Guest Blog: Restless in Sleep Country by Paul Huebener

In Restless in Sleep Country, Paul Huebener challenges the conventional view of sleep as a purely personal or biological matter. Instead, he examines it through a cultural lens, revealing how sleep is shaped by societal forces like politics, power, and inequity. By exploring sleep in Canadian and Indigenous contexts, he demonstrates the cultural significance of this seemingly private act.

In the guest blog below, Huebener gives us an introduction to his book, and looks at the figure of sleep in Suzette Mayr’s 2022 Giller Prize-Winning The Sleeping Car Porter.

Troubles with sleep have become a source of seemingly endless public obsession and worry. Up to half of the population in Canada reports trouble sleeping, and the global sleep aid industry has been valued in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. But while media reports and self-help articles tend to portray sleep as a matter of personal habits or as a problem to be solved by consumer products, recognizing sleep as a cultural issue allows us to perceive the forms of power tied up with it. My book Restless in Sleep Country is about learning to see sleep as a place where cultural values take shape.

Think of your most recent sleep, whether it was a full night of slumber, a fitful episode of restlessness, or a daytime sleep after working the night shift. Instead of thinking about that sleep only as a matter of personal experience, how might you trace the values of your cultural world by considering the conditions of your slumber and the slumbers of others? When we think about this kind of question, we’re engaging in critical sleep studies. Critical sleep studies is an emerging field that challenges us to reexamine how we conceive of sleep and how we might confront the cultural forces through which our inequitable encounters with sleep take shape. Scholars such as Sara Arber, Benjamin Reiss, Hilary Hinds, and Simon J. Williams have found that sleep is heavily infused with politics and inequities. Cultural visions of sleep not only reflect diverse approaches to the practice of sleeping; they can also reflect, and shape, competing forms of value and power such as those associated with gender, the culture of overwork, and uneven social acceleration.

The particular focus of Restless in Sleep Country has to do with cultures of sleep in Canada, as little work has previously been done to understand how sleep operates as a contested figure within this nation. Specifically, I argue that representations of sleep in Canadian texts and Indigenous texts can in different ways profoundly challenge, reconstruct, affirm, and otherwise bring to critical awareness the cultural functioning of sleep and its associated configurations of power and thought. Meanwhile, the skills of critical discernment that emerge through this work will be useful not only in Canada but also in all places where sleep and culture interact. We might say that every narrative that touches on sleep can be understood as a sleep socialization story. Every news article, phone app, or poem that engages with slumber tries, for better or worse, to indoctrinate us into a particular vision of sleep. Lying down and closing our eyes is an act that carries surprisingly high stakes, and we must learn to read sleep with thoughtful attention and care.

For example, bedding supply retailer Sleep Country Canada has used advertising taglines such as “Sleep is the fuel that powers your day,” emphasizing the idea that the purpose of sleep is to enable daytime productivity. Using the fuel metaphor and a charging battery metaphor to convey the notion of abundant energy, these ads show people not enjoying a restful sleep but waking up and stretching their freshly charged bodies. Sleep, much like electricity or gasoline, is an energy resource to be accumulated and spent in the service of productive activity. By shifting the focus from the sleeping body to the powered-up body, these ads show that Sleep Country is in the business of selling wakefulness. Yes, when you arrive in Sleep Country, you will have a good sleep, but more importantly you will then leave sleep behind with energy to burn. This vision of sleep raises questions about who and what sleep is for. Is sleep something we do to increase our value within the economic system? To better achieve our personal life goals? To feel more alert? Or does sleep have intrinsic value regardless of any notions of performance and productivity? The question of why we go to sleep each night is more profound than it may appear, being closely tied to the question of what it means to lead a good life.

1.7 Sleep Country Canada, “To Power Your Day … Start with a Good Night,” 2020.

1.8 Sleep Country Canada, “Sleep Is the Fuel That Powers Your Day,” 2020.

Alternatively, consider a literary text such as Suzette Mayr’s novel The Sleeping Car Porter, which won the 2022 Giller Prize. While much of the story takes place in a sleeping car – a train car in which beds are provided for passengers on a long trip – the figure of sleep in this story is more than a backdrop or even a theme. The novel develops sleep as a marker of privilege, a form of currency, and even a volatile, dangerous character, rejecting simplistic notions of sleep as a merely individual activity. The protagonist, Baxter, endures agonizing sleep deprivation while caring for passengers around the clock during an eighty-hour shift. While the wealthy white passengers sleep in their berths, Baxter labours through the night, ensuring the passengers’ comfort, shining their shoes, and maintaining the intensive hospitality of the sleeping car. Baxter spends the nighttime hours not sleeping but “tripping over pillows and pyjamas,” an image that captures the idea that, for Baxter, the supposed infrastructure of sleep is a hazard that only emphasizes his lack of rest. Images of beds, mattresses, blankets, and other sleep accessories in this novel clarify the harsh power dynamics of his world. For Baxter and the other Black porters, the accoutrements of sleep do not reflect relaxation and restful slumber; they reflect painful sleep deprivation and the endless demands of exhausting work. In its nuanced treatment of these issues, The Sleeping Car Porter teaches a critical literacy of sleep.

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr, Coach House Books, 2022

Slumber is more than a matter of replenishment and personal habits; it is a window into how society treats people, often in connection with issues of poverty, employment, gender, and race. A key message of Restless in Sleep Country is that if we want to understand the seemingly innocent and private practice of slumber as a site of cultural meaning and power, we need to develop a critical literacy of sleep and imagination. We need to be careful readers of the sleep socialization stories that surround us all.

Paul Huebener is a professor of English at Athabasca University. His previous book, Nature’s Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis, was shortlisted for the Alanna Bondar Prize for the Environmental Humanities and other awards.