.
I thought about chronodiversity and perceptions of time in both waking and sleeping life; how we can attempt to navigate our daily experiences, simultaneously resisting and also going with it all. I’m writing this on a Sunday evening, staving off the new week and Monday’s inevitable return-to-work. Maybe one day, Sundays will be rest again, as Maria hopes over WhatsApp.
Felicity Callard recounted her Wellcome project on rest, and The Restless Compendium: Interdisciplinary Investigation of Rest and its Opposites, which entailed slow-moving research on daydreams, fantasy, and reverie. Callard recalled Jonathan Crary stating that “the history of the daydream will never be written”. Perhaps not, but we can continue to attempt to archive the daydream; and perhaps learn from the way Palestine has rewritten the world.
Sophie Jones spoke to her own personal relationship with sleep.
Sleep can be a recklessly asocial activity; it can be a fraught zone of intimacy and care; we sleep for each other. Sleeplessness can also be a condition of caring…
Sleep is not always a refuge from capital; it is warped by its status as a demand.
Sophie rounded off her provocation with a call for us to problematize sleep as resistance; while she’s attracted to the idea on a utopian level, it’s important that we stop before the politicised critique of the way we live becomes a set of instructions…
After the panel discussion, we took another brief albeit necessary coffee break, and I was happy to discover that, by this point of the day, attendees were making use of the IASH kitchen as if it was their own: washing the cafeteries and making new coffee and tea, helping themselves to what they needed. As the host and lead organiser, I do appreciate it very much when people behave in the ‘Spanish’ way—"my casa es tu casa”, my home is your home. Take what you need, but most importantly, help the host by taking it yourself. I finally started feeling more at ease.
CREATIVE SESSION (Dr. Oli Hazzard, Dr. Maria Sledmere, Dr. Kevin Leomo)
This was my most-awaited session. After all, this is the reason why I was so eager to collaborate with Maria and Kevin (both in their ‘artist-hats’). I wanted participants to step outside their comfort zone (particularly those from non-art-centred disciplines) and discover first-hand the potential for art-led research to complement traditional academic research. How different mainstream academia would be if we all dedicated more time to engaging in more creative and reflective practices? In the closing session, two comments from the participants resonated with me.
First, Callard noted that nowadays she can only engage in any sort of critical thinking by reading forms of writing other than academic papers. She emphasised the importance of doing research through different means than those taught during our formative years. As someone who has been trained in ‘analytic philosophy’, I feel a sense of relief from hearing her comments. Many times, I catch myself wondering whether there’s something wrong with me when I read a highly regarded text by colleagues and realise that it does not spark anything in me, just boredom. I take comfort from hearing that other modes of research are possible and perhaps, even more productive and inspiring.
Second, Cowan also shared his thoughts about the need for a practical shift in analytic philosophy about what we consider the entry point to examine dreams: it might not uniquely be dream reports, but our expressions of those, such as the ones done through poetry and other forms of art. As someone who has drawn heavily from subjective reports in her research, I wonder whether my views on the nature of dreaming might change if I started by paying more attention to artistic representations of dream experiences—this thougt brought me back to Bernini’s morning presentation.
The first section of the creative session started with poetry readings from Oli Hazzard and Maria Sledmere on their respective books, Sleepers Awake and Midsummer Song / Hypercritique. While listening to each of them reading, I got lost in the rhythm of their poems and the form they took. As someone highly synaesthetic, I find myself experiencing the rhythm of the poetry reading as taking up certain ‘shapes’. I don’t perceive the voices of the readers as having certain intonation or register, or by the contents of the words they are saying, but as the shape those words are taking. In a sense, they are fluid but square; they are following an imperfect pattern that is somehow organised.
Funnily enough, in the post-reading discussion, Kevin asked the poets about our experience of rhythm and temporality and how these elements are construed in the poetic process. Maria answered something along the lines that the rhythm of the poem is not just in the different lines of the verses, but that it is created by the content. This makes me think about the “squared fluidity” that I was experiencing before, whilst I was listening. How can different uttered words change this perception of shapes and forms?
On his side, Hazzard noted the changes in our perceived temporality during COVID times—how the suspension of labour led to different ‘chunks’ of temporality that nevertheless go together. This resonates again with some of the points that Maria noted earlier about the linearity/non-linearity of narratives. During COVID’s lockdown, it was as if time was suspended, or in a way, extended. Life went on a never-ending-March-2020.
Looking back, I keep getting confused as to when I did what—time seemed to be divided between the periods in which we were allowed in bars and those in which we couldn’t relate with anyone outside our ‘bubble’. Somewhat, it was like a dream—I have memories of those times, and I know that I spent the peak of the pandemic at home. But what did I do? Like when trying to remember my dreams, I have fainted memories of banal activities like preparing food, working on my desk, and staring at the back garden from the window to the back garden spring to my mind, mixed with other more ‘bizarre’ elements, including 5h-long Zoom calls, ‘zoom-bombers’, supermarket’s shelves without pasta, toilet roll, and flour–ah, flour! Those times in which everyone decided to start baking to fill in their empty time.
The discussion followed on the similarities between dreaming and poetry. Hazzard noted how we dream about everything, and how dream narratives are thus somewhat ‘boring’. He presented an anecdotal example of the poet Alice Notley, who, after moving to Paris, was feeling exhausted after supplementing social contact with transcriptions of her dreams every morning. This story makes me think about the cognitive effort involved in remembering my dreams. To me, this effort seems to be constituted by two things: the active process of ‘remembering’ and the unconscious effort of contextualising and making sense of its narrative. When I wake up, I usually remember a lot of details, but these tend to come all at once, without order. And in between, I also get a feeling of having “lost” something, of a missing jigsaw piece that connects the different snippets of the dreams. But then, I think, what if there’s no missing piece? What if this is what I experienced? Just a series of snippets or brief nonsensical moments whose only temporality is that they follow one another? And whilst these different memories of my last night’s dream might make some sense to me, when I try to explain them to others, they get completely lost in translation. As Hazzard notes, like poems, we need to find a way to communicate our dream experiences to others.
Perhaps I should follow suit from Virginia Woolf and recount my dreams as a stream of consciousness. By paying less attention to the lack of logical narrative and linearity. Dream research suggests that our dream memories are comprised of a large amount of ‘made up’ elements—elements that, to an extent, might be regarded as ‘confabulatory’ insofar as they are ‘false memories’. It might appear to us that something occurred in the dream, but actually, it did not; we are just filling in the ‘gaps’ of those parts of the dream that seem to be ‘missing’. We have a need to give a logical order to narratives, which leads us to have a distorted account of what our dreams actually were.
I really enjoyed having the chance to hear Oli read, especially after being introduced to Sleepers Awake by Maria previously. I felt at ease as Maria read from Midsummer Song / Hypercritique. Maria spoke on overcoming the middle-class aesthetic of scarcity in the Anthropocene through low-carbon pleasure located in daily life; metabolic forms of narrative drawing from the figure of the swerve, and the energy of byproducts of byproducts. Utopia and euphoria in equal measures cannot sustain the architecture of our world - perhaps we can in fact use the sentence, the line; the visual as a blueprint - a raw diary for writing alternatives to solutionisms.
It was interesting to reframe dreams as waste; Oli pointed to waste discourse and how the lack of utility of dreams gives them potential; they can no longer be instrumentalised if they’re psychic byproducts of a sleeping mind, enjoying a rhythmic reprieve from instrumental labour. Maria spoke to this importance of rhythm - the relationship between prose and lineated verse in Midsummer Song; the capaciousness of poetry and the aural tradition of collective song. Poetry and essaying play with speed, tempo, form, and rhythm in interesting ways.
Dream poetics were explored and the blank dream was offered as a thinking diagram. We discussed lyric architecture after Lisa Robertson; how Crary calls sleep a “viral scandal”. We spoke of Alice Notley, who recently passed, whose practice involved daily transcriptions of dreams - an exhausting feat exploring dreams as epistolary form. What happens when you send a letter of your dream?
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No explanation is entirely sufficient in hypercritique: it must always lie in excess, or be open beyond that limit, having burst the door, unearthed some force that would otherwise stir up, disrupt the regulating dam of techno-capitalist reason. But hypercritique must dream in low-carbon measure; dream an occasional gentleness.
After the poetry reading and discussion, we were invited to write some haikus. Borrowing Maria’s words, haikus are a “highly condensed form of poetry capable of capturing an image or moment in time”. A form of writing ideal to explore the “fragmentary experience of dreams”, and with it, the feelings prompted by our dreams.
To warm up and let our creative juices kick in, Kevin guided us through deep listening exercises. Following on the legacy of Pauline Oliveros, these exercises allowed us to tune in our senses and change our attitude to sound: from mere “hearing” to “listening”. For the first exercise, we were instructed to be in silence for some minutes and attentively listen to every single sound around us, write it down, and bring it back to our mind before moving to the next. This practice reminds me of the ‘phenomenological reduction’ promoted by the phenomenologists like Husserl and Sartre. In brief, the phenomenological reduction involves a shift in ‘attitude’ or a way in which our attention is directed in conscious experience. To move away from the ‘what’ or the experience, to the ‘how’. That is, to focus on how things appear to us, and not ‘what’ is the thing that we are perceiving: paying attention to how the blueness of the sky, or the crispiness of a sunny and cold winter day, is felt.
Kevin’s soothing voice asked us to listen deeply to the sounds around us and make note of what we heard. My list:
stomach acid burbling
my old strong coffee heart
faint window breeze
whistling?
that clock getting LOUD
invisible carpet rustles
barely perceptible symphonies of breath
warm book flicking motion
paper shuffle
contingent zing of metal bottle
pen clang
soft sigh
eyelash flickers (seriously)
denim whoosh
fabric shuffle
nib scratch
clock tick
children playing
chair strain
rucksack zipping
multidirectional bag rustles
pen click
and again, pen click
cheeky scream
clock gets louder and louder
leather plastic crumple
Doing this exercise reminded me that if I really need to make myself sleepy, I go under my duvet like a den and read things aloud from my phone. Preferably something really boring like sports fixtures, bibliographies or a shopping list.
For the second exercise, we were asked to do more or less the same, but this time, by closing our eyes and letting the ‘dream’ permeate our waking consciousness. To observe the liminal process of falling asleep or of anything else that might appear and write a prompt from our experience.
Some kids are screaming outside. As I am drifting off, I try to ‘listen’ to those screams. Are they saying something? Somewhat, I feel certain that they are voices and not screams. But then they go again, and in effect, they are not talking. Nearby, on the window on my left, I can hear a bird. For a moment, I feel struck by the fact that it was a magpie, but immediately after I realise that I was falling asleep, and that I just imagined it—there was some bird making a noise, but it wasn’t anything like a magpie.
I open my eyes, and I feel more inspired than I was before to attempt my haiku writing.
I have never been much into poetry. I remember with dread those classes at school in which we were asked to write very strict, rhythmically structured forms of poetry. It filled me with dread because I could never come up with words that rhythmed with each other. During the workshop, I tried to write free verse by first following the five-seven-five syllable rule of haiku. But much like the rhythmed sequences, I could not come up with the needed syllables for every line and for the things I wanted to convey. My attempt at haikus, or just some odd free-style of poetry, ended up like this:
“Driving for hours
my dad at the wheel
there is no food
we should get some
A ghost town
he’s going too fast
Stop!
we are going to crash
There’s nothing for us
we take what we need
the police is coming”
“I wake up very sweaty
What was it for?
What was it from?
It was just a dream.
I don’t remember what
I was scared
I don’t want to go back
I fall asleep again
The dream continues
I wake up very sweaty”
When leading a workshop, sometimes I’ll do the writing process myself. Other times I’ll bask in that nice feeling of everybody around me is supposedly writing and simply let my mind wander. Maybe that’s another ‘how’ rather than ‘what’. I like how it’s happening: paying attention to the stillness and restlessness that oscillate in a room full of people writing or trying to write. The low-key buzz of time pressure. I don’t necessarily need to know what is being written — though that’s a treat if people are willing to share. One thing that challenged me about writing my own haiku was the struggle to get into a concrete image. Maybe because we’d been talking quite abstractly around dreaming and rest and conceptual ideas all day, or maybe because I was at my lowest ebb (late afternoon!), but I just couldn’t find that striking image to start with. My notebook filled up with abstractions such as ‘saturatedness’, ‘trace’, ‘sentimental’ and ‘resistant data’. Scratch that. I found the nearest sensory impression. I wanted a window to focus on, to lower my range of information. I thought of those quadrats we’d use in biology to study a sample organisms within a specific area. Like any old shoegazer, I looked down:
Lime green carpet tile
ineluctably quiet
to walk all over
It’s been a while since I’ve written haiku.
angles of no strain
nature’s in-between spaces
are lucid dreams real…?
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In the run to the workshop, Maria, Kevin, and I had different preparation meetings that ended up in great discussions and insightful points about our work as interdisciplinary researchers, the struggles of wearing different ‘hats’, and how all this affected our rest and overall mental health. Because of this, we were curious to hear from participants' own experience with interdisciplinarity, but also, how they found the interdisciplinarity character of our workshop, and how this was helpful or inspiring for their own research.
In the opening session of the workshop, we asked participants to write down their thoughts about how engagement in interdisciplinary practices might impact our relationship with rest and sleep, collecting them in colourful paper notes.
Reading them all, I noticed the following repeating themes:
Interdisciplinarity as a way to ‘rest’ from one’s discipline. By engaging in a ‘different’ discipline and different research methods, we rest from our usual work and way of doing research. But also, as Maria noted in her answer, not only do we engage in ‘rest’ by stepping aside from our discipline, but we “cultivate intellectual restlessness”. We do this by becoming curious and exploring other ways of doing things, other perspectives, and other ways to conceptualise the same ideas. Restlessness, in this sense, can also be understood as a form of rest.
Interdisciplinarity as a way to connect or bridge similar ideas amongst different researchers. To undertake the arduous task of ‘translating’, but also to create a new vocabulary to describe our experiences, in this case, those related to dreaming and sleep.
Interdisciplinarity as a space for playfulness and lightness. Again, an opportunity to step aside from our comfort zone.
Some answers in this theme made me think about how ‘playfulness’ can also be understood as a way of resting. Until this workshop, I always took rest to mean a period of passivity, quietness, and stillness. But actually, it doesn’t need to be all the time. Rest can also be conceived as playful exploration or exposing yourself to new experiences. This thought reminded me of my mum telling me every time I go home, “Why don’t you rest? You should take some time off when you come here. You are always doing things”. And I telling her: “But I rest by doing things!”. It’s true that I don’t rest by doing ‘work’, but I do find it more ‘relaxing’ or ‘restful’ to dedicate my free time to engaging in things I want to do and I don’t normally have time to do. And “doing things” might involve the sort of stuff people like my mum might consider ‘restful’, like having longer naps, watching TV, or just sitting on the balcony doing nothing. But “doing things” can also involve more active stuff, like hiking, visiting exhibitions, going to new places.
I thoroughly enjoyed participating and learning during the whole day of the symposium. Later, we shared how conferences can be intense - my wandering mind could never cope with Adriana’s hardcore philosophy conferences of relentless papers. Having a range of presentations, from more research-led to generative panel discussions, with space for artistic practice, and a general sense of play really made the day fly. We engaged with notions of time, our bodies, and academic proclivities.
Contributors closed out the day by sharing turns of phrase and concepts which resonated with them. Maria picked up on the use of rest-related language in technology - ‘sleep mode’, ‘shut down’, ‘down time’ - the etymology of which to be looked into another day. The narratives around rest can often be profoundly anti-human; Marco stated the need to negotiate these, particularly in relation to capitalism. Continuing, Felicity noted how rest is much more under siege politically than previously. Adriana highlighted how the day’s different methods of inquiry and types of work and research complemented each other in fruitful and sometimes unexpected ways. Robert was encouraged to use other points of departure for thinking about sleep and dreaming - rather than relying solely on dream reports, he’d like to use artistic methods and expressions to research experiences of dreaming.
It’s rare that I maintain my attention and presence for an entire day of academic activities, but for this, I was in the room the whole time. I liked leaping from one lily pad idea to the next, confident we’d found ourselves in the same pond. My brain thrives on novelty and connection; I enjoy finding synthesis between apparently disparate things. Having a range of panel and workshop styles kept the afternoon engaging. I liked moving between rooms and having quiet moments as well as being ‘on’ for chairing. I am in awe of my friends Adriana and Kevin who are not only formidable academics but also generous and energising artistic spirits. This is the kind of research and knowledge exchange that makes me feel like I’m doing the job I want to do. Adriana’s concept of ‘squared fluidity’ got me thinking about interdisciplinarity. Like each discipline is a kind of quadrat you can throw down in your corner of mess in the world and make a study. I think I prefer this to the commonly used ‘lens’ metaphor, because it lets you think about constraint as well as generativity — in adopting a new frame, you notice things differently.
I really appreciated there being an ongoing discussion about consciousness, energy and neurodivergence throughout the day, especially in the afternoon but also, tacitly, in the event planning. It got me thinking about stimulation and attention and what ‘data’ my brain considers valuable enough to retain or attend to. The logic of this is so interesting to me because I think that question of ‘value’ is partly the compositional substrate of all thinking and writing. Everything else has a tendency to dissolve. There’s too much going on in my brain to hold it. I appreciate how candid the various speakers were not just about their ideas but in their lived experience as academics working on these particular issues. I pondered whether the overarching ideas of rest, sleep and dreams were ‘permission-giving’ in that sense, and how exciting it was to feel the immediate personal impacts of such discussions.
Next year, I’m going to be writing a book about dream ecologies, picking up on the work we’ve been doing with Project Somnolence as well as pulling threads from my 2024 book Midsummer Song. The workshop was invaluable in giving new insights especially from philosophy, as well as underlining a sense of how I want to continue doing this work. Collaboratively, across disciplines, in good spirits and with lots of coffee.
In the process of writing this (long) review of the workshop, Maria suggested we each wrote a memory of a dream we had around the time of the workshop:
My dad is driving me and my mum somewhere in Spain to attend my uncle’s wedding. I’m in the back of the car, wondering why we are going all the way to this part of the country by car since it is very far away. We’re crossing a very desolate town - it looks like a ghost town, but we know that people live there. My dad starts speeding up, and we are in what seems to be the high street of the town. I tell him to go slower, that someone might unexpectedly appear. I also realise that we might not make it to our destination before bedtime, and that we don’t have any food with us–we should get some. We stop at a restaurant with an outdoor terrace. It’s quite busy. I go to the toilet and I decide that I should take some more provisions for our trip. The restaurant is now a house in which I have broken into. I go around the different rooms, finding any food I can take with me. The fridge is full of leftovers, as well as the cupboards and tables. I stock up. It appears that I’m there with my siblings (which I don’t have in real life). As we try to leave the town, we notice that someone has called the police, and they are after us.
Dreaming of a now-derelict O2 ABC, Friday nights at Propaganda with the refrain “now I’m falling asleep and she’s calling a cab” on my lips.
It was somewhere between house party and gallery opening, but really it was something happening in a flat belonging to a ‘south spider’. I went for a bit then took a break to go downtown. I saw M. and he told me about his experience colour fishing. It was this crazy thing you could do being deep in the water submarine style except your body was the nodal point of a telescopic consciousness and there was a psychedelic smudge to the whole thing. Twice I saw someone try it and only the second time did colours yield. There were fantastic magentas and other warm purples, some colours I didn't recognise and thus remain indescribable. The coolest thing in the world would be to discover a new colour. I went back to the party initially grumpy then got talking. And then the next day I walked into college and the world had changed. People I knew like K. and S. looked through me, like I was a ghost.