Fast Awake

In the 1990s, science fiction writer Nancy Kress envisioned a world where an elite few never had to sleep. Her Hugo and Nebula award-winning Beggars series posited a gene-therapy fix to sleep, dreamed up by gifted children let loose in a lab. The Sleepless were not only more productive but also more intelligent and emotionally stable while the sleep-dependent Beggars became an underclass of serfs.

Writer and video artist R.M. Vaughan also predicts a society that reveres lack of sleep, but his imagined future is yet more dystopian and in some ways has already begun. Vaughan has been cursed with insomnia since he was a small boy. That curse has come to define him as special, and he wonders how much of it was learned—a bid for attention perpetuated by a morbid attachment to complaining, one that he sees all around him.

“If the world around us is being run, ordered, financed and even entertained by people who are not sleeping well…,” he muses...