PAH 160D5 - Bedtime: Exploring the Cultures and Practices of Sleep

The need for sleep is ubiquitous and part of everyday existence. Like many things that are part of our routine, however, we rarely take time to consider sleep critically: Why do we sleep? Is sleep different from culture to culture? In what ways is sleep made valuable (or not)? And what's with dreaming? These and many other questions are at the heart of this course. Over the course of the semester, we will probe modern and historical humanities archives for artifacts related to sleep. By examining the ways human beings have come to represent sleep through a wide variety of cultural practices (e.g., rituals, popular culture, art, etc.), we will explore the connections between sleep and creativity, the role sleep plays in the formation and maintenance of social and cultural institutions, and sleep's changing relationship to the human condition generally. The goal, ultimately, is to imagine what sleep's future holds.