July 3-7, 2023
Workshop in Montréal, Quebec
I’ll Sleep when I’m Undead
Sleep today is said to be in crisis. Sleep is under threat by our 24/7 (Crary 2013) lifestyles; by demands of availability generated by social media, the internet and the always-on of media themselves; by the blue light of media screens, and the somatic reset of social media addictions; and by the crisis cycle of the contemporary news media. Sleep scientists are increasingly attending to longstanding inequities of access to “good sleep”, unevenly distributed across the fracture lines of social inclusion, and reflecting the environmental and cultural impact of insecure sleep conditions, including excess noise and illumination, rising temperatures under climate change, vulnerability to assault, an increasing demands to be available for work or care. These and other anxieties around sleep as a site of embodied risk are found across the spectrum of 21st century horror media.
Beyond dreams and nightmares, sleep itself has a complex history in horror media, in the remix of cinemas as a dream machine to a rich visual and aural language for altered states that blur the line between waking life and nightmare. While our focus is on 21st century media, we also sought work that puts today’s bad sleepers in dialogue with the past of sleep-horror media. Our premise is this: sleep is in essence a risky business. Sleep is often seen as generating precarious situations, and sleep itself is understood as a site of risk, vulnerability, and loss of control and agency. Sleep’s horror affects enervate the sharp edges of conventional horror, its eruptive distinctions between normal and deviant, raising complex questions of creepy agency, resistance, dispossession and vulnerability. Horror sleep media explores rest as a space of work, the site of the relentless extraction of the body’s capacities and biopolitical management, through monitoring and modulation, or in other cases the only territory in which the complexities and dangers of life today can be navigated as a new site of survival. Rather than naming a novel state of affairs, feminist, queer, and racialized sleep horror understands sleep not as a break in the fabric of reality that allows a horrific otherworldliness to emerge, but as the condition of the exhausting conditions of everyday life. Part of the horror in the contemporary wave of sleep horror media is that the waking/ dreaming binary is displaced by the grey zone of somatic capitalism, where even off-hours are occupied by apps that track, quantify and assess us while we sleep, for purposes not our own. How does 21st century media figure the dispossessive risks of sleep?
This weeklong writing workshop was a collaboration between the Sociability of Sleep interdisciplinary research-creation project and CORÉRISC. We selected 9 participants for a week-long writing workshop in Montreal in the context of the Sociability of Sleep’s summer exhibition. Participants arrived on Sunday. Monday through Friday were dedicated to collaborative and individual writing sessions, working towards the publication of an edited collection. As such, we worked both with individual chapters, and to collectively shape the conversation about sleep in contemporary horror. Each day included two short public talks from participants about their emergent research in sleep horror along with writing workshops and end-of-day check-ins. The Montreal Monstrum Society co-hosted a public screening of a sleep horror film; participants were encouraged to suggest material to screen and discuss; and we held a workshop on public scholarship on popular media.