The Nightmarish Vision of Life Without Sleep

We spend one-third of our lives asleep. This biological fact is something that, with time and technology, is less and less taken for granted. In many science fiction stories, the future of sleep is cozy and idyllic — an elevated state living within a dream world. In others, sleep is more of an evolutionary shackle that gets in the way of productivity. The latter focuses on questions that haunt anyone who feels there are not enough hours in the day. What if we didn’t have to sleep? What if sleep were optimized in a way that overrode human biology?

In the 2002 James Bond movie, Die Another Day, one dark answer appears from the villain of the film, billionaire mogul Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens). Graves sleeps in a pod for just minutes out of the day in order to mitigate the side effects of a bizarre gene resequencing procedure. But, because Graves is an evil Bond villain, he tries to make his not-sleeping into a productivity-centered superpower. “One of the virtues of never sleeping, Mr. Bond. I have to live my dreams,” he says glibly. “Besides, plenty of time to sleep when you're dead.”

Automatically, our minds recoil. Graves is evil because he has an evil space laser and doesn’t fight fair with swords or said lasers, but the thing that subconsciously makes him wicked is that he doesn’t sleep. The connection between ultra-capitalism and sleep might not be limited to silly Bond villains. If science fiction is any guide, that one-third of our lives could either be extremely shortened or lengthened, depending on our future-tense employer.

“Sleep subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism,” wrote Jonathan Crary in his 2013 book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. This notion was echoed by that famous altruistic Time Lord, the (12th) Doctor (Peter Capaldi), in the 2015 Doctor Who episode “Sleep No More,” in which he says: “Sleep is essential to every sentient being in the universe, but to humans, greedy, filthy, stupid humans, it's an inconvenience.”

In “Sleep No More,” a far-future technology called Morpheus puts workers into sleep chambers, which “concentrates the entire nocturnal experience into one 5-minute burst.” The idea here is obvious: It forces employees to work around the clock, since their sleep has now been taken care of, supposedly, from a biological point of view. In this Doctor Who adventure, the side effect is quite literally monstrous. Creatures made of leftover sleep dust are sired, which serve as an on-the-nose consequence of this biological hacking, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster cautionary tale, making it clear that tampering with the natural circadian rhythm of humanity could result in our own demise. The message is urgent: Slow down, don’t work too much, and don’t use tech shortcuts to catch up on sleep. While the threat of human-sized sleep monsters may not seem literal, the analogy to everyone’s own sleep patterns, relative to our work schedules, is damning.

Six years ago, as the lockdowns of 2020 started to take effect, and certain kinds of workers stopped going into the office and clocked in from home, it seemed, for a moment, the world was forced to notice just how much sleep everyone was missing. When remote workers eliminated their commuting times, suddenly, they could, in theory, get more sleep. And yet, as Madeleine Pollard points out in her 2024 essay for Byline, “The Rise of Sleep Capitalism,” even this stay-at-home, chilled-out vibe quickly morphed into a kind of profit-oriented hustle. “With this increased focus on rest came the relentless, near-competitive pursuit of the perfect night’s sleep,” she points out. From TikTok trends like “sleepmaxxing” to “homeopathic sleep supplements” sold at $72 a packet to $300 sleep trackers that give you a nightly “sleep score.”

The old idiom “the early bird gets the worm” would be the easiest culprit here, but what that expression failed to account for was “the early bird might be aided by technology that humans don’t need.” If you believe that the Doctor Who Morpheus chambers are far-fetched, what of the very real hyperbaric sleep chamber you could have delivered to your home right now, for $3,060?

The Cost of a Good Night’s Sleep

Now, this isn’t to say one shouldn’t spend money on stuff that can aid sleep. If anything, people should prioritize sleep and spending cash on things that help you sleep is often money well spent. The Calm App is $16.99 a month, or, if you want, $499 for your entire life, and the calming routine it adds to your life will most likely extend it. A quality sleep mask will put you back about $30, and gloriously turn down the unwanted stimuli coming from your neighbor’s porch. Wired’s top pick mattress will cost you a bit less than $2,000, but with a lifetime warranty that’s a worthy investment for making one-third of your life more comfortable.

The key difference between a dystopic sci-fi sleep future and casual sleep consumerism hinges on the moment when the person stops thinking of their own sleep as something they can control. And, it’s not always about shortening sleep or creating a kind of optimal sleepmaxxing situation. In the Alien franchise, one’s sleep is extended, unnaturally, for decades, in order for employees of Weyland-Yutani to perform various tasks in deep space. In Alien: Earth, the cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay) misses his daughter’s entire life and tragic demise while sleeping. Ditto, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien and Aliens.

Again, like Doctor Who, there’s a literal, physical monster waiting to destroy you. After all, who ever heard of the xenomorph from Alien taking a quick nap? Everything about those monsters is, in a sense, a metaphor for the sleepless, round-the-clock worker. Ash (Ian Holm) calls the xenomorph the “perfect organism,” which is interesting because, like the androids of the Alien franchise, the xenomorph requires very little time to grow up, and apparently, never sleeps.

Today, the biggest barrier to sleep is, without question, our screens. Or, more accurately, the algorithms that push the content to those screens, big and small. Now, this late night-scrolling, streaming, and browsing is, in many ways, a choice. You can put down your phone, as a small but vocal movement of people are doing. But if you sacrifice sleep for entertainment, yours was more of a Sophie’s choice than you might realize.

As Kaitlyn Regehr, author of Smartphone Nation, notes, “we aren’t the consumers of media, we are the product.” Specifically, our attentions are the product, enticed and kept with algorithms and sold to advertisers whose subtle ads influence us as we “enjoy” our feeds — oh, and sacrifice our sleep. It brings to mind A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick’s story about addicts who, at the depth of their addiction are taken to farms where they help to grow the very substance that addled their brains.

Similarly, in William Gibson’s famous cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, the lead hacker character, Case, is constantly sleep-deprived, which can be partially blamed on his drug and drinking habits, but also on the fact that he dreams of cyberspace, of being jacked in to a digital world, which he craves more than real life. He, like so many of us, is drawn to swim in the sleepless algorithm which has no respect for biological needs or mental well-being.

In Gibson’s related novel, set in the same universe, Count Zero, we learn that some infants are even born with digital narratives running through their minds, because their mothers are addicted to being jacked-into dream-like media, the equivalent of streaming TV shows directly into your brain. When Case or other characters sleep in Neuromancer, the names of the temporary places where one can crash are telling: these tiny sleep pods are called coffins.

Dropping Out and Sleeping In

A blowback to the sleepless desires of capitalism is clearly afoot. Take the popularity of The Anxious Generation, whose author Jonathan Haidt calls for us to put down our phones and, specifically, keep them out of the bedroom. Then there’s the rise of mindfulness and transcendental meditation. And of course the stubborn persistence of remote work remains with us, years later, which a study found saves 72 minutes per day and leads to earlier bedtimes.

In countless books, the goal of quitting a — usually dystopic — job often ends, fittingly, in dream sequences. Some are dreams of that which could never be reached in reality — as in the dark endings of Brazil and 1984. A more hopeful (and dream-like) example can be found in The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami’s recent reimagining of his own Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, in which the main character quits his job to pursue love and to quite literally work on, and in, his dreams (this is a gross simplification, as a Murakami plot is nearly always impossible to summarize).

Clearly, if our sci-fi dreams are telling us anything about the current state of human sanity, the stories about sleep are overwhelmingly urging us to reconsider how much we commodify that one-third of our lives. Because if we turn sleep into one more thing on our never-ending checklist, then we risk losing the basic meaning of our lives. We lose our capacity to dream.