The sociology of sleep?

Having frittered away a considerable amount of my April on things like furniture shopping and mindless reading, I realized late last week that the semester’s end is looming, and that my paper for my Contextualization seminar is in no better shape than it was in January, when I submitted my initial proposal to join the course. And since I decided to cut short my semester and fly out in early May to San Diego and Los Angeles to do various things, it also dawned on me that I have less time than I thought to get something credible on the table. Hence, the past few days have been a frantic rush of reading and note-taking.

Though, I shouldn’t worry so much. It’s the only thing left for me to finish this term! And, I have to give the professor for the seminar some credit. He’s told us to worry less about submitting an artificially polished, finished product than developing an original, substantive idea that interests us (and, by implication, him) and that might form the basis for a viable research project that one can really ‘dig into.’ But then again, last week he talked a bit about a project that he started in 1970 that he’s only now returning to, so that may not be the best model, either! Even though I came to the class thinking it would be theoretical at a very high order of abstraction (the course description alone provoked widespread puzzlement among classmates as to its possible meaning), it’s been very down-to-earth, even surprisingly earthy in a good sort of way.

Robot programmed to move according to eye movements during REM sleep

For my own part, I’ve been writing on the sociology of sleep, which - even though it has ostensibly little to do with my field, the sociology of education - has been marvelously fascinating. Part of my interest is prompted in all of these ongoing developments in sleep science, sleep research, and the commercial ’sleep industry’ (the ’sleep industrial complex,’ as a recent NYT article put it). Part of it is personal - I am, quite frankly, a terrible sleeper (although this is in turn a terrible reason to research something), so reading all of this stuff is a bit self-indulgent. But it’s interesting because there’s a paucity of theoretical or systematic work in the sociology of sleep (though that may be changing: Simon Williams’ recent Sleep and Society may be an indication), even though of course there’s more than can be read on dream analysis and interpretation as well as the neurochemistry and physiological aspects of sleep. But given my focus on sleep as a kind of context, some of the more fruitful readings that I’ve been filtering through have been from the humanities - including Roger Ekirch’s history At Day’s Close and Eluned Summers-Bremner’s Insomnia: A Cultural History. The question I’ve been struggling with is: whenever we talk about sleep it soon becomes a discussion about something else - privacy, intimacy, family, work, health, and so on. There are much more established literatures in all of these domains, in which sleep makes a ‘guest appearance,’ so to speak. What would be the basis, if any, for an independent sociology of sleep, if that even makes sense at all?