Introduction: The Sleeper’s Unrest

It is astounding how little we talk about sleep. Astounding because it is the way we spend a third of our lives, and astounding because a third of the population is thought to suffer from poor sleep. At the same time, advertising for sleep aids is widespread, constantly reminding us of the extent to which troubled sleep has become a common affliction. The number of companies fueling the sleep-industrial complex—producing everything from apps to high-tech mattresses to optimized teas—is perhaps only equivalent to the number of guidelines, regimens, and strategies we are meant to follow to cure our personal and collective sleep failings. This widespread appeal to the troubled sleeper, where the common and the exceptional of sleep exist in an uneasy exchange, requires research on sleep to navigate between individual and shared experience. For one, when we start to dig into the reasons why people are suffering from lack of sleep, we also inevitably enter the intimate and private domain of the sleepless night. Reduced to an individual concern, cures and treatments are placed on the individual: better sleep hygiene, cognitive behavioural therapy, sleeping pills, meditative sleep apps. And yet, if we zoom out from the isolated singular experience, we can often see larger social patterns that might shift the burden from the individual to the collective. Here sleeplessness becomes a more complex phenomenon, interwoven into the realities of waking life and a manifestation of larger systemic problems: overwork, anxiety, stress, poverty or precarity, and environmental conditions fostering radically different sleepworlds due to everything from urban design to the impact of climate change (e.g. noise pollution, heat). A more social perspective makes visible the ways in which sleep quality is another marker of social inequities, including gendered, racialized, or economic. The societies in which we live are also responsible for determining their normative forms of rest. In this sense, there is no singular or universally agreed upon way in which humans should sleep. In certain times and cultures, expectations were and are very different from the modern-day North Atlantic region from which we write this text (e.g. daytime naps, near-hibernation in winter, etc.). And, moving back from the social to the individual, variability between people (in their circadian rhythms, such as is pathologized in delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS); circumstances such as shift work, new parenthood, or menopause; externally imposed schedules of school or work; or even the lifetime modulations of aging itself) makes it impossible to establish a universal recipe or standard for what makes “good” sleep. This is not to say that all troubled sleep could simply be resolved through social redress. There are a number of sleep disorders that are caused by physiology rather than environment, though it would be shortsighted to think the two do not affect each other in more or less direct, immediate, or visible ways. Whether in more common conditions like obstructive sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome, or in rarer forms of disturbed sleep such as somnambulism, parasomnias, narcolepsy, Klein-Levine syndrome, or REM sleep behaviour disorder, among others, a diagnosis does not fully account for “the patient experience”—the actual manifold lived manifestations of medically disordered sleep. What prevails across these varieties of troubled sleep is the tension between the social and the individual, the normative and the exceptional, the contingent and the intransigent of sleep out of order, urging us to pay attention not only to differences amongst sleepers but to the differential of sleep itself. Between a sleeper and their environment there are many x factors shading the space between what data reports as our sleep experience and what sleepers’ …