“Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak of external space.” —Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”

“What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Room at the Centre d’investigation et de recherche sur le sommeil, Lausanne, Switzerland

1a) Space

If you happen to be in Lausanne, Switzerland, and if you happen to be at the Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois in Lausanne, Switzerland, you can take the elevator six floors down from the main floor—yes, that far, to the basement, to the basement of basements—and find yourself at a place called the Centre d’investigation et de recherche sur le sommeil (CIRS), and this is where we’ll begin. 

CIRS comes alive at night. If you walk inside, you’ll see that five closed doors fold around a night nurse sitting in the middle of five screens. Behind each closed door is a room that looks identical to the other four: like a bedroom or like a simulation someone created of a bedroom, but with cameras hooked up to the walls and a cornucopia of heteroclite gadgets hinging sleeping bodies to bedside units. These sleeping bodies appear to be armoured in wires and tapes and their breathing patterns are rhythmic and deep under the quilts.

On the screens that encompass the night nurse, data from the sleeping bodies is projected, external mirrors of the internal.

This is the place where sleep has come under surveillance. Not as something that happens or as something that one does, but as something that happens wrong, that one does badly. In fact, being bad at sleep is the act that both isolates this space and makes it penetrable (Foucault 26), it’s what allows you entrance at all.

The heterotopia (of deviation) of the sleep clinic is the object of this probe, but actually it’s possible to go a bit further—it is the snow globe that you shake and look into at the scene within, it is the peephole, the CCTV into the heterochrony of sleep.

Here, the private act of sleep, a space of complete alone-ness where we spend one third of our lives, is made public and populated in the arena of the faulty body’s data.

Electroencephalography data with video of sleeper (Somnologica)

The alphabet of oscillations

1b) Time

Sleep is a behaviour. As such we can say it exists in a special relationship to time. It is daily and ahistorical, it is a routine that has multiple other routines orbiting it, like flossing, washing, putting on that old T-shirt before going to bed, even waking up, drinking coffee. Yet in order to study sleep, science has made the behaviour into an object, or what Bruno Latour, quoting Gaston Bachelard, might term a “reified theory” (66). Polysomnography is the inscription of sleep, and it comes through the interface of programs such as Somnologica, which present a montage of continuous lines compartmentalizing the messiness of the living body, each into a particular graphy (for the brain/mind, electroencephalography; for the heart, electrocardiography). A portrait of sleep in electroencephalography, for example, is drawn mostly in delta waves (𝛿), theta waves (θ). Polysomnography is the mirror cast up to sleep, where knowledge is formed from a space in which “knowledge” has traditionally been seen as momentarily suspended.

Now we can know sleep, construct it. In the uncanny valley of the data of our bodies lie avatars of our sleeping selves: “I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface . . . From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there” (Foucault 24).

Yet like an image in a mirror, sleep is fleeting: behind all the data produced by sleep research, the basic function of sleep remains mysterious, making sleep, as Allan Rechtschaffen notes, “the biggest open question in science” (Goode). In relation to the sleep clinic, then, how can we say that something is being done wrong when we do not even know what that thing is for?

What kind of place is this? How to read the self when the self is over there?

1c) They collapse

The establishment of the sleep clinic as a “real” space was a relatively slow evolution, but we can say it was minted around the time Allan Rechtschaffen and Anthony Kales put out a manual for sleep scoring in 1969 (Kroker 362–66). The clinical study of sleep gave way not necessarily to a breakthrough concerning the function of sleep, but to a massive industry, where, for example, you can pick from over seventy different drugs to “cure” your insomnia alone (the fact that sleep requires curatives at all is relatively novel, but by now a pretty stable concept).

These days it’s not only sleep that is of interest, but also sleeplessness, which is either seen as dangerous (“drowsy driving” anyone?) or desirable, as in current military research. About the latter, Jonathan Crary notes in his book 24/7: “Sleeplessness research should be understood as one part of a quest for soldiers whose physical capabilities will more closely approximate the functionalities of non-human apparatuses and networks” (2). The pathology of sleep, a societal construction built around an ahistorical event, has invited a species of questions that may not have existed previously; i.e. is it possible to function outside of sleep altogether? If so, what kind of heterochrony would that be? (One that needs in any case a longer probe…)

2) A possibility of networks

The science of sleep brings to light an event where the internal intricately aligns to the external: where a private and invisible behaviour becomes public and reified.

Yet the data sleep gives up is difficult to read, somewhat like deciphering bits and pieces of the Voynich manuscript; sleep is asemic and maybe that’s where it will stay. If the heterotopia par excellence is the ship, as Michel Foucault posits (27), then the data washing up from the heterotopia of the sleep clinic is the mess of the ocean fossilized and frozen, seadrift on the shore of the waking.

And maybe, this makes the study of sleep rife for other laboratory models, ones more similar to those Jentery Sayers describes in relation to the infrastructure of the Maker Lab in the Humanities at UVic; that is, labs informed as cultural practices, where a “research team performs or practices multiple definitions of a given field.” How could such a space open an area of research where sleep is not necessarily pinned down to biological data, but where this data, such as that produced by polysomnography, is one point in sleep’s movement (Foucault 23)?

I was granted access to the heterotopia of the sleep clinic not through the pathological (although that could be a funny way to put it) but through an outside foundation that placed me in the lab as a resident poet. Like Jentery Sayers’s MLab, this lab was separated into two physical places: the Center for Integrative Genomics (CIG) at the University of Lausanne, where foundational research on sleep is carried out, and its clinical component described here in text and pictures, where patients are treated and their data collected and filtered back down to the CIG. As one person in the lab carrying out a vastly different kind of research than the others, I found the exchange of information to be mostly asymmetrical: while I learned a lot from the scientists, I was often seen as a curiosity and sometimes as a personified affront to the state of research in general, and there were at least two occasions when I was approached by a colleague with the sole purpose of telling me they didn’t read poetry (“um… thanks for letting me know…?”). It was clear, though, attending meetings, participating in experiments, speaking to technicians and lab directors and nurses and doctors and postdocs, that sleep was proving more elusive than the sum of the efforts being deployed; furthermore, the fact that I was put into this situation at all suggests that the need for broad collaboration was and is being recognized.

How then could a laboratory configured as a “network that connects points” (Foucault 22) offer a different perspective on a concept like sleep, and what would this look like? How does altering the research method change the research object? Because maybe sleep, as it is currently being studied, will not give up its secrets; maybe sleep is asking for different kinds of questions and we require different ways of posing them.

Or maybe, taking a page from science fiction, sleep itself is the laboratory and we the subjects under its study (cue spooky exit music).

Polysomnography selfie

Works cited

Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–27.

Goode, Erica. “Why Do We Sleep?” The New York Times, November 11, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/why-do-we-sleep.html

Kroker, Kenton. The Sleep of Others, and the Transformations of Sleep Research. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Scribner, 1971.

Sayers, Jentery. “The MLab: An Infrastructural Disposition,” Maker Lab in the Humanities | UVic, website, http://maker.uvic.ca/bclib15.