Includes bibliographical references (pages 163-177) and index

How to sleep -- Without thinking -- Dormant -- Alarm -- I don't want to be awake -- The domestic architecture of the skull -- Heroes of sleep -- Too much dream -- Imperatives of the importance of diet -- Mediating -- Sleep acts -- Repulsive sleep -- Supination or pronation? -- Ingredients of sleep -- Sleep glitches -- Body parts -- Chemistry sex -- Be unconscious -- The luxuriance of dissolving -- Free-running -- Sleep in love -- Vulnerable -- Hyperpassivity -- The eye busy unseeing -- How to thrive biologically -- Repetition -- Architecture -- Laws governing sleep -- Film sleep -- The man controls the day. But we will control the night -- Headless brim -- At the edge of sex -- No tools left in this vehicle overnight -- Unswept benches -- Trains and buses -- The smell of sleep -- The child's bed -- Brain as labourer -- Melnikov's Promethean sleepers -- Sleep debt -- Sleep on the road -- Terraforming -- Nocturne -- Dozy-looking -- Licked surface -- Waking up -- Equipment -- Sleep upright in order to avoid death -- Go to Guildhall Museum and look at the clocks -- Animal sleep -- Wrap up warm

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. Mediations 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