Episode 1: The sleep crisis
In this first episode of season two, Cressida and Joshua talk with Diletta De Cristofaro about the so-called “sleep crisis:” is there one? What is it? Why do we insist on talking about it?! How is the sleep crisis related to other crises—of climate, mental health, financial systems, or democracy? Is there a “polycrisis” or a “permacrisis”? We focus in chapter one on some answers to these questions, and how we could really know whether we are sleeping less or less well than we used to. Second, we turn (22:30) to the question of what talking about the sleep crisis does for us, and Diletta suggests that sleep fiction has its own crisis genre, which carries public feelings. How is the sleep crisis connected to the climate crisis? (39:00) Third (47:08), Joshua and Diletta bond over the idea of apocalypse as revelation or the end of the world.
Mentioned in the episode: The Sun’s amazing headline from 2019; Diletta De Cristofaro’s profile; Karen Russell, Sleep Donation; Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves; Jenny Offill, Weather; Finegan Kruckemeyer, Hibernation.
Transcript:
Cressida 0:01
Nightmare! Getting less than seven hours sleep a night could KILL you! (It will kill you in all caps) as experts warn Brits are in the grip of a sleep crisis.
Joshua 0:30
I am your co-host, Joshua Ayer. I have a PhD in Political Science...
Cressida 0:35
[Cheers]
Joshua 0:36
...obtained, thank you, here at the University of Alberta. I have long struggled with sleep. I was making some improvements, but then I acquired a baby, and I am now back to the drawing board of sleeping and struggling with sleep.
Cressida 0:53
And I'm Cressida Heyes, and I am a professor at the University of Alberta where I am a philosopher and political theorist. You can find out more at cressidaheyes.com. I am a I was a pretty good sleeper, I think. And then menopause came upon me. And so now I'm often awake in the middle of the night, which is sort of okay, except sometimes it leaves me more tired than I would like to be. So I also during my sabbatical year have been experimenting with afternoon naps, can recommend. And so, yeah, I'm a biphasic sleeper who likes to have a siesta as well. And I'm doing all of the sleep patterns. And I also live with a teenager who likes to sleep in in the morning and stay up at night, which is something that we talk about in in one of our episodes. So there's a lot of out of whack sleeping happening in my household, which is really common, but is also presents its own challenges.
Joshua 1:56
So the topic for episode one, our season two opener, is the sleep crisis. How did you land on this one, Cressida?
Cressida 2:08
Well, something about how I noticed that all the talk of sleep that we've been talking about for all of season one has crystallized into the idea of a sleep crisis. And there's something very sensationalistic about the way that that gets talked about. I also knew that my colleague and friend, Diletta de Cristofaro, is writing a book about the sleep crisis, and we're going to hear from Diletta today. So I thought we have an expert, we have an organizing theme, and it kind of captures everything that we're doing on the podcast of trying to think about the zeitgeist and how it relates to sleep. And also it feels like hardly anybody utters a sentence nowadays without having the word crisis in it, whether it's a climate crisis, a financial crisis, a public health crisis. And people keep telling me that there's a polycrisis. So, you know, not just that there's one crisis, but there's multiple crises and they're all coming together and they all reinforce each other and ah, ah, ah, crisis. So it felt like a good term to organize an introductory episode.
Joshua 3:25
Yeah, I do feel like I see the the word crisis pop up a lot. And , you know, there's those, I forget what they're called, but those graphs that show you the popularity or the usage of a word over time. What's it called?
Cressida 3:39
N-gram.
Joshua 3:39
Thank you, an n-gram. So close to enneagram, which is...
Cressida 3:42
No, no, that's flaky.
Joshua 3:43
A completely different thing, yeah. But an n-gram.
Cressida 3:45
Sorry to anybody who loves enneagrams.
Joshua 3:47
The Google n-gram, especially. And I do feel unconfirmed, but if you looked up crisis, I feel like there'd be a real spike. And in this current moment, as you say, we are dealing with a real sort of tangle of different crises. Of course, crisis itself is usually referring to a sudden change or a turning point, usually negative. So normally something that is maybe unstable or unsustainable, or maybe even just a sudden break, but there's this moment of change, very drastic change.
Cressida 4:26
Yeah, in in theory, a crisis can lead to an improvement. So the term was used before it became more common in politics, it was used a lot in talking about disease, like, oh, he's had a fever crisis, but now the fever's broken, right? Or he's had a crisis and now he's gonna die. So, you know, the idea that a crisis marks a turning point, but that doesn't really seem to be how it's functioning now, that crises are both temporally extended, right? So crisis can go on a long time, and there seems to be a permanent downhill. So crisis doesn't resolve well. And so I think both of those are kind of adaptations of the term that reflect the times that we're in.
Joshua 5:11
Yeah, a new and improved crisis. The old one was so short and so temporary, you couldn't really enjoy it. But today's crises, much bigger, more drawn out, maybe without end. So some real big improvements over the older, smaller version of crisis. To really figure out what's going on with this term and especially how it relates to sleep and the possibility of a sleep crisis. We turned to a scholar who's writing a book about this very thing. So let's go to that interview.
Cressida 6:01
So today we're really happy to welcome on Sleep is the New Sex Season Two, Diletta De Cristofaro. Can you introduce yourself, Diletta?
Diletta 6:12
Yeah, sure, and thank you for having me. So I'm an assistant professor in English literature at Northumbria University in the UK, and I am the principal investigator on a project called Writing the Sleep Crisis, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission and basically looked at representations of the sleep crisis in a range of contemporary culture.
Cressida 6:36
Great. So you have a PhD in literature, and your first book was about novels that take place in post-apocalyptic worlds. So, how did you become interested in sleep?
Diletta 6:48
So, as I suspect, it's the case with many people that work on sleep, and I know it's the case with both you, Cressida and Joshua, from listening to the podcast. I am not a good sleeper. I've never been a good sleeper. I you know was a terrible sleeper as a child. So I now have a baby who doesn't sleep well at all. So I'm pretty sure that my parents think of it as some kind of karmic revenge for the many horrible nights I visited on my parents.
Cressida 7:16
Yeah, my mother and my mother, in fact, explicitly said, Oh yeah, this is this is what goes around, comes around.
Diletta 7:23
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, my parents keep on saying, What did you expect?
Cressida 7:26
Yes, yeah, I got a lot of that too.
Diletta 7:28
Yeah. So there you go. So so yeah, so there's definitely a kind of like personal stake in, you know, my academic and scholarly interest in sleep. And actually at the time in which I first came up with this idea of the project, the writing the sleep crisis project, I was going through a really bad time in terms of my sleep. I was really obsessed with the very, very little sleep I was getting. And then at some point, I kind of zoomed out and I realized that a lot of people were talking about their horrible sleep. And there was a lot of cultural conversation around this idea of a sleep crisis. There was a lot in the media about this sleep crisis. So I realized that while I was perhaps undergoing a personal sleep crisis, society was also undergoing or seemingly undergoing a sleep crisis. And so, you know, you mentioned my first book, which was on post-apocalyptic fiction, and of course, that's ultimately about the very idea of crisis, right? It's about studying the kind of crisis of the contemporary moment that give rise to this trend of post-apocalyptic imaginaries. So, as somebody who's always been very interested in the idea of crisis, I thought that, you know, a project on the sleep crisis was the perfect kind of like next step for I mean.
Cressida 8:47
Yeah, there's a logic there. Hopefully. Yes. Not that there has to be, but there is. So we're doing our episode on the sleep crisis as a kind of framing theme for season two. And one relevant definition of crisis is from the Oxford English Dictionary, an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending. So when you say that you were interested in post-apocalyptic novels, it's crisis in that sense of the word that's come back around to us through sleep. I have to cite this that in one of your articles, you quoted a headline from The Sun. Our North American listeners might not know that The Sun, we're laughing because we know, but the The Sun is a British tabloid well known for its hypersensationalism. Yeah. And they, in July 2019, they had a headline that reads, "Nightmare, getting less than seven hours sleep a night could kill you." (It will kill you in all caps) "as experts warn Brits are in the grip of a sleep crisis." And I looked that up, and it looks even better when it's embedded in their kind of font, you know, and on their website. So that's the kind of sensationalism about the idea of a sleep crisis that you're unpicking. And you say that the sense that there is this crisis is evident, quote, "in a proliferation of pronouncements, in scientific analyses, the media and everyday life conversations, as well as of cultural images and representations, articulating the contemporary moment as one defined by the steep decline in sleep quality and quantity, and the equally steep increase of the number of people suffering from sleep disorders." So there's three things in there, right? Decline in sleep quality, sleep quantity, and more and more people having sleep disorders. So I take it that you're not centrally interested in trying to very carefully work out whether that's actually true. But also to think about what the effects of talking, like The Sun does, might be. But maybe we can start by asking if we really can pin down any facts. Are people sleeping less well or just less? And since when? And which sleep disorders are becoming more common and among whom?
Diletta 11:12
Yeah, so that's that's the thing, right? So you'll find sleep scientists claiming that we're now sleeping one to two hours less than people did about a hundred years ago. But then you'll also find sleep scientists actually kind of questioning this kind of claim, basically saying, okay, but what like how do you measure the baseline, right? How do we know? Can we reliably know how long people slept a century or so ago? And actually, then if you look at kind of historical research, there's you know lots of studies underlying how people about a century ago, so in the kind of like Victorian age, were worried about a sleep crisis just as we are today. So, you know, this kind of like raises interesting questions in terms of why are we talking about this idea of a sleep crisis as if it was this kind of like uniquely contemporary phenomenon, right? So yeah, my position is kind of agnostic, as you said. Like obviously, I mean, I'm a literary and cultural studies scholar. I don't do data, I don't do language. It's not my thing. So I don't want to, you know, I don't want to claim expertise that I don't have, but you know, by looking at the scientific literature, my sense is that there is a lot of debate, but obviously then the media pick up upon this idea of a sleep crisis. And you know, the the example of the headline is obviously quite interesting, precisely because it's like sensationalized, and so then we have to ask why this is the case, right? But then yeah, in terms of countries that are affected or are supposedly affected, you know, again, there's lots of research about industrialized nations. But then there's also, and I think this is quite important to stress, there's also emerging research that looks at how actually sleep is even worse in poor countries or in poor communities in rich countries, yeah. Which makes sense if you think about it, because you know, obviously sleep is kind of dependent on a safe environment, on you know, good mental health. So if you're worrying about your safety, if you're worrying about your livelihood, if you're worrying about you know what you're gonna eat the next day, then of course you're not gonna sleep well, are you? And then we're asking about sleep disorders and which ones are more prevalent. So insomnia is definitely the big one that gets kind of like invoked time and again, right? So that's about kind of like the difficulty of falling asleep, but also the difficulty in staying asleep. Then there's sleep deprivation, which is slightly different because you might have no issues in falling asleep or staying asleep, but then you don't have enough time devoted to sleep. So, you know, you you don't have optimal sleep health. And then less prominent perhaps are sleep apnea and sleep disorders connected to shift work, but those are also mentioned in the scientific literature.
Cressida 14:05
It does, it does seem as though some sleep disorders are becoming more common, and there are there, whatever the historical trends, there are huge differences, both within different groups in national contexts, between national contexts in the duration and the quality of sleep that people get. So, what causes of this sleep crisis are typically invoked? So you've written in particular about digital devices, especially smartphones and blue light, sort of an understanding of time as something that needs to have value extracted from it, and the sort of general sense that we're in a period of social acceleration, which is something that we talked about in season one actually, and the connections between the climate crisis and the sleep crisis. So, what do people who are convinced that there is a sleep crisis think is the cause of it?
Diletta 14:59
So, digital devices are definitely very often part of this kind of cultural conversation around the sleep crisis, and blue light is part of it because, of course, there are some studies showing that blue light, which is emitted from digital screens, basically acts as a kind of melatonin suppressant. But again, going back to kind of like common sense, if you think about it even beyond a blue light, if you're sitting in bed zoom scrolling, then you're likely not going to have a good night's sleep. Similarly, you know, even if you're not doom scrolling, but your phone is closed and it pings or there are kind of like visual notifications popping up, then they call upon you, which inevitably kind of wakes us up, right? So I think again, it's kind of common sense to say that digital devices are making sleep worse for many people. But more broadly, your question was in exactly the fact that digital devices are ultimately part of a broader kind of culture of daily life that is just not that conducive to sleep, right? so there's a lot of emphasis on productivity, there's a lot of emphasis on , in this context, on the idea of sleep as a waste of time, or even, and I think that the two things are actually basically two sides of the same coin, even on sleep as something that you need to harness to kind of like make you more productive during the day, right? It's the kind of same idea. So yes, there is some kind of pushback, you know, there's lots of stuff, lots of campaigns, lots of , you know, books, manifestos talking about the importance of sleep to your health, to your you know, the daily life, but that doesn't mean that that culture isn't there. And ultimately, the idea of a 24-7 culture is very often evoked when it comes to the sleep crisis, because of course, people in industrialized nations are working jobs that have longer hours, especially if you know take into account commuting , and some of these jobs are very precarious, so that of course makes sleep worse because of you know the relationship with the sense of stability and mental health and so forth that is all it's obviously lacking if you're not feeling stable in your own life and in your own job. and then again digital devices that kind of facilitate this blurring of the line between your work life and your personal life and when do you actually switch off? So all of these ideas kind of speak to each other and yeah, speak of a culture that ultimately is in that conducive to sleep, right?
Cressida 17:46
So one of the things that we need to talk about when we talk about the sleep crisis is is the history of sleep. Has sleep got worse dramatically or slowly in some way? And in the clip we just heard, I think I said electronic instead of electric, but we've only been able to measure electrical activity in the brain since 1924. So that's through EEG technology. And that's a hundred years, it's really nothing, right? So the idea that if if what it takes to measure how much and or how well somebody is sleeping is measuring the electrical activity in their brain, which is of course a contested way of thinking about what sleep is, then we haven't been able to do it very long. So actually, we don't have that kind of data about whether people are sleeping worse now than they did. We do have, of course, anecdotal historical data about sleep patterns, sleep habits, so it's not that we we've got nothing. and similarly, REM, rapid eye movement, sleep, was only named in 1953. So that's a really important phase in the sleep cycle, as we'll talk about in future episodes. And so it's when most, not all, but most dreaming happens. And so that has been around even less, the idea that sleep has phases and one of them is REM. So really the basics of being able to say through independent observation that someone is asleep haven't been around that long.
Joshua 19:18
Yeah, and so there's that piece. And then as you say in in the interview as well, there's this other layer, which is about comparing ourselves to historical periods in general. And when we try to do that, I think there's especially we might have a bias towards our present moment, we might have certain intuitions about our present moment and certain feelings about our present moment that feel sort of undeniably real, like we're so much worse off for sleeping. But when you think about how you would actually go about confirming that, what's the evidence that you could draw from the past to confirm that we are actually sleeping worse today?
Cressida 19:59
Yeah, it's not that there is no evidence, but that we have to be content with narrative evidence about sleep as a social practice rather than data sets of thousands of sleep studies. But I think we can say that the digital revolution, which, you know, is the last 30 years or so really, has had a significant negative effect on sleep. And that the neoliberal intensification of capitalist relations, that's a big phrase, but the way that we work in particular has changed how a lot of people experience their sleep because they are doing shift work, they're working precariously, they're patching work together. So real wages have declined and the timing of people's work has changed. And so that I think has clearly had a very big effect on sleep.
Joshua 20:51
So, in the absence of sort of knockdown evidence, right? Why is it so attractive? Why is it so compelling for people? The idea that there might be a sleep crisis, like something about that is resonating. So the question is what the repetition of that claim that there is a sleep crisis is doing for us if it's not referring back to generally accepted evidence.
Cressida 21:35
As a project is that we're not just thinking about whether or not there is a crisis as a matter of fact, but what it achieves to say that there is one, right? Which is a bit different. So we're not trying to evaluate the data and work out just how bad things are, although we acknowledge that things might be a bit bad. But we're sort of looking at the desire to invoke crisis, not just in terms of sleep, but we see it in all sorts of contexts, right? Energy systems, youth mental health, global finance, democracy, they're all in a state of crisis. And it's not that that isn't or couldn't be true exactly, but if we go back to the definition of crisis as an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending, do you actually think we're in a sleep crisis in that sense, or maybe better, what does talking as if we are do for us?
Diletta 22:35
Yeah, so that's really the question for me, as indeed it is for you and for your work. So you're absolutely right in saying that ours is seen as a time of multiple crisis, and whether these crises are real or just perceived is less interesting to me, again, as a literary and cultural study scholar, than the very fact that we talk about this moment as a moment of polycrisis or permacrisis. You might have heard these terms, you know, they've become increasingly popular since the 2020s. So around the kind of time of COVID, culturally speaking, it makes sense that these kind of like neologisms emerged then, right?
Cressida 23:17
Yes.
Diletta 23:17
But these terms are not about COVID per se, right? They name a kind of structure of feeling that predates COVID, so which is the sense that we live at a time of multiple crises. So the kind of definition of crisis that you mentioned, which is the classic definition of crisis, I don't think holds true anymore in this moment, because that kind of definition, you know, speaks of crises as a moment of change, right? So it goes back to the etymological meaning of crisis, which is this turning point in a disease. Right. But what happens now in the perma or poly crisis is that these crises never resolve, they just accumulate, right? They never go away. There's simply a new crisis that kind of crops up. So again, if you think about sleep as a kind of embodied experience that depends on feelings of safety, stability. Well, of course, then if you're living in the permacrisis or poly crisis, however you want to call it, then of course it makes sense to feel that we are at a moment of sleep crisis, right? To talk about the sleep crisis. It's kind of an embodied way to again name a feeling, what living in the 21st century is all about, right?
Cressida 24:29
What it's like. Yeah.
Diletta 24:30
So, you know, perhaps when people like sleep scientists or say foundations like the National Sleep Foundation talk about a sleep crisis, they are actually talking about that kind of like traditional idea of crisis, right? They're naming something that they see as a public health crisis that they need to address, right? We can do X, Y, and Z to address it, and we can get to this turning point in this public health problem. But I think that public discourse is actually doing something else with this idea of the sleep crisis. And it it's it's about using the idea of poor sleep as a way to talk about the experience of living in the 21st century, basically, this kind of like host about a crisis.
Cressida 25:08
So sleep is standing in for a sort of a host of feelings about all these other things. What I mean, what are the other things? Like climate crisis?
Diletta 25:22
Climate crisis is something that I think is there quite a lot. It's again the crisis of work, for instance, you know, economic crisis, the crisis of the future, ultimately, right? Like I know I sound like yeah, well, an apocalyptic kind of person or something. Yes, why?
Cressida 25:41
It's the language you know!
Diletta 25:43
Exactly. But it is true. I think that like the reason why that kind of traditional idea of crisis, I think, doesn't work anymore, is that these terms are trying to name the sense of futurelessness that kind of like weighs down on people. So yeah, yeah, sometimes yeah.
Cressida 26:01
I mean, it's an interesting kind of redefinition of the word crisis, right? The idea that a decisive change is impending. Well, you might get that feeling, but it might never arrive, or at least it might not arrive within the time frame you were expecting. And so, you know, it's like having a terminal illness diagnosis and not dying, which that also happens to people, right? That that they get this sort of idea that there's a crisis and they're they're going to die within this time frame, and then they somehow live much longer than they were given by some doctor, but always in this sense of, you know, I could at any moment be in the moment when things change. Chronic crisis. A chronic crisis, which is not what crisis is supposed to be, but somehow it is. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. And kind of, I mean, if that's the vibe, it explains why people are so stressed about it. Yeah.
Diletta 27:01
I'm stressed about it!
Cressida 27:02
I'm stressed about it too! The more we talk, the more I'm stressed.
Diletta 27:06
I'm sorry. It's because you didn't have to invite me on the podcast.
Cressida 27:09
No, no, it's all right. I'm prone to stress at the best of times. So it's all just grist to the mill.
Joshua 27:27
So once we move beyond the empirical questions about how bad our sleep is, and start asking what the language of crisis enables, then we're into humanities territory. Back home.
Cressida 27:39
So we need to turn to look at some specifics of how the sleep crisis is represented in various contexts. So one of the big things I've learned actually from Diletta's work is that the sleep crisis has its own genres. So that's to say, it provokes texts that repeat certain conventions. So talking about the sleep crisis causes you to produce certain kinds of creative or literary material, right? And so as she describes the sleep crisis, anticipates an apocalypse. So there's a crisis now, and what's coming is something that's world-ending, right? T he sleep crisis is symptomatic, is another trope, another feature of this genre. That there's a sleep crisis, and that's always telling us about another deeper kind of crisis. So those are the big two.
Joshua 28:34
And what's interesting is this is gonna come up in other episodes, including the next episode, episode two, about sleep being the symptom for other kinds of public feelings. it could be anxiety about the future or anxiety about the present, it can be financial stress, it can be, you know, different stressors that are making sleep elusive. And in this apocalypse genre, sleep is often figured as like not the real problem, but once sleep becomes difficult, that's sort of an indication that there are larger things that are breaking or that there is something larger coming loose, and that's what's causing us to have worse sleep.
Cressida 29:38
A lot of your work involves interpreting fiction, and I thought we could talk about a couple of books that recur in your academic writing. So there's a really interesting book by Karen Russell called Sleep Donation, that I think is both creepy and revealing. So can you tell us briefly about that book and what you think it says about sleep?
Diletta 30:00
Yeah, sure. So that's definitely one of my favorite examples of what I call the sleep apocalypse genre, which is basically this subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction that responds to the sleep crisis discourse by imagining a future more or less near, in which the world as we know it is ending or has ended because of a pandemic of a sleep disorder. So the apocalypse is basically something to do with sleep. Typically, as in the case of Sleep Donation, it's a kind of like terminal insomnia disease where people basically cannot sleep anymore, and of course, then they end up dying. So Russell's novel, the title Sleep Donation, refers to the fact that the only treatment that exists in the world of the novel for this pandemic of terminal insomnia are donations of healthy sleep, right? And Russell uses this as a kind of extended metaphor to kind of highlight all sorts of interesting things about sleep today. So what happens is that sleep basically becomes a kind of like really precious and scarce resource in the novel, right? Something that needs to be extracted from as many bodies as possible, including children, babies, actually, which is where you know the creepiness comes in, for instance. And this kind of extraction, really like unbounded extraction, sits in parallel to the extraction of natural resources. This is a novel that also pays close attention to the climate crisis, right? There are very specific parallels being made between the extraction of natural resources that are leading to the climate crisis and the extraction of sleep that is attempt that are attempting to cure, to treat this pandemic of terminal insomnia. And so what happens also is that precisely because sleep is such a commodity in the world of the novel, and it soon becomes clear that there's actually a black market of sleep donations, those that are donating their sleep thinking that they're actually doing you know some kind of like voluntary action to make the world a better place are ultimately working effectively. You know, they're producing profit for some kind of opaque entity that you know it's really unclear.
Cressida 32:25
Oh, how dastardly!
Diletta 32:27
Yeah, yeah. So basically sleep becomes work, right? So you have this image of a person that, in addition to their kind of like daily work, also works in their sleep by actually producing profit for this institution. So again, this kind of like raises interesting questions about the idea of sleep as a resource for the world outside the novel, right? Do we also think about sleep as a resource? That's kind of what I was hinting at when I was saying that, you know, if we think about sleep as something that we need to harness to be more productive during the day, well, that's thinking about sleep as a resource. And does that, you know, to be very self-helpy, does that serve us? You know, yeah, is that useful in any way? Why are we doing that? Or is it, as Russell actually suggests, something that we need to be wary of because it kind of parallels really instrumental ways of thinking about nature, for instance?
Cressida 33:20
It's a good thought experiment, especially the extraction of sleep from babies part, which is yeah, especially grim. You point out that that sleep donation has has quite a bit in common with a novel that we've talked about on the podcast before, which is Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves. Can you tell us what you think the parallel is?
Diletta 33:43
Yeah, well, so both novels are obviously part of this subgenre, so sleep apocalypse genre. They draw important parallels between the sleep crisis and the climate crisis. Again, Dimaline's novel is also set on a in a world that is ravaged by climate change, basically. But then, of course, what's interesting about The Marrow Thieves is that it really emphasizes kind of like the impact of the sleep crisis, the climate crisis on Indigenous people, kind of suggesting that you know they're the ones that bear the brunt of both crises, because of course it's indigenous people whose sleep has been extracted.
Cressida 34:22
Yes, because they're the ones, they're the ones left who can sleep.
Diletta 34:25
Exactly, exactly. So it's the settlers doing the extraction, it's the settlers doing the violence. And of course, like, you know, when we think about Indigenous literature that that sits within the post-apocalyptic genre, we usually think about it in the context of, you know, Indigenous people have already experienced an apocalypse, which is colonization. So very often these texts kind of like draw really explicit parallels between the colonial past, so to speak. Obviously, the point is that the past isn't that much of a past at all, and the kind of future that they're imagining. So they're kind of like imagining this repetition of patterns of colonial violence, and that's exactly what Dimaline is doing here, with the kind of scenario that she conjures up, where again it's Indigenous people's sleep that is being extracted and commodified.
Cressida 35:12
Yeah, I mean, that genre of Indigenous literature is using an understanding of time as having cycles, right? Whether that's an essential worldview or whether just as a historical fact, right? That the destruction of a people and trying to come back from an apocalypse or just to say it, a genocide, is a process, and then it may happen again because of the same kind of structural reasons or but a different you know, different set of historical facts. But it there's always this possibility of this recurring. So things coming back around is a very different understanding of historical time than the one I think that settlers in the global north have inherited, which is sort of that, you know, things things were going really amazingly well, and progress was working great, and modernity was advancing just as it should, and then suddenly things went went wrong. Oh, I can't think why. Throwing up of hands, crisis. And so one of the ways that the language of crisis gets its novelty in The Sun and its ilk is kind of by ignoring previous crises and suggesting that these are the the novel and important ones, rather than that crises are actually things that come back around with some regularity, and that you know, we're maybe we should not approach them with this idea of extreme urgency because things are suddenly going to change, not least because they're not. But we should also think a little bit about the historical patterns that have led us to this. Yeah, that's too much for The Sun.
Diletta 37:01
But well, yeah, no, that's definitely not gonna happen, right?
Cressida 37:05
But but yeah, but you see what I mean, that there's a way of understanding history that's different than we're being asked to understand it here.
Diletta 37:13
Yeah. And of course, I mean, in part what what that kind of article also does is to try and suggest that ultimately it's the individual's responsibility to sort out this crisis, right? There's really little emphasis put on the kind of systemic structures that are causing the sleep crisis, right?
Cressida 37:33
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. It was a it was essentially a promo for a an ITV documentary, Why Can't We Sleep. And that's while I'm I'm sure that I haven't watched that documentary, but while I'm sure that there's lots of information in it, it did get the feel that it was asking you to think about whether you had good sleep hygiene yet again, right? Yeah, put down your devices, which is, I mean, again, can help, but it's not the only thing, right?
Diletta 38:03
Yeah.
Cressida 38:03
Yes. some of the people in sleep science that we've talked to have shared this is kind of refreshing, actually, have shared our exasperation with individualized sleep tips and the idea that you just have to give people a little handout that tells them to put their pajamas on an hour before they go to bed and drink a glass of warm milk and put their phone away, as if that will sort of solve what ails us. Yeah. So it's good to know that nobody believes in that. But it's yeah, but it still keeps coming around.
Diletta 38:35
Yeah, because that's what they are asked to provide, right? People want that in a sense because that's you know what they've been told that they should get, right? These kind of tips, top tips.
Cressida 38:45
As you said, we always love an individualized solution.
Diletta 38:48
Yeah.
Cressida 38:49
We always love if the people who are on the sharp end of some kind of structural inequality have to change what they do. That's that's the best. We love that.
Diletta 38:59
Yeah, yeah, of course. That's very simple. Less work.
Cressida 39:05
you've also written a lot about the connections between climate disaster and the sleep crisis. So these could be very literal, actually. So how how does the change in climate actually affect sleep?
Diletta 39:17
Yeah. So studies increasingly highlight that obviously sleep is regulated by temperature, right? So hotter nights inevitably lead to worse sleep. And of course, the climate crisis is actually leading to you know increasing heat waves. We are in a heat wave right now, in so many countries in Europe, for instance. So, because of this, there's a real risk that basically climate change will produce a sleep crisis if there if we're not in one already, right? Because the nights are getting hotter and hotter. And again, it makes sense. I think we all sleep worse in the heat, right? But there's also kind of like more mental effects of climate change that are again producing worse sleep for people. So it's not just about increasing kind of like nighttime temperatures, it's about poor mental health ultimately. You know, there are there are very well-documented links between poor mental health and poor sleep. And the climate crisis can bring up a variety of kind of like poor mental health issues, you know, there can be disorders like PTSD or , you know, depressions, for instance, if you experience a climate disaster, but it can also be something more diffuse, but you know, no less serious, which is this kind of like idea of eco-anxiety, so kind of like fear of the environmental doom, fear of you know what climate change will bring about. All of these issues are ultimately making our sleep worse.
Cressida 40:55
Yeah, and of course, having the means to remediate them is also indexed to certain kinds of resources. So, not very many people in Edmonton in the past have had air conditioning. Right, yeah, because it's really used to be really cold here. Yeah, and the summers, and the summers were never really hot. But now I know a lot of people who are getting air conditioning installed, and it's really expensive to do that, and just thinking about who who has the ability to get their house air conditioned, even in within communities in the global north in a rich country, let alone people in India, you know, yeah, and who can manage cooling.
Diletta 41:35
Yeah, and then of course, you know, that's energy intensive in and of itself. So what does that do to the environment, you know? Yeah, yeah.
Cressida 41:44
Yeah, we're consuming energy to mitigate our consumption of energy all the time. Yeah.
Diletta 41:51
Yeah.
Cressida 41:51
You're more interested, I guess, though, in how writing about representations of climate crisis and sleep crisis parallel and influence each other. So tell us about that.
Diletta 42:03
Yeah, so my general argument when it comes to analyzing these texts that address these intersections between this climate crisis and the sleep crisis is that these texts are not just, you know, reflecting the scientific literature back at us. So, you know, by for instance, stressing how warmer nights cause worse sleep, or, you know, how eco-anxiety causes worse sleep. Does that? but actually, what these texts are very good at doing, I think, they're pointing out kind of structural parallels between the sleep crisis and the climate crisis, and basically suggesting that both are effectively caused by a form of capitalism that is about extracting as much value as possible from nature and human beings. So, you know, if you think about the word exhaustion, you know, there's exhaustion of natural resources, but there's also exhaustion of people, and that's what these parallels are all about. So, you know, I've already kind of talked a little bit about Sleep Donation and The Marrow Thieves, which are very good at kind of like drawing these structural parallels. Another text that I always talk about, because I really love it, is Weather by Jenny Offill. And, you know, this is a novel about eco anxiety. The protagonist is very anxious about the future of her child or a very young child at a time of climate change. And the protagonist doesn't sleep because of this eco anxiety. But beyond this kind of like, again, structural feeling, right, that causes her insomnia, there's also loads of reflection around how insomnia is also something that is produced by the world that we live in, by kind of like structural factors. So it's a book that works very well with aphorisms. So one of them is insomnia as a badge of honor. So the protagonist notices that insomnia has become a badge of honor. And so, you know, in so doing, it's kind of pointing to those structural factors that we were talking about, right? This idea of the importance of productivity, this idea of sleep as a waste of time. And so again, kind of like driving parallels between the climate crisis and the sleep crisis is both ultimately caused by a cultural form of capitalism that doesn't understand boundaries ultimately, right? Doesn't understand natural boundaries, doesn't understand planetary boundaries, doesn't understand human boundaries.
Cressida 44:28
Yeah. And just in case our listeners are thinking this is all doom and gloom. I mean, because it kind of is, but that's okay. You also discuss ways that reclaiming sleep might be a form of environmental reclamation. And that I thought was really interesting. So the example that gripped me was the awesomely named Finegan Krukemeyer's play, Hibernation. So what happens in Hibernation?
Diletta 44:57
So it's a play that takes place in a very near future. So it's I think the 2030s, when the world is already in a kind of advanced stage of climate breakdown. So many nations are already underwater, there's crop failures all the time. And governments are working on a solution, and the solution is space colonization, Elon Musk style, but then all of a sudden, a kind of like government aid comes up with a simpler solution, perhaps, which is basically using the kind of gas that they've been developing to put people into hibernation so as to facilitate space travel, to ultimately cause the entire population of the world to hibernate for a year. And the idea is that you know, by virtue of stopping everything, you know, by virtue of stopping the capitalist machine, every sort of production, every you know, activities of consumption, everything that is energy intensive, then the earth will regenerate. And that actually does happen, but so much so that then hibernation kind of like becomes a global movement and it becomes something that people want every 10 years. So there will be a year of hibernation every 10. Obviously it's a provocation, but you know, the idea behind it is that if we were to reclaim more sleep and more rest for ourselves, then it is true that we would actually stop a lot of energy-intensive activities, right? And so that would make a difference ultimately. Of course, we can't hibernate, but if we were not constantly buying into this idea of being having to be productive all the time, about having to consume all the time, that would help. And so a part of one way in which we could do so would be to revalue sleep as something that you know is outside of this kind of like capitalist circle and that is you know valuable because of that, right?
Cressida 47:09
So there's a lot in there. This equation of sleep crisis with the end of the world is really interesting. So sleep is so often represented, I think very misleadingly, as death, as a short death, most often. And here it's lack of sleep that's destroying humanity. So when I think about apocalypse, I think about the end of the world. But you asked Diletta something a bit different about apocalypse as a revelation. So can you explain that question a bit?
Joshua 47:38
Yeah, apocalypse is such an interesting word because it's common, its most popular usage is to represent the event that is world-ending, right? We think of the apocalypse as this world-ending event. But when I talk about the environmental apocalypse and I talk about it in a class on environmental philosophy, we go back to what that word is historically doing. Going back specifically to Greek words is a very philosopher thing to do as well. But the Greek word is apocalyptine or tyne, apocalypse, probably, and its actual meaning is not like world-ending, but is uncovering or revealing. And so what I like to do with the term apocalypse when we're talking about it in class is use it as a like less this catastrophic event that ends things, but more what does it show us? What does it reveal to us? Like, what is this apocalypse showing to us in the context of the environment is often how does it reveal the unsustainability of our political economy, of our relationship to nature? So less of a there is a disaster that comes along with the apocalypse, but what the apocalypse is doing is not just the disaster. It's actually the disaster is maybe the means of uncovering a circumstance that we weren't able to see before the apocalypse. The example I always think of too is with COVID-19 and the way that essential workers became a phrase that more and more people used. And, you know, for some people, the pandemic revealed a sector of the economy that we could not do without, right? That might have been very obvious, but it really took the like pandemic to make that clearer to a lot of people, right? It made it much, much harder to avoid. And so the apocalypse, the disaster has this revelatory function, and that's what I was asking. that's what I was asking about. You know, I teach a course on environmental philosophy, and one of the things that we talk about all the time is apocalypse and what apocalypse means, and specifically that it's an uncovering, right? Or that it's a revealing.
Diletta 50:20
Yeah.
Joshua 50:21
Certainly seen the way that you've been describing sleep as an apocalypse and climate as an apocalypse, as these unveilings of like deep structural problems.
Diletta 50:31
Yeah.
Joshua 50:32
And my question is sort of how do we tend to treat apocalypse? I would suspect as a society, we don't tend to treat crises and apocalypse as those uncoverings, but more as a problem to be solved. And I think my question is more an open invitation to sort of comment on that, especially as somebody who's interested in apocalypse. maybe how should we understand apocalypse, especially sleep apocalypse, and then how do we understand them and what's the tension there?
Diletta 51:09
Yeah, so I mean, yes, you're absolutely right. Like again, going back to the kind of like etymological meaning of the word, it is all about a revelation, right? But also going back to the kind of like religious narrative of apocalypse, which is the Book of Revelation, which is the kind of like prototypical kind of like Christian narrative about apocalypse, it's the revelation of a better world to come at the end of history, right? Right. So my book, the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel, it's talking you through how that idea of the revelation of a better world at the end of history has you know shaped kind of like crucial ideological constructions in modernity, like capitalism, the idea of progress, colonialism, etc. But all of those constructions are now starting to unravel, basically.
Joshua 51:59
I've noticed.
Diletta 52:00
Yeah, well, have you?! Okay. They're actually leading to a very different kind of apocalypse, which is that ultimately, like, you know, this this kind of like terminal crisis where there is no better world at the end of history. If anything, it's all dystopian. And you know, if we go back to the idea of the perma or polycrisis, it's not even an apocalyptic crisis in a sense, because again, it doesn't end, there's no resolution. So I think that again, for want of a better word, you know, if you go and read kind of like more literary apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives, you will see this new sense of apocalypse tree being excavated and really kind of like trying to critique this old idea of apocalypse and trying to show how actually this understanding of time as a kind of like line directed towards spectrum and actually didn't do us any good. If anything, it brought us to where we are right now, right? So , yeah, does that answer the question?
Joshua 53:03
Oh, it does it answered my question. Can I ask you just to say a bit more on you say that it has maybe created a lot of problems, this orientation towards time unfolding linearly and the assumption it's going in a positive direction? And I'm wondering. Yeah, I would also love to connect it back to sleep.
Diletta 53:23
Yeah.
Joshua 53:24
I'm not sure I can do that, but can you say more about that?
Diletta 53:27
Yeah, so I mean, the obvious example is the climate crisis, right? We've thought about this idea of progress as kind of like continuing and like open-ended progress, right? That would actually just give us more progress, right? It would never actually get us into trouble. But then what a lot of it has ultimately amounted to is, you know, this the risk of climate breakdown effectively, because the kind of limits of the Earth system were not taken into account or were not taken into account enough. So that's one of the big kind of dimensions of this idea of, you know, if you think about this apocalyptic orientation to time in the etymological sense of the word, well, that's quite dangerous actually. We've talked about The Marrow Thieves, for instance. That's why I would argue it goes back to that kind of cyclical understanding of time, precisely because it's trying to deconstruct that idea of a line directed towards [?] as something that is actually true ultimately, first of all, and something that doesn't damage us, but it's actually trying to show just how much it has already damaged us and or some of us and how it will only continue to do so, right?
Joshua 54:44
Yeah. There's I think also, especially in the in the history that you're describing, the idea that that what the apocalypse is revealing is something that is just happening, right? And it is a better world that sort of comes without acting it or without producing it. Yeah. Which reminds me of the play Hibernation and the idea that really to solve the problem, you actually have to remove human agency from from the equation. And that also reminds me of what Cressida was saying about insomnia, something we've heard a lot about, the paradox being the more you try to force yourself to fall asleep, the more impossible it becomes. And I do wonder if the language of apocalypse, the way that you're tracing it, maybe does start to push us in this direction of like, what if we allowed that better world to come about instead of trying to produce it?
Diletta 55:45
Yeah. And there's also something like you know, about sleep itself as a form of inactivity, right? That is interesting here, right? Actually, the solution at least is positive by Hibernation. And and again, there is something to it, right? There is something seducing about it, it's just to not do much, right? Yeah, it's just to take a step back and be like, okay, maybe we just need to, but which of course, probably, it probably will only take you so far, right? But it but it will take you somewhere, at least.
Joshua 56:16
I mean, we know during COVID we had that brief moment that everyone talks about the dolphins returned or whatever to the sea, and you know, and there was peace on earth for five days when the economy did shut down and things, you know, the smog cleared in some places. It was like the earth really had a chance to breathe again for the first time since the industrial revolution. So there is something, as you say, I can only take you so far, but there is there is definitely you can get somewhere from that.
Diletta 56:44
Which is already something.
Joshua 56:45
Yeah.
Cressida 56:55
On that apocalyptic note, that's it for episode one.
Joshua 56:59
So stay tuned for the next episodes of Sleep is the New Sex, where we'll be discussing sleep science at long last.
Cressida 57:06
Okay. Yes, I know some people have been really waiting for this, and it's going to be a double header. So episodes two and three, we talked with four experts about the biology of sleep, but also how doing sleep science is a matter of understanding culture.
Joshua 57:21
We're back in two weeks as usual, and if ever you want to check our schedule or follow up on anything you hear in the podcast, you can of course go to our website sleepisthenewsex.ca, where you'll find not only the episodes, but also a full transcript, show notes, and links to everything that we mention.
Cressida 57:40
This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiyaw, Niisitapi, Metis, Nakota, Dene, Haudonosonee, and Aniishanabe, 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 recognise 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.
Cressida 58:30
But you have lovely babies. I've seen photos of both your babies and they are delicious.
Joshua 58:36
They are very cute, yeah.
Diletta 58:38
And that's what saves them. So there you go.
Joshua 58:40
That's the only reason why we don't eat them.