I began by thinking about sleep as a mode of refusal. Sleep; that expanse of time that capitalism struggles to appropriate, to make profitable, as Jonathan Crary has suggested in 24/7. In its unproductiveness, I saw sleep become a method of refusal of capitalism’s attempt to turn everything into use. Laying down, I began to ask: What would become of sleep if it was no longer something we do in order to become regenerated to go to work the following day? What would happen if we embraced rest as an open ended, useless activity? What would emerge? Dreams, I want to suggest, as many have before me.
Over the last half a year, I have been occupied with the poetics and politics of dreams. There’s an essay I’ve been working on, which will hopefully be published before summer, and a workshop, which I ran for the first time in November and am hoping to run again in the new year. The texts that emerged from the first iteration of this workshop have just been published in the Nocturnalities Rest Archive. Nocturnalities is an artistic research project aiming to contextualise rest, exhaustion, anxiety and precarity in cultural labour and the art world. You can find the entry on the workshop here.
I have always loved to dream, but it was only more recently that dreams began to interest me as a mode of fabulation. Fabulation is Saidiya Hartman’s method of refusal in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, where she speculates alternative stories for the lives of black girls and women in New York and Philadelphia, between 1890 and 1930. This gesture towards alternative histories appears in the work of Lola Olufemi as the otherwise, “a linguist stand-in for a stance against.” To substitute this otherwise, Olufemi proposes in Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, we might embrace non-linearity, we might speculate, might invent a future that doesn’t have to be ahead of us, but “everywhere simultaneously.” Olufemi points towards dreaming, towards dream-space as the place where the otherwise can be brought into being. Resting, Dreaming, Resisting, Imagining: these are also the calls to action in Tricia Hersey’s manifesto Rest is Resistance, where rest appears as a disruption of capitalism. Together, they are saying: we need rest to have space to imagine otherwise, and we need to imagine otherwise in order to free ourselves from what we want to resist through rest.
If we could see sleep as a refusal of mandatory, nonstop productivity, we could see dreaming as a way to sit with the useless, the unproductive, the non-linear. We could see dreaming as a refusal of what we cannot accept. We could see it as a door to imagine otherwise. This also includes dreaming against the individualism of our perpetually exhausted lives.
This year, there has been a lot that has felt, and continues to feel, nightmarish. It is hard to hold on to dreams, to believe in them even, but those are still my wishes for the new year.
