Americans spend billions of dollars every year on drugs,
therapy, and other remedies trying to get a good night's sleep.
Anxieties about not getting enough sleep and the impact of
sleeplessness on productivity, health, and happiness pervade
medical opinion, the workplace, and popular culture. In "The
Slumbering Masses," Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer addresses the phenomenon
of sleep and sleeplessness in the United States, tracing the
influence of medicine and industrial capitalism on the sleeping
habits of Americans from the nineteenth century to the present.
Before the introduction of factory shift work, Americans enjoyed
a range of sleeping practices, most commonly two nightly periods of
rest supplemented by daytime naps. The new sleeping regimen--eight
uninterrupted hours of sleep at night--led to the pathologization
of other ways of sleeping. Arguing that the current model of sleep
is rooted not in biology but in industrial capitalism's relentless
need for productivity, "The Slumbering Masses" examines so-called
Z-drugs that promote sleep, the use of both legal and illicit
stimulants to combat sleepiness, and the contemporary politics of
time. Wolf-Meyer concludes by exploring the extremes of sleep, from
cases of perpetual sleeplessness and the use of the sleepwalking
defense in criminal courts to military experiments with ultra-short
periods of sleep.
Drawing on untapped archival sources and long-term ethnographic
research with people who both experience and treat sleep
abnormalities, Wolf-Meyer analyzes and sharply critiques how sleep
and its supposed disorders are understood and treated. By
recognizing the variety and limits of sleep, he contends, we can
establish more flexible expectations about sleep and, ultimately,
subvert the damage of sleep pathology and industrial control on our
lives.
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