Sleeping into Wakefulness

Abstract

This piece is composed of a blend of poetry, social commentary, and collage artwork. It aims to draw connections between sleep and liberation, exploring how deeper levels of rest can draw us toward freedom, not only in our material conditions, but of thought, imagination and spiritual exploration. Using the three stages of the sleep cycle – light sleep, REM sleep and slow wave sleep – as a metaphorical and literal device, this piece explores productivity culture’s limiting effect on our mental and spiritual health; the piece creates poetic connections between the physical phenomena and the mental and spiritual possibilities that lie within each sleep stage. As working people, especially racialized working people, we are subject to generations of sleep deprivation through historical processes of enslavement and forced labour extraction, which translates to many lost years of the higher functions of rest: self-knowledge, memory, creativity and resilience. In today’s highly corporatized economy of neoliberal social relations, all working people are subject to a similar theft of the physical, mental, and spiritual power of deep rest. As racialized women of immigrant families, we draw upon our experience of witnessing firsthand the neoliberal ideology of sleep deprivation and extreme productivity portrayed as a necessary rite of passage for our families to have established belonging, stability and safety in Canada.