Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. However, cultural, political, or aesthetic thought tends to remain concerned with the interpretation and actions of those who are awake. How to Sleep argues instead that sleep is a complex vital phenomena with a dynamic aesthetic and biological consistency.Arguing through examples drawn from contemporary, modern and renaissance art; from literature; film and computational media, and bringing these into relation with the history and findings of sleep science, this book argues for a new interplay between biology and culture. Meditations on sex, exhaustion, drugs, hormones and scientific instruments all play their part in this wide-ranging exposition of sleep as an ecology of interacting processes.How to Sleep builds on the interlocking of theory, experience and experiment so that the text itself is a lively articulation of bodies, organs and the aesthetic systems that interact with them. This book won't enhance your sleeping skills, but will give you something surprising to think about whilst being ostensibly awake.

The interdisciplinary nature of this texts means that it should be of interest and relevance right across the humanities including philosophy, media studies, art and aesthetics, cultural and critical theory to name but a few

prefaceacknowledgements1. How to Sleep2. Without Thinking3. Dormant4. I Don't Want to be Awake5. The Domestic Architecture of the Skull6. Heroes of Sleep7. Too Much Dream8. Mediating8. Sleep Acts9. Repulsive Sleep10. Ingredients of Sleep11. Sleep Gltiches12. Body Parts13. Be Unconscious14. The Luxuriance of Dissolving15. Free-Running16. Sleep in Love17. Vulnerable18. Hyperpassivity19. The Eye Busy Unseeing20. How to Thrive Biologically21. Repetition22. Architecture23. Laws Governing Sleep24. Film Sleep25. Man Controls the Day.But We Will Control the Night26. Headless Brim27. Trains and Buses28. The Smell of Sleep29. The Child's Bed30. Brain as Labourer31. Melnikov's Promethean Sleepers32. Sleep on the Road33. Terraforming34. Dozy-looking35. Nocturne36. Waking Up37. Equipment38. Sleep Upright In Order to Avoid Death39. Animal Sleep40. Wrap Up Warmbibliographyindex