Paradoxical Sleep and Flights of Imagination: Sleep Rock Thy Brain and the Performance of Research

Sleep Rock Thy Brain is a triptych of plays commissioned for the 2013 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, inspired by theatrical flying technology and the neuroscience of sleep, and written by Rinne Groff, Lucas Hnath and Anne Washburn. It involved collaboration between Actors Theatre, the University of Louisville, and ZFX Flying Effects across scientific, artistic and technical disciplines. This article argues that the process served as performance-based research that supplements sleep science with an experiential representation of the situated somatic, emotional and paradoxical elements of scientific research, sleep and dreaming.