Episode 01: Sleep stories

In this episode: Cressida and Joshua talk to Paul Huebener (author of Restless in Sleep Country) of Athabasca University about the surprising ways sleep is presented to us across a wide range of Canadian media, from films to ads. We begin with a discussion of sleep literacy (2:58), then move to a discussion of sleep tech (9:34), a little Canadian content (17:29), some representations of sleep in Canadian and Indigenous literature (19:56), sleep and architecture (31:21), sleep in film (37:28), and finally, in advertising (41:04). Don’t miss our top-and-tail renditions of the Sleep Country jingle!

Mentioned in this episode: Paul Huebener, Restless in Sleep Country: Imagination and the Cultural Politics of Sleep; orthosomnia; 8Sleep’s Podpro; what is a lab sleep study?; Sleep Country Canada; Statistics Canada (value of unpaid work); Rates of sleeping pill use in Atlantic Canada; Suzette Mayr, The Sleeping Car Porter; Alan Derickson, Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness; Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves; Awake; “sleep is for the strong” (Sleep Country ad); British Airways ads: Flight attendant + Cat to predator.

Transcript

Do you want to sing the Sleep Country Canada jingle?

Oh, please be my guest.

Okay. Do you know it, Joshua?

Sleep Country Canada. Why buy a mattress anywhere else? Right? Like that's a ding.

Yeah, that's right.

That's fantastic. To me, it's the ding at the end that's the earworm. Sleep country Canada. Why buy a mattress anywhere else?

Ding.

Cressida:

Hi everybody, my name is Cressida Hayes, and I am a professor in the departments of political science and philosophy at the University of Alberta. I am interested in the politics of sleep, and I'm often to be found at about 2.30 in the morning doom scrolling. I had a baby who didn't sleep, which I'm not sure I ever really recovered from, and that's given me a deep personal and academic interest in all things sleep-related.

Joshua: 02: 01:09

And I am your co-host, Joshua Ayer. I'm a PhD student, also at the University of Alberta, studying post-work and the politics of productivity. I am myself someone who never figured out how to sleep, and only until recently averaged a brisk four hours of sleep a night. So I have a personal stake in this series. I'm sure, like many of our listeners, and I'm so excited to learn more about the topic.

Cressida: 00: 01:33

Each episode of this podcast will address a different topic. So whether you're joining us at the start or somewhere else along the way, you've come at the right time. With that said, do be sure to check out any past episodes you might have missed. You'll find the themes also overlap in surprising ways.

Joshua: 02: 01:51

Today on the podcast, Paul Huber talks about representations of sleep in film and fiction.

Cressida: 00: 01:59

And there's also lots of Canadian content, or as we like to say, can con, tying our interest in sleep to the place we are. Thanks very much. And welcome to Sleep is the New Sex Podcast. We're very excited to have you.

Paul: 01: 02:39

Oh, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Cressida: 00: 02:42

So you've recently published a book, Restless in Sleep Country: Imagination and the Cultural Politics of Sleep. And it's a fabulous book. So thank you for writing it.

Pau: 01: 02:52

Oh, thank you.

Cressida: 00: 02:53

And you make a couple of big claims in that book. And one of them is that we need to become literate in sleep. So can you tell us what you mean? We need to become literate in sleep.

Paul: 01: 03:06

Sure. Well, before I started studying sleep, I was studying time. Time is interesting because it seems like something that's universal, it applies to everybody. But once you start studying it, you realize that time has all kinds of inequities tied up in it and it's really connected to forms of social power and politics. And as I was working on time, I started to wonder: well, you know, when we talk about time in critical time studies, we're usually talking about the daylight hours, things like social acceleration and overwork and exhaustion. And I started to wonder, what about those other hours of the night, the ones where we are maybe sleeping or trying to sleep or supposed to be asleep? Because sleep too is something that maybe at first seems totally universal. It applies to everyone. But again, once you start looking at the details, it's really tied up with forms of power and culture and inequity. And that's one of the really interesting paradoxes of sleep. It's a relaxed, private activity, often hidden away behind closed doors. But at the same time, it's really tied up with cultural politics. And so in writing the book, one of the things that I learned is that we need to recognize sleep as a matter of culture, not just as something that applies to isolated individuals. And we need to be able to think critically about the forms of power that are tied up with sleep. Sleep is everywhere within culture, and we can learn to read it in the sense of interpreting sleep and how it functions culturally.

Cressida: 02: 04:57

What about you Joshua? Are you sleep literate?

Joshua: 02:04:57

The short answer is no. But I have become increasingly sleep literate through my involvement with this podcast. And as I say in our intro, I always struggled with sleep. And so was very aware that I wasn't having a normal sleep experience, but thought that everyone else was having a normal sleep experience. You know, it's funny, as I did more and more school, it seemed like more and more of my peers uh were also not having normal sleep.

Cressida: 00: 05:27

Yes, that's what that's what we aim to do with graduate education is to ruin everybody's sleep.

Joshua: 02: 05:32

It really ruins your sleep. And if I didn't have problems sleeping before graduate studies, I'm sure doing the graduate work would have given me sleep problems. But I think doing this podcast and learning about the different ways that sleep is represented to us, the way that that normal idea of sleep that I felt guilty about not getting or that I felt like I was missing out on, learning how that came to be constructed and represented, and also the way that sleep is shaped by all these cultural narratives, that's something that I've been learning very recently. So I would say short answer, no, but learning more about sleep literacy. And this interview with Paul really solidified that for me.

Cressida: 00: 06:22

Yeah, there's nothing like a humanities education for making you foreign to yourself.

Joshua: 02: 06:27

So true. Yeah. Yes. So experience can definitely say that.

Cressida: 00: 06:32

So I think that Paul's book is and his interview is really good at showing us how to think about sleep in the humanities. And he expresses the hope at one point that there should be more connection between science and humanities' work on sleep. And I really agree with that because I read literature from the discipline of medicine and it just doesn't seem to have any culture in it. And yet, and yet it makes all these assumptions about what it is to be a good subject of sleep or even to be a good citizen, and doesn't know that it's making those assumptions. And if it knew, it would do better science. And so I think uh when he talks about sleep literacy, it says something about the assumptions that we're making across disciplines and how they get peddled, you know, how they're sold to us as this is the way that you have to sleep and this is how you have to think about it, and this makes you good and this is bad. And it all needs to be tied together.

Joshua: 02: 07:28

Yes, the way we have this idea of sleep, but how we got that idea is actually much more interesting than we would assume it is.

Paul: 01: 08:50

And here are the ways that you should make neurotic changes to your habits and lifestyle and sleep hygiene. So it places that entire emphasis on the individual, basically telling people, this is your fault that you're not getting those eight hours that you're supposed to get, and these are all the things you need to do. And then we're sold products. A lot of the ways that we encounter sleep, at least in our waking hours, is through advertisements for products. And there are just all kinds of trackers and things, and these things can teach people about their sleep habits, but they can also create a kind of unhealthy obsession. Sleep scientists have coined uh a new term, orthosomnia, which refers to an unhealthy obsession with getting a perfect sleep as represented by sleep trackers. Cressida, have you ever slept on a pod pro?

Cressida: 00: 09:36

No. Sounds painful

Paul: 01: 09:40

That's very wise. I think that's a very good decision. The Pod Pro is a smart mattress created by a company called Eight Sleep, as in Eight Hours of Sleep. And so this is a perfect example of how sleep is presented to the public. It's a mattress that tracks your stages of sleep and your emotions through the night. And then in the morning you get a report on your phone and it tells you here's the sleep you got, here's the sleep you missed out on, maybe you didn't get enough REM sleep, maybe you had a little bit of heart rate variability. And then you can choose temperature settings that the mattress will automatically create for you in different segments throughout the night. And it creates this whole domain of expertise for you to suddenly become worried about. And if there's one thing we've learned over the years about products that are connected to the internet, is that sooner or later they can be hacked. Somebody could get into your mattress and turn up the temperature all the way or turn it down to freezing. But even when it works properly, it's sending your sleep data to the company, it's tracking your sleep. You know, when was it a year or two ago? Remember, Sam Altman got fired from OpenAI, the company that makes Chat GPT. He ended up being rehired shortly after. But when he was fired, it was a big uproar in Silicon Valley. And the CEO of the company that makes the Pod Pro mattress came out the next day and he said, wow, there was a big drop in the amount of sleep that people got last night in San Francisco because everyone was worried about this Chat GPT situation. And of course, the reason he knew that is that everyone, their mattress is sending him the data about how much they sleep. As soon as a product comes with a privacy policy, you already know you're in trouble, right? And so sleep is presented to the public in all kinds of ways, but there's a lot of thinking that we need to be doing about what that means, what these products are doing, and what their implications are for our lives. And people with sleep apnea, for example, can really have improvements in their quality of life if they get the right machine for that. It's funny, a lot of literary texts have kind of a suspicion of the sleep science lab because it is a very strange idea to be covered in electrodes and then to be told, well, just sleep normally and we'll measure how that's working because you can't sleep normally that way. So there's kind of a suspicion there. But really, the sleep labs and sleep products that people use at home can be very positive, very creative. Really, it depends on the person. Some of them can be very helpful. And that's kind of what makes part of our job studying culture very complicated. We can't just say you should take technology out of the bedroom. I mean, for one thing, a mattress is a technology. Um, there's no way to completely remove technology from our lives, nor would we want to, because some of it is very helpful. So then the question is not so much should we get rid of sleep technology? It's more a question of how can we learn to interpret the difference between technologies that are going to help accomplish whatever it is is valuable to us about our own sleep, or technologies that are going to give us anxiety and uh violate our privacy. It's not so easy to tell the difference, and it's going to be different for different people.

Joshua: 02: 12:42

Cresida, do you use any sleep tech?

Cressida: 00: 12:44

That's a very personal question.

Joshua: 02: 12:46

Yes, it really is. Yeah, I noticed that.

Cressida: 00: 12:49

I have really resisted the apps, partly because I made the mistake of reading the literature about sleep apps before I had one. And I think it sort of ruined me because there's all of these concerns about privacy, of course, but there's also just this feeling that I don't want to be turned into that kind of cyborg in that way. And a certain skepticism about whether they'll really be all that useful because the literature on the quantified self describes a lot of people who are really interested in coming up with numbers to describe themselves, but I'm not convinced that they know themselves any better at the end of those numbers than they did before. There's just experientially, it's just something about the descriptions of what it's like to use lots of different apps and to really try to sort of measure, quantify, and recalibrate your sleep. That's not compelling to the kind of person I am. That said, I am a terrible nighttime phone user. I will wake up in the night and scroll on my phone.

Joshua: 03: 13:49

Yes.

Cressida: 00: 13:50

And read the news. In fact, because I'm also a biphasic sleeper, that's one of the things that I do usually between sort of 2 and 3.30-ish, is I read all of the world news and then I lie in my bed with my teeth clenched, thinking this is this is all horrendous. So yeah, I am a sort of nighttime tech user, or I suppose that's a technology that's relating to my sleep, but only negatively makes my sleep really bad.

Joshua 03: 14:18

Yeah.

Cressida: 00: 14:19

So I mean, other things, of course, like I'm sleeping on a very old mattress, and that's a technology.

Joshua 02: 14:24

I was going to say.

Cressida: 00: 14:25

But in terms of the the digital, it's just that I can't quite get my phone out of the bedroom.

Joshua: 02: 14:31

Yeah. You're kind of using an anti-lullaby. That's right.

Cressida: 00: 14:38

I've tried all of these, these um like listen to stories.

Joshua: 03: 14:43

Yes.

Cressida: 00: 14:43

I've tried that. And it does help. Then I sort of wake up with my earbuds in and my phone sort of hidden somewhere in the bedclothes, kind of twitching, and I think, what were they saying to me while I was asleep? Exactly. Might help me get to sleep, although I've never had much trouble with that. But it it doesn't really otherwise seem to do very much for me. I think because I'm so trained to listen to things carefully and try to remember them. That's part of being an academic, is whenever you read things, you try to read carefully. And whenever you listen to things, you try to remember them. And it's hard to be more casual.

Joshua: 02: 15:18

Yes. When you're trained to be trained, dialed in to everything. Going to sleep just forces you to pay close attention, right? Yeah. I have tried those apps. I've had Stephen Fry um especially read some stories to me. And

but he's vivacious

but not when he's reading about like honey or something. It's the topic. I don't think the advice is normally to listen to like an audiobook or something interesting. But normally these apps take a very, very mundane, maybe boring or comforting story. Yes. And then have rich voices that soothe you with it. It's clever, isn't it? It is very clever. I have tried a few of them and have had a few of them work, but then have had horrible ear pain for the rest of the time. Oh yeah, I've had that too. Yeah. Yeah. You fall asleep with an earbud in.

Cressida: 00: 16:18

Yeah. I lie on my side as well.

Joshua: 02: 16:19

Yes, exactly. So I'm lying on my side with an I mean, it's just obviously just stabbing me in my face the whole night. So I don't normally do that. Too much pain. So that part I have found effective, but don't often use. And then the rest of it I share in the skepticism of its effectiveness and also the paranoia about the datification of my life, but also of my sleeping in particular. And like the privacy concerns that come up with that as well.

Cressida: 00: 16:51

Yeah. There's always a balance, right? Between your concern about being made into data and having your privacy invaded and the risk that the technology will make you more neurotic. And then on the other hand, the fact that it might work, it might really improve your sleep, it might be very enabling. Sometimes the same technologies can do both those things. Yeah, I don't think that there's going to be any answer to the question of whether sleep technologies are good or bad. It's always going to be for which people in which context. Now, some people, non-Canadians or maybe even younger Canadians listening to this podcast might not know what the reference to sleep country is. So can you explain that?

Paul: 01: 17:47

Sleep Country Canada is a mattress and bedding supply retailer. It's a store you can go to. There are many of them throughout Canada, and they will sell you the perfect mattress, and they tell you that they will solve all of your sleep problems. Their ticker symbol on the Toronto Stock Exchange is uh ZZZ, or we probably pronounce it Z V Z in that case. They're gonna give you your Zs. And so uh I did refer to that in the title of the book, partly because my area of expertise has to do with Canada, what kinds of literature and cultural happenings are going on in this country. And so I figured if I'm gonna study sleep, well, other people have been studying sleep in all kinds of different contexts, but the perspective that I can provide has to do with what's going on in Canada in terms of sleep. And it's not that there's a particular Canadian form of sleep, the actual physical process of sleep doesn't have specific national identities. But because sleep is always tied to uh cultural politics and social histories and forms of power, well, Canada has its own unique configuration of culture and region and power and history. And so that influences the way that sleep takes shape in this country. For example, right now we've got a crisis in Canada around uh housing costs, homelessness, poverty. Those things have big impacts on people's sleep. If you look at statistics Canada's time use surveys, it will show very clearly that there is still a big gender gap in terms of unpaid work. And a lot of the unpaid work that falls on women uh interferes with sleep. A lot of it is caregiving work that takes place at night. Or you can look at regional differences. In Newfoundland, for example, there's a huge amount of sleeping pill use when compared with uh, say, the prairies. Not totally clear why that is. There's a cultural difference uh that people haven't really been able to put their finger on. And so all of these things lead us to the conclusion that we need to be examining sleep critically from a cultural perspective. And there is a lot we can learn by asking a question like, how does sleep operate culturally in Canada?

Cressida: 00: 19:56

What's your favorite fictional representation of sleep and what did you learn from it?

Paul: 01: 20:02

Great question. Well, there are so many. Sleep is surprisingly enough everywhere within literature, even though it seems like a boring activity to narrate. It has all kinds of presence in literary texts. And one of my favorite novels that I read recently is called The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Meyer from Calgary. It's been receiving quite a bit of buzz. It won the Giller Prize recently. And it takes place about a hundred years ago in Canada on long-distance luxury train trips across the country. And uh the main character, Baxter, is a porter in a sleeping car. So his job is to uh take care of the luggage, but also take care of all the passengers to set up their bedding and then fold their beds away when they get up. And Baxter and the other porters are black, and most of the passengers are wealthy and white. And the novel really comments on how there's kind of an economy of sleep on that train. And we're probably familiar with the idea in capitalism that wealth sort of concentrates upward, right? People who are impoverished become stuck in poverty. People who are wealthy find themselves more and more enriched. And in this story, sleep operates that way. There's there's an economy of sleep where sleep sort of works its way upwards because Baxter has to completely exhaust himself. It's an 80-hour trip across the country, and he's he's basically in charge of dozens of passengers 24 hours a day. The only way he can sleep is if he finds a porter from a different car to watch his car for a few minutes, and then they they return the favor. So he catches a few minutes of sleep here and there. But he's exhausting himself in order to support the sleep of the wealthy white passengers. He's working throughout the night, he's shining their shoes. Um, there's a there's a line where he's tripping over pillows, um, which is a great image because a pillow is supposed to be an image of rest and relaxation and lovely recuperation. But for him, it's an image of just pure exhaustion and unending labor. And part of the relevance in our own time is that people are told in our own society if you're tired, if you've got problems with fatigue, well, you should make sure that you're getting eight hours sleep at night. Maybe you should take a break, maybe you should meditate, maybe you should download an app that will help you uh relax. And of course, the people who most need rest and recovery are people in a situation like Baxter, where they're oppressed because of economic issues, because of race, because of gender, and so on. And if he rests, he's gonna get fired. If he gets eight hours sleep at night, he'll get fired. If he slows down his pace of work, he'll get fired. If he takes a break, if he shuts his eyes, if he yawns when he's talking to a passenger, he could get fired for that. And so to me, it's a fascinating novel because it really makes the point that when it comes to sleep deprivation, it's really a matter of seeing it at a cultural level and fighting oppression.

Cressida: 00: 22:57

I'm so glad that you raised that book as your example because I met Suzette Meyer in November and we talked about that book. And you say in an analysis that sleep is a character in the book. And I think that was Suzette's intention as well, was to make sleep be, you know, not just a theme, but somehow reified or really palpable in that novel. The way I experienced that as a reader is that at a certain point the book became almost unbearable to read because the experience of sleeplessness, really acute sleep deprivation, was so viscerally evoked that I started to feel ill. Like I typically read novels before I go to sleep, and it didn't make me feel like nice and calm and like I needed to go to sleep. It didn't make me feel like that at all. It made me feel slightly sick. I started to feel it myself and heart sick for Baxter. And so I felt terrible reading that book. And that was sort of what made me think it was great. Like a great book. And the other thing that struck me about it is I don't know if you've read Alan Derrickson's Labour History, a great book about different examples of early mostly 20th century occupations that are male dominated, in which he argues that pushing on, keeping up, being sleep deprived, but seeing that as a marker of success was a trope of masculinity that was used against working class men by wealthy men. And so his argument basically is that if you say staying awake is a marker of being a good man, a good worker, and a good man, then you can impose sleep deprivation as a horrible labor condition and to some extent get away with it because you're telling people that they're not being exploited, they're being manly, dangerously sleepy is the title of that book. Because of course, being sleep deprived is dangerous in lots of occupations. Uh, I mean, for the sleeping car porters, it's sort of terrible, perhaps more than dangerous. But if you're working in a steel factory, that's another one of his examples, then it's pretty dangerous.

Paul: 01: 25:06

There is a real class dynamic there in things like factory work, being forced to work the long hours and the exhaustion. And one of the things about sleeping car porter is that it combines that with the effects of race. And it really even uh harkens back to the use of sleep deprivation in slavery, where people who were enslaved were made to work to the point of exhaustion and sleep deprivation, and then were told that they were lazy if they ever needed to stop, if their bodies just couldn't work anymore, they were told that they were lazy. And that's where some of the you know damaging stereotypes about black people being lazy, that's the origin of that. It's the imposition of exhaustion. And so for someone like Baxter working on the train car, it is a matter of socioeconomic class, but that's compounded, you know, because the novel takes place a hundred years ago, really the very recent within living memory uh history of exhaustion as a form of oppression and slavery.

Cressida: 00: 26:01

And that association between masculinity and sleep deprivation was complicated because Baxter's gay and he's closeted. And that's a big part of the story, is that his queerness can't be revealed and is constantly a threat of being revealed. And so, yeah, all of those connections I think are really important in that book.

Paul: 01: 26:22

Yeah, that's a really good point.

Joshua: 02: 26:34

The way Paul talks about this story of the sleeping car porter touches on a theme that I think is gonna come up a few other times in this podcast series, and that's this dichotomy between those who choose exhaustion because it's perceived as manly or necessary to do, you know, good work, sort of the always awake genius, and also working from bed by choice, um, practicing sleep hygiene by choice, and then this flip side of people who are forced into exhaustion, who are forced to work from bed, which is something we'll talk about later. And also for whom sleep hygiene isn't really a luxury they even get to think about and worry about. We have, at least I have, a full night to sort of sleep and set up however I want. And then I have this discourse about how best to do that. But for some people, that's not really, you know, you're cramming sleep in between shifts at work and picking kids up, or you have all these things, and sleep isn't something you get to tailor and curate perfectly. And so there's this division that comes up here that I think is going to keep coming up in this series as well.

Cressida: 00: 27:51

Yeah, I think that there's such a consumerist direction behind a lot of the way this that we talk about sleep. Are you willing to spend money on this? If so, you're our target audience. And there are lots of people who would love to have money to spend on improving their sleep, but they don't. And so they tend not to be uh spoken to. I mean, this is why it needs to be politicized, because some kind of various forms really of collective action to ensure that people who don't get enough rest get more rest. I mean, this is one of your interests, right? The sort of the end of overwork is really important because it's going to help people who currently don't get to worry about whether they have a nice pod pro mattress and the right sleep app. People who instead are just trying to fit their sleep in between their shifts as Uber drivers. Right. And that's a very different kind of life.

You talk about several texts that are authored by indigenous authors, um, Canadian, quote-unquote, indigenous authors. And I wondered if you could say something about why you think sleep is an indigenous issue, why it's represented in interesting ways, I think, in Indigenous literature, but is also a political issue that pertains to First Nations in Canada.

Paul: 01: 29:14

Right, really good question. Well, uh, some Indigenous writers have commented on the importance of sleep and dreams within indigenous societies or worldviews. So writers like Leanne Simpson or Willie Ermine have commented on this. I'm not Indigenous myself, and I'm not the best person to comment on how sleep and dreams are oriented or viewed within Indigenous societies, but writers have commented on that. So there's that positive association of sleep within indigenous cultures. But there are obviously huge negative implications with sleep in terms of colonization. In the residential schools, for example, sleeping quarters were incredibly overcrowded. And doctors knew at the time that that was a cause of tuberculosis. We had, you know. Doctors writing letters to the government saying the overcrowded sleeping quarters are causing a crisis of tuberculosis that was known for generations, and it was a decision of the colonial government to impose overcrowded sleeping quarters as a form of oppression and colonization. So there's a terrible history there in terms of sleep as really a tool of oppression. But literary authors have done all kinds of interesting work with sleep. Cherie Dimaline is a Metis author, and she wrote a novel called The Merrow Thieves, which has really become quite famous and been really well publicized. And I think there's a TV show being made about it. It takes place in a future dystopia, and the indigenous characters are kind of on the run from people who are who are hunting them down. And as they're making their way through a forest, they come across an abandoned hotel, and they decide they're going to sleep there for the night instead of sleeping in the forest like they usually do. The hotel has all these abandoned rooms in it, and so each person from their group goes to a different room to sleep for the night. But it turns out they have trouble sleeping in that arrangement. And so one of the characters goes into another character's room so that they can sleep together. And then a third character comes in there so that they can be the three of them together in the room sleeping. And then another one comes in. And by the morning, the entire group is all sleeping in one room. And it's really a comment on different orientations toward what should sleep look like in terms of how it's configured culturally. And the very architecture of the hotel with its separate individual rooms speaks to the Western or settler colonial vision of sleep as a solitary individual activity. But the way that sleep works better for the indigenous characters is to see it as more of a communal practice. And with a scene like that, it's not so much that it's telling us that communal sleep is the better form of sleep. It's more a matter of figuring out what's best for different cultures or different people. And I really love that image of the hotel as a kind of architectural symbol of different cultural approaches to sleep.

Cressida: 00: 31:56

Yeah, and it's, I mean, it is a settler colonial imposition of the time, but it's also the case that solitary sleep was not the norm in Western cultures for most of their history. So the idea that you would have your own bedroom as hotels represent to us now is not really a long-standing practice. And even when it was a practice, it was mostly confined to the aristocracy, right? So communal sleep, sleeping in rooms together, even lodgings or inns where you had to get into a bed with a stranger, were the norm for most of Western history. And so the bedroom, I think, is a really interesting site of architectural evolution and a way that individualism, cultural individualism as a norm, is represented. The idea that you should have your own bedroom, which also shapes all sorts of policies like children's services policies, you know, like if you're looking after your kids properly, your kids each have their own bedroom, or at least children of different genders aren't sharing a room. Those uh apply across all sorts of contexts, but they're very culturally specific and historically new. So I think people don't necessarily realize that the assumptions they make about the people they should sleep with and the spaces that they should sleep in are, you know, not something that have been around for a really long time.

Joshua: 02: 33:28

Okay, you raise this really interesting point about sleep in architecture, the space in which sleep occurs and the way different spaces might create different habits of sleep or encourage different habits of sleep. That was a really interesting point that came up in this discussion of the Marrow Thieves.

Cressida: 00: 33:49

Yeah, and I think that it's cultural and it's situational, as Paul's example makes clear, but it's also got a lot to do with class and economic privilege. So there's a real cultural preoccupation in Canada. We found when we did this interview study with sleep coaches that we'll we'll talk about at another time, where sleep coaches would really set a lot of store by a child having their own bedroom as a mode of sleep training, that you can only sleep train a baby if they're separate from you. They're not in your bed, and ideally they're in their own room, and that's very specific. And I couldn't help thinking, especially when I interviewed people in their houses, which I did a number of times. These were mostly middle class women in Western Canada, and most of them were in Alberta, most in Edmonton and Calgary. And they had they just had really big houses. I grew up in England where people, even middle class people, don't have such big houses.

Joshua: 03: 34:48

Oh, yeah.

Cressida: 00: 34:49

You know, it it just feels it felt like they had a lot of space, and so they'd made that circumstance into a necessity that your child must have their own room because that's how they sleep, but it's not necessarily how they sleep. There's loads of warnings in the literature on children's sleep about how you mustn't have your kid in your bed, and sometimes that they should have their own room, although I don't think that that really falls straight out of the advice. But it's so obvious that all of these ways of organizing space and the history of suburban large home building has shaped the way that we think about sleep. And that seems very contingent. There's more examples than not of people who sleep communally, like the whole family sleeps together, maybe with servants, with animals, even, and other cultures where all the men sleep together, all the women sleep together. So the idea that you have your own bed and you sleep in it, the only other person who's allowed to sleep in it is your romantic partner, is pretty weird. And very specific. Very specific. Yeah.

Joshua: 02: 35:54

That is really interesting. Yeah.

Cressida: 00: 35:56

And even that, even that romantic partner norm, I think, is being challenged in really interesting ways. Like people talk to me all the time about sleep divorce, which basically is just the situation where you decide you don't want to sleep in the same bed as your as your partner anymore.

Joshua: 02: 36:12

I've come across that as well.

Cressida: 00: 36:13

Yeah, usually because if it's a straight couple or if it's two men, if there's a man involved, it's usually because he's snoring. Although, of course, women snore as well. It's just that men are more likely to snore. It can turn into a really big deal if one partner has some kind of sleep habit that keeps the other one awake. And so lots of therapists, psychologists recommend that you sleep in separate rooms and point out that that doesn't mean that you're less intimate in any sense of that word. It just means that you sleep separately, as you sleep separately from other members of your family, apparently.

Joshua: 02: 36:47

Right.

Cressida: 00: 36:48

Of course, loads of people sleep in the same bed, not just as their partner, but as their kids, and sometimes until their kids are you know pretty old. So it's not like it's none of this is really normal, it's just normative.

Joshua: 02: 37:01

Right. That's oh, that's such a good distinction for moving forward as well. Normative versus normal.

Cressida: 00: 37:07

Yeah, I mean, none of it is really statistically the most common way of doing it. It's just got a kind of a value for us.

Joshua: 02: 37:15

Yeah, and uh historical as well.

Cressida: 00: 37:18

Yeah. So what's your favorite film about sleep and why?

Paul: 01: 37:32

Well, I'll tell you about a movie from Netflix. It's called Awake. I'm not gonna make the claim that Awake is going to go down in history as a masterpiece of cinema, but it did reach the number one spot in viewership on Netflix when it was released because people are obsessed with sleep loss and it's a movie about insomnia. It's a post-apocalyptic movie. There's some big disaster, maybe some kind of solar flare. There's a bit of hand waving in terms of the explanation, but some disaster happens and everyone on earth loses the ability to sleep. And so people are kind of staggering around, they're completely sleep deprived, and it really works like a zombie movie where everyone is kind of mindless, they become automatons, they stagger around, losing the ability to relate to one another, forming strange cults and paranoias. In a typical zombie movie, there's a zombie virus, but in this movie, it's insomnia, as though insomnia is the disease. And a lot of scholars interpret zombie movies as comments on consumer capitalism. The zombies are roaming through the shopping mall looking for their next uh purchase, figuratively speaking. And so, you know, awake, because it's all about insomnia, it sort of implies that insomnia is the disease that comes about maybe through modern culture or through consumer capitalism. Sleep loss is the disease. And one of the strange things about that movie is that at the same time that everyone loses the ability to sleep, technology stops working, all kinds of technologies. But the one technology that the movie is really focused on is cars. The cars don't run anymore. So the people can't sleep and the cars don't work. And that seems like kind of a strange pair. It's almost as though the characters can't sleep without fossil fuels to burn. So to me, it sort of becomes a comment on the fossil fuel economy and the problem of figuring out how we can possibly move beyond that and this fear that if we don't have our combustion cars anymore, we're not going to be able to live coherent lives. We're not going to be able to sleep at night. And for me, that sort of raises interesting questions about well, how can we imagine a future world that's not a dystopia because combustion cars aren't running, but maybe imagine a world that that does function without the combustion cars working. And in a way, it's a question of what can sleep look like in an uncertain world that involves cutting down on fossil fuel usage. I'm not sure if the movie itself is really conscious of that question or if it's just if it's just having a good time. But for me, it raises those questions.

Cressida: 00: 39:60

Yeah. Well, I think most things that are produced on Netflix, we we can interpret in ways that exceed the author's intention, um, for sure. I I'm really I'm so interested that you picked that film because I love what you say about this connection between energy and sleep. If we can't plug ourselves in and recharge and consume energy and then, you know, stock up on it again, that the energy economy writ large would also fall apart, that the absence of sleep signals the absence of cycles of energy consumption.

Paul: 01: 40:34

I think the question of why we go to sleep at night is closely tied to the question of what it means to lead a good life. It's not a simple question. Is sleep something that we do so that we can improve measures of productivity? A different orientation to sleep would be that it's inherently valuable. It's almost a sacred human activity, something that we do that absolutely should not have some external purpose for productivity. And that tension exists in all kinds of places. Do you want me to tell you about a sleep country ad that talks about that tension?

Cressida: 00: 41:08

Yes. Tell me about a sleep country ad.

Paul: 01: 41:11

There's an ad called Sleep is for the Strong. It's an ad for their Bloom mattress. So there's an office worker in this ad, and he's totally overworked. His day is exhausting. He works long hours, he's falling asleep in a meeting, he's falling asleep over his coffee cup, he's walking into walls because he's so exhausted and overworked. Finally, he gets home at the end of the day and he's got this blue mattress from Sleep Country, and he gratefully falls asleep on it, still even wearing his work clothes. And so the ad maybe is saying that sleep is a good thing because it can allow us to recover from this exhausting work day. But in a way, you know, the tagline in the ad is sleep is for the strong. But the reason the worker is quote unquote strong is not that he sleeps or enjoys his rest. It's that he's ready to bounce back to work after getting just the bare minimum amount of recuperation possible. The reason he's strong is that he keeps the ex the cycle of exhaustion going. And so, in a way, what the mattress is providing for him is not sleep and relaxation and restfulness. It's empowering him to achieve even more things and be even more productive and have even more wakefulness. And we've a lot of people have heard the expression sleep is for the weak, which is the idea that um I can handle the exhaustion of modern life and just get the bare minimum amount of sleep. I can, you know, I can do this, I can be productive. And in a way, sleep is for the strong. Sounds like it's the opposite of sleep is for the weak, but they both kind of mean the same thing. They both mean we're just gonna treat sleep as something that we're just gonna get the bare minimum of it that we need in order to keep being productive.

Cressida: 00: 42:57

Yeah, it again reminds me of the theme of Derrickson's book, the subtitle of which is Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness, right? So the idea that you can exhibit strength by doing sleep right, and that that is a discourse that I think is sold to men. Um, my favorite ad is also very gendered, and I've done this many times in talks where I pair the two ads. They're both British Airways ads. One is an old ad that Sarah Sharmer includes in her book that is super creepy. It's a woman in a quite a retro sort of twin set who is a young, attractive white woman who's an air stewardess, right? Very, very much not a flight attendant. And she's holding a baby, rocking a baby in her arms, except that the baby has the head of a businessman. Super creepy. And the text underneath is uh advertising the new cradle seat, right? So the idea is that if you travel in business class, you'll sleep like a baby. And it's not just the seat that's being advertised, it's also the service, right? The service of the woman who will hold you like a baby, i.e., give you a martini, right? That that feminine labor supports your sleep, and that sleep supports your work, and your work supports your masculinity. It's really crass. Like when I show that ad to students now, because it's 30 years old, they wince, they immediately know that this is kind of awful. But there's a much more recent version where business class flights are advertised with on the left of the screen a cat, just a regular domestic pussy cat, and then an arrow, like a flight arrow, that takes you to the other side of the Atlantic, because it's advertising a transatlantic flight. On the other side of the screen is a lion, a big male lion. So the idea being that if you get the right kind of flight, you can turn from this little pussy cat into this big male predator in the course of the flight. It's much more subtle, but it's still gender-coded, you know. And so I think that there's a lot of that kind of representation that's saying not don't sleep, although there's some of that, because sleep is for the weak and don't do it, but get the right kind of sleep supported by all sorts of other people in ways that are stratified, and you will emerge with the right kind of masculinity on the other end of it. And so when I point that out to students, they see it, but it's not immediately something you would have thought of if you hadn't sort of seen that juxtaposition. So through all of these examples, that's how the cultural literacy of sleep is taught. So speaking of advertising, the thing sleep country is most famous for is its jingle. Well, sleep country, we have advertised you very thoroughly on this episode. Paul, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Paul: 01: 46:21

Oh, what a pleasure, Cresida. Thanks so much for having me.

Joshua: 02: 46:25

Next time on Sleep is the New Sex, we'll be talking about beauty sleep with our guest, Meredith Jones.

Cressida: 00: 46:33

This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiao, Nitsatapi, Metis, Nakota, Dene, Hodnoshone, and Anishanabi, lands that are now known as part of Treaties 6, 7, and 8 and homeland of the Metis. As we talk about the history and meanings that sleep, rest, leisure, and productivity have for us, we also want to recognize the way each of these ideas participates in the history of colonialism that has shaped and continues to shape relations between settlers and First Nations. Our sound engineer is Tom Merklinger, who also wrote and performed our music. To find our first season, please see the link in the show notes, and for more information on this project, visit sleepisthenewsex.ca