Blue Dreams, Black Sleep

Abstract

Dionne Brand’s meditative and narrative rule-breaking book, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, reveals the ways in which the incredible effortfulness of living, dreaming and sleeping is not only proof of a shared condition of Blackness but also of an antiblack world. Sleep (or a lack thereof) indexes scales of and relations to antiblackness. In this paper, I consider the mirrored boundaries between wakefulness/sleep and life/death, probing their psycho-existential and ontological infrastructures. I argue that these states of being are tethered, however tenuously, to each other and in doing so, clarify the stakes of the ostensibly quotidian and mundane. By analyzing insomnia, slumber, fever dreams and nightmares, the text reveals the literal and metaphorical coordinates that locate the bounds of Black consciousness and freedom. Black sleep becomes a kind of freedom, insofar as it offers reprieve that is only possible when the dreamwork is forgotten or psychically registered as nothing at all.