Glasgow Science Festival
June 8 + 15, 2024 | Botanic Gardens, Glasgow
Join Nap Director Kevin Leomo and Somnolent Specialist Maria Sledmere to exorcise your sleep demon! Learn how the creative arts can be used to improve our relationship with sleep and create your own sleep demon trading card.
While sleep is a source of rest and recovery, many of us wrestle with disturbed sleep. If you've ever had nightmares or found yourself sleepwalking, you've encountered oneirodynia. The word comes from the Greek oneiros, meaning 'dream', and odyne, meaning pain. Sleep disturbance may be caused by a number of factors including stress, stimulants, environment, and temperature.
We'll enable participants to draw their own sleep demon trading card, using our pre-printed templates, building a 'sleep bestiary' of our (least) favourite nocturnal nasties! Audiences will be encouraged to rethink their relationship to sleep through a medical humanities approach, utilising creative methods.
Our event aims to transform peoples' taken-for-granted and 'everyday' assumptions about the importance of sleep, through exploring the factors that negatively affect their sleep, particularly the context in Glasgow.
We'd love to change how creative and critical research is carried out, in the context of interdisciplinary research into health, wellbeing and ecology through the field of sleep studies.