Snoozefest

Shakespeare may have invented the phrase “night owl,” but he respected good repose. In Macbeth, he described sleep as the “chief nourisher in life’s feast.” Paul Huebener would probably agree. With Restless in Sleep Country, the English professor at Athabasca University, in Alberta, advances a rigorous and wide-ranging take on snoozing, grouped under two categories. He grapples with the historical, ideological, and political baggage that conditions how we “imagine and encounter” our slumbers: a “critical literacy.” He also examines depictions of sleep in Canadian movies, novels, print ads, poetry, and TV commercials, among other media: a “cultural literacy.” What might appear at first blush persnickety and overthinking verbiage — the sort of academic bluster that inspires exasperated groans outside the ivory tower — offers much insight. This book isn’t just for scholars and specialists.

Key to Huebener’s project is the notion that sleep is not simply a natural act. Yes, it’s a biological necessity, but that necessity is bound up with “ideological priorities”— or social concerns beyond sheer scientific analysis. “What values were reflected in your sleep last night?” Huebener asks. “For whom did you sleep? What did your sleep mean?” That’s not to say sleep has no existence beyond politics; on the contrary, our inherent need for rest is precisely why we should explore these subjective matters. Barring unprecedented scientific advancement — something like the “dream machine” created by the supervillain Gustav Graves in the Bond film Die Another Day — we’ll always have to sleep, so we’d better understand the act in all its complexity.

There’s plenty of empirical data at our disposal, of course. Brain scans, sleep trackers, and the like offer observable stats: how long, how much, how often. They don’t tell the whole story, however, and relying solely on them may gloss over deeper imprecisions. Consider that Statistics Canada noted a 42 percent increase in insomnia symptoms between 2007 and 2015. The data used to arrive at that number was largely self-reported, with contingent factors such as “insomnia identity” potentially skewing the results. Many take pride in their lack of sleep even though they “appear to be excellent snoozers under objective measurement.” They want to be seen as restless because busyness has become a status symbol in certain circles.

Too many of us today think of sleep as merely a vehicle for productivity. Huebener blames capitalism for discouraging rest — after all, it’s hard to monetize. The dominant ideology has created a broad “sleep-industrial complex.” Sleep issues are often framed as medical, a matter of individual rather than cultural responsibility. That outlook leads us to spend more on consumer products, like caffeinated drinks and luxury mattresses, and to seek out all variety of pharmaceuticals. While such measures are great news for companies like Casper and Pfizer and Starbucks, they neglect deeper structural problems. The root causes of our sleep issues go unaddressed. As Huebener puts it, “A weighted blanket can only do so much when we are kept awake by persistent overwork, deficient social safety nets, and technologies designed to be addicting.”

To understand sleep in its totality, Huebener insists, we must go beyond numbers and spreadsheets and turn to the tools of the humanities. In that spirit, he spends much of his book closely reading fictional texts that “profoundly challenge, reconstruct, affirm, and otherwise bring to critical awareness the cultural functioning of sleep.” He begins with poetry, a form that works especially well to get beneath the surface of hard data because it can “emphasize the associative nature of thought” and challenge the assumption that “description is the only way to represent experience.” After looking at verse by the likes of Don Domanski and Leonard Cohen, he undertakes a close reading of Slow War, Benjamin Hertwig’s collection from 2017. Its fifty-some poems juxtapose war in Afghanistan and civilian life in Canada to illustrate how “large-scale manipulation of sleep in the military can be internalized by individual soldiers” and, by extension, to show how similar exploitation affects all of us, every day.

Huebener then examines an impressive array of novels, including works by Angie Abdou, David Chariandy, Dionne Brand, Michael Ondaatje, Nino Ricci, Tracey Lindberg, Shani Mootoo, and Wayson Choy. Their disparate texts reflect a “tangled configuration of values and practices linked to cultures of sleep” across the country, while Indigenous depictions of rest often emphasize a “particular vitality,” with dreams functioning as forms of cultural or spiritual knowledge. For writers like Eden Robinson and Joshua Whitehead, these renderings are “positive assertions of cultural identity” that model “survivance,” as the Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor says; they actively advance Indigenous stories beyond the mere recognition of historical injustice.

Restless in Sleep Country intersperses cerebral analyses with relatable anecdotes, such as Huebener’s adventures with the popular app Calm. Marketed as a one‑stop shop for rest-related needs, it features ambient music, guided meditations, sleep tutorials, and audiobooks dulcetly narrated by Idris Elba, Keanu Reeves, LeVar Burton, Lucy Liu, and other celebrities. After signing up for a free trial — the full app costs $76.99 a year — Huebener was bombarded by email reminders and push notifications: breathe, relax, set aside ten minutes to work on your mental fitness. And don’t forget to take advantage of this discount code! The author tells an equally engaging story, though decidedly less funny, about an alarming incident in June 2013. He, his wife, and his infant son were evacuated from their apartment in Calgary’s Beltline neighbourhood after heavy rainfall flooded the Bow River. They stayed with generous friends until the crisis passed. Huebener marvels at becoming “climate evacuees in our own city” and reflects on the “climate-induced disruption of our sleep.”

He recognizes that the disruption was not felt equally. He was lucky to have somewhere to go. In fact, he was lucky that he had a dwelling to worry about losing in the first place. This reflection ties into his ruminations on how homeless Canadians get sleep. Many deal with scorn when satiating their biological need for rest because the type of slumber available to them is not seen as permissible by polite society. Sleeping in privacy: fine. Sleeping in public: not fine. Grabbing some shut‑eye on a subway or a park bench is unacceptable — and often illegal. The “criminalization of sleep,” Huebener argues, reflects the routine denigration of identity and dignity. “The conditions of sleep are not separate from waking life,” he concludes. “The concerns that characterize the waking world — love, pleasure, safety, meaningful work, precarity, loss, and grief — forever intertwine with the ways that we sleep or fail to sleep.”

While largely successful, Restless in Sleep Country has under its covers a few stylistic lumps that will make discerning readers uncomfortable. Huebener uses the terms “unequal” and “inequitable” seemingly interchangeably, for instance. The COVID‑19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns affected people’s sleep in “very unequal ways”; the same calamities, he observes elsewhere, affected their sleep in “highly inequitable ways.” Canada is a “diverse and unequal cultural world”; it’s also a “diverse and inequitable nation.” Perhaps an exhausted copy editor is to blame. If the usage is intentional, it’s a distracting conflation of avoidable injustice with the uneven but not necessarily unfair distribution of resources or opportunity. In the book’s conclusion, Huebener implores readers to adopt an “activist mindset” and, for the sake of “resisting legacies of inequity” (there’s that word again), calls on us to “both learn and unlearn.” That’s a distinction without a difference. Unlearning is just learning. The same criticism applies to his repeated use of the now tired term “lived experience.” Surely all experience is “lived.” What would constitute an “unlived” experience? Some of his more eccentric interpretations — a particular commercial for the mattress retailer Sleep Country apparently symbolizes “the perpetual labour of modern existence”— are far-fetched to the point of self-parody. To his credit, he acknowledges the fault: “This critique may be starting to verge on the comical.” But the author’s diffidence begs the question of why it’s there in the first place, even if humour sometimes “points the way to a layer of truth.”

Despite these flaws, readers can curl up with and enjoy Restless in Sleep Country. It’s anything but a crusty academic “problematizing” or “troubling” or “resignifying” of an everyday activity. It’s a thoughtful untangling of the knotty conditions surrounding our sleep: the second-best kind of pillow talk.