The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life

Conclusion: The Futures of Sleep

243 Conclusion .................. The Futures of Sleep Early in the twenty-first century, sleep captures Americans ’ imaginations, with stories often published by Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times Magazine and aired by Dateline NBC. This focus is the result of sustained interest on the part of the nonprofit National Sleep Foundation, medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, and various segments of American society who, each in particular ways, have attempted to make sleep disorders more apparent to the American public. In doing this, they have also attempted to make the social more biological in its foundations and to transform the American public into a sleeping public as well as an alert one. They have worked to make the slumbering masses something real, a standard that guides our everyday lives. Often embedded in these popular discussions of sleep are references to a conjectured end of sleep, the dream of a future in which sleep will be a social luxury and not a biological necessity. Or, rather, where sleep and wakefulness can be controlled through simple pharmaceutical means, with sleep-inducing Lunesta for dinner and alertness-promoting Provigil for breakfast, with wakefulness and sleepiness managed as desires rather than acting as impulses that control the social lives of sleepers . This model of society supplants normal patterns of human sleep with pathological or fantastic forms; it replaces what sleep Americans do get with the patterns emblematized by narcoleptics and supersoldiers. In both cases, normal human sleep is replaced with the science fictional or the scientific as fictional. Conclusion 244 In anticipation of this future, in 1996, at the very moment when interest in sleep was intensifying as a result of the Z-drugs, Wired published a brief article titled “The Future of Sleep,” in which the article’s author asked a group of sleep professionals, including a medical clinician, a medical researcher, and two experts on lucid dreaming, about their predictions for the future of sleep. Drawing on the knowledge of those assembled, Wired asked about the specific future of treatment for insomnia , sleep apnea, and snoring, as well as technology to induce dreaming; no consensus was reached among the experts for the possible future of these concerns. What did achieve consensus was the prediction for the possible total elimination of sleep, which all agreed was “unlikely.” Now in the early decades of the 2000s, looking back at this Wired article as a historical artifact, we still have no “real cure for snoring and apnea,” which are different conditions, though both are treated as chronic, and the latter requires nightly prosthetics in the form of CPAP and BiPAP machines; electronic dream inducers are nonexistent; the very idea of an “effective nonaddictive sleeping pill” is debatable, especially as pharmaceutical companies have moved away from the language of addiction to that of “habit formation”; and, moreover, Americans are still sleeping, evidencing the “unlikely” elimination of sleep. But the very idea of the end of human sleep is a persistent and popular one, and its possibility acts as a fantasy of scientific progress—of what science could bring into being—for the practice of sleep science and the American public, creating a subtle pressure on cultural conceptions of what sleep is, how it evolved, and what it can become. In this chapter, I put this recurrent fantasy into dialogue with the lived realities of disordered sleepers. What this allows me to do is to formulate a social possibility, what I call multibiologism, a cultural and medical acceptance of nonpathological variation within species, which recognizes both society and biology as mutable within limits. What I am interested in here is the embodied limits of the elimination of sleep— the defiance of bodies to particular technoscientific futures—as they are produced in the discursive practices of medical practitioners and in scientific literature and as they are lived by individuals. I do not intend any romanticism of human biology as it resists these futures; rather, my appeal to material limits of bodies grows out of my sympathy with scientists and with disordered sleepers. My claims are based in the clinic, 245 Conclusion not the laboratory or the science fictional; rather than seeing the clinic as solely the site of disciplining and controlling bodies, I want to pull from it a bioethical model that is more ethical than bioethics is currently conceived and practiced. If anything, then, my recourse to human...