We spend around one-third of our lives asleep. For centuries sleep was perceived as a deeply private and mysterious state of unconsciousness, beyond scientific explanation, often associated with transcendence, vulnerability, eroticism, and death. As someone who easily falls asleep in public spaces—on trams, in taxis, or even at the hairdresser’s—I am interested in the complex relationship between the sleeper, their environment, and the observer. When we become sleepers our vigilance decreases and we become vulnerable and dependent on our direct surroundings. How does the act of sleeping in public alter our perception of safety, agency, and exposure?

This research examines the portrayal and cultural significance of sleep throughout history from a Western perspective, drawing from various sources, including artistic depictions—Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, psychological and neurological insights from Rahul Jandial and Matthew Walker, and evolutionary perspectives on vulnerability during sleep from Lawrence Wichlinski and Benjamin Reiss. Additionally, I explore contemporary sleep-related phenomena, such as “sleep streaming”, performative sleep in art by Sofie Calle and Tilda Swinton, and social trends like sleepmaxxing. By analyzing these representations, this study seeks to understand how sleep functions not only as a biological necessity but also as a performative and cultural act shaped by historical and societal contexts.

You’re sitting on a train after a long day of travel. Your eyes start closing, your hand slowly relaxes from how tight you’ve held your phone. Suddenly, your leg shakes and your whole body straightens up in seconds. You feel slightly embarrassed. Did I touch anyone during my nap? Did my mouth open and I snored? You quickly look around, straighten up even more, organize your things, and start scrolling your phone to keep your mind awake. But the dreams keep fighting their way back. Do you resist your overwhelming need for sleep or let it happen?

You give in, and your whole body follows. Your legs stretch forward, awkwardly close to the passenger sitting in front, and your head leans backward letting your neck relax. While still hearing the voices of kids playing cards on seats behind you and a crackling announcement of the conductor in the background you start seeing images and shapes. They keep changing and merging, your brain makes a story from the noises of your surroundings. You just entered the state of liminal dreaming, your mind is still present but already started drifting away. Just moments away you are gone, the voices go silent, the images calm down and you’re unapologetically sleeping on the train.

Congrats. Better keep your belongings close. Just in case.

As a person who can easily fall asleep in any given moment and place, I’ve been interested in the relationship between the sleeper and its environment. It’s usual for me to nap on the hairdresser’s chair, massage bed, or in the tram, five min before my stop. I’ve been experiencing motion sickness my whole life, and sleep has always been an easy remedy for it. It relaxes your body and disconnects you from any pain or discomfort you might be experiencing. Sleeping in the car next to a partner or family member is a safe nap, a moment of gathering energy before reaching the destination. A bus, plane, or train, has the same effect on me as a car but doesn’t come with the same privacy and comfort. It swings and moves making it irresistible for me to stay awake. As someone who doesn’t hesitate before napping in public, I’m going to investigate the other side, how the environment experiences the person who sleeps in it.

We become the sleeper, in the moment when we transition between wakefulness to sleep. During N1, the first non-rem stage of sleep, the body becomes paralyzed. Our organism releases neurotransmitters that switch off our motor function, allowing us to sleep safely without acting out our dreams. Next, the Executive Network turns off. As Jandial wrote, it allows us to ignore normal rules of time, space, and reason. ²

Our body limits our responsiveness and vigilance, causing us to become exposed to outside predators and threats of the nighttime. Although nowadays we are mostly safe from unsheltered sleep and intruders, awaiting our moment of inattention, we are still in an exposed position when asleep. When resting, especially in public, we rely on our surroundings and social trust. Without such trust, we would fall into the loop of anxiety-induced insomnia, when a fear of losing the ability to remain vigilant enables us to rest, which especially concerns patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. ³

The phrase ‘losing consciousness’, implies that we lose the ability to stay present, it happens involuntarily. We could argue it doesn’t concern sleep, as we can mostly control when our body falls into it. We have access to many ways of supporting our wakefulness. Caffeine, energy drinks, or even blue light on our laptops allow us to work late hours. But in a controlled state of falling asleep, there is still a transitional moment, a liminal space between awake and sleep when this disconnection between our mind and reality happens. This phenomenon was named hypnagogia, from Greek words ύπνος (‘hypnos’), meaning ‘sleep’, and αγωγός (‘agōgos’), meaning ‘conductor’ or ‘leader’, as well as the corresponding hypnopompic state originating from the Greek word ‘pompos’, meaning ‘sender’ describing the transition from sleep to wakefulness. ⁴ The moment when you become the sleeper, your mind not being occupied by images, and digital content has a space to unlock its visual madness. This first stage of falling asleep, lasting approximately one to seven minutes, has been speculated to be one of the key elements to unleashing our creativity. Salvador Dali, being aware of hypnagogic hallucinations, invented a technique that helped him create his surrealistic paintings. He would sleep with a key in his hand and a metal plate on the floor, when falling asleep key would slip from his fingers hitting the metal, resulting in him waking up. The technique allowed him to capture the dreams of the N1 stage and immediately translate them into paper. ⁵ As Jandial writes in This is Why You Dream, researchers at the Paris Brain Institute put Dali’s experiment to the test. They gave participants a puzzle, those who didn’t manage to solve it, got a twenty-minute break and an instruction to try falling asleep with a key in their hand. They discovered that a single minute of sleep onset resulted in an insight. The participants who entered the sleep were almost three times as likely to solve the puzzle as those who remained awake. ⁶

By balancing on the sleep-entry moment we access a different state of consciousness, where our mind operates outside of logic and structured reasoning. It’s a form of thinking inaccessible to us when we’re awake, and completely detached from the constraints of rationality and social rules. As a result, it can also become a moment when our mind confronts us with our fears and unresolved thoughts. That’s why hypnagogia might be associated with sleep paralysis; a state in which the body entering sleep is still and immobile, while its semi-conscious mind produces vivid and terrifying hallucinations. While we lose control over our consciousness and body, it’s the moment when our mind can think, create, and speculate freely not distracted by technology and restrained by rules of reality.

During COVID-19 most of us felt deprived of intimacy and connection due to forced isolation and rigorous restrictions. Zoom and Skype calls became the main source of social interaction and many people found comfort in falling asleep together on video calls. This intimate act became a scheduled activity. People crave to see their partner in a vulnerable state of relaxation and to feel that someone is keeping an eye on them too. This need to observe our loved ones when asleep originates from our evolutionary past when vigilance during vulnerable sleeping hours was crucial for survival. ⁷

⊕ Fig. 1. Master of Jean Mansel (1430-1450), The innkeeper's family and two friends sleep in a bedroom; the innkeeper argues with his wife. In Western culture, we perceive sleep as a deeply private state. We sleep in separate rooms, and if that’s not possible - beds. It’s recommended to separate children from parents during the night as soon as possible, to ensure their proper development.⁸ But it’s a relatively new approach. Sleep was not always associated with privacy, until the mid-19th Century it was communal. People shared a bed with their relatives, friends, co-workers, or even strangers. The bed-sharing provided the feeling of security and warmth and gave space to share thoughts, and tales and discuss dreams. Seeping together didn’t have the same sexual connotations as today, royals and high-ranked people who didn’t suffer from a shortage of rooms and beds still had bed-mates. Bed-sharing started to quickly decrease in the mid-19th Century. As Gorvett writes ‘It all began with an influential American physician. William Whitty Hall, who had strong opinions on many subjects, became a passionate advocate of the idea that communal sleep was not only unwise – but ‘unnatural and degenerative’.’(Gorvett, 2024). ⁹

⊕ Fig. 2. The Sleeping Lady. c.3,000 BCE. National Museum of Valetta, Malta. ⊕ Fig. 3. Sleeping Venus. By Giorgione, 1510. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

In art, sleep is shown much more individualistic than history would suggest. The motif of the sleeper always held deep religious, erotic, or moralistic meaning, and was rarely represented in a natural and documentary way. That’s why we don’t find many images of people sleeping communally, but represented sleepers are usually exposed and isolated. One of the oldest examples of the sleeping figure is a Neolithic clay sculpture called The Sleeping Lady (c.3,000 BCE) found in Malta. ¹⁰

She is lying on her side, with a skirt covering her lower body. The figurine’s pose becomes a recurrent motif in Renaissance and Baroque paintings, particularly mythological representations of Venus, Danae, or Ariadne. Giorgione’s painting Sleeping Venus (1510), ¹¹ is one of the most recognizable representations of the sleeping figure from that period. She is portrayed as peacefully resting, absorbed in a world beyond consciousness, and completely exposed to the viewer, shown as powerless and available.

She is not aware that someone is observing her, she’s not looking at the viewer, ignoring or hiding. Sleep is often associated with eroticism as well as innocence, it’s also viewed as parallel to death. Ancients represented sleepers in tombs and burial places, as sleep was believed to be a ‘temporary death’ and death was believed to be an ‘eternal sleep’. Historical tendencies in painting sleeping women might suggest that women are most desirable when inanimate. Kryger writes in The Atlas ‘A sleeping woman takes on the posture of death but is very much alive. She is conscious but not cognizant. She lies physically in reality, but her thoughts run in fantasy. Sleep delights, frightens, regenerates, and may even lead to fatigue. It can overpower like a heavy, irrepressible fog or elude us like the sweet thrills of happiness.’ ¹² Artists who wanted to portray the female body often reached for the motif of the dead or sleeping women. They used them as mannequins where their thoughts and feelings were disregarded and pushed into the background. Their environment tells a story, but they exist in it unaware of what’s happening. Sleep is less macabre than death but the line separating them is very thin. We can never be sure if the sleeper in the image is alive.

In Romanticism, painters remained fascinated by the sleepers but managed to enrich them by representing their unconscious mind. In the painting The Nightmare (1781) by Hendry Fuseli, a young woman lays on her side, her arms are open, exposing her chest. Her pose reminds Renaissance representations, but the image is no longer peaceful, the figure of the incubus sits heavily on her stomach, the black horse peaks from the dark curtains, and her arms are not relaxed from spiritual or erotic ecstasy, but from fear and vulnerability. Fuseli introduces the darker and demonic side of the dreaming mind. The incubus is often interpreted as a depiction of ‘sleep paralysis’, that threatens the mind and enables movement of the body. The woman in the painting is fully dressed, which signifies that the depiction of the sleeper holds now deeper meaning than just showing the beauty of the female body.

⊕ Fig. 4. The Nightmare. By Henry Fuseli, 1781. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan.

The motif of the sleeping mind became widely explored in the 20^th Century, with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) by Sigmund Freud. ¹³ Many surrealist painters started looking for links between dreams and creativity. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Salvador Dali experimented with a hypnagogic state, and the painting Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944) was a direct result of it. The woman in the image seems to be represented similarly to the Renaissance depictions of the sleepers. Yet, she is not sleeping on the bed but in a fantastic world surrounded by her dreams. Dali, like Fuseli, represents the mind together with the body of the sleeper.

⊕ Fig. 5. Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. By Salvador Dalí, 1944. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

In those depictions, we observe a subjective interpretation of the sleeping body. With the development of video and photography artists could take on the role of the documentarians. It allowed them to record and capture moments of everyday life, in an almost objective way.

One of the first films of Andy Warhol, created as an ‘ani-film’, was over five-hour-long footage of John Giorno, Warhol’s lover at the time, sleeping. ¹⁴ He translates the passive state of Giorno’s sleep into an active observation and documentation. As mothers watch their newborns sleeping, partners look at their loved ones. We, viewers, come as strangers and are put in the uncomfortable situation of active observation of someone in an intimate and private moment of rest.

⊕ Fig. 6. Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno | Andy Warhol: SLEEP AND OTHER WORKS, installation view. Photo by Daniel Perez.

Sofie Calle in her work The Sleepers (1979) puts herself in a position similar to us, viewers in Andy Warhol’s movie. She invites her friends, acquaintances, and strangers to spend a night in her bed, among them 27 agree with the experiment. Calle described her work as ‘I asked people to give me eight hours of their sleep. To come and sleep in my bed…I asked a few questions. I took photographs every hour. I watched my guests sleep.’ ¹⁵

⊕ Fig. 7. The Sleepers. By Sophie Calle, 1953.

She photographed them awake and asleep and secretly recorded their intimate conversations behind closed doors. The next day she served them a meal and asked about their experience, their interpretation of the act of sleeping in her bed, their habits, beliefs, and dreams. During the research, guests and artists formed an intimate bond, Calle observed them asleep when they occupied her most private space, her bed. She captions photographs with fragments of conversations, which gives the viewer a look inside the mind of the portrayed person. This artwork examines sleepers in a consensual and collaborative way that requires trust from both sides.

When we compare Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus with Calle’s The Sleepers we see a clear difference in representation. Giorgione sees his model as beautiful and desirable, he duplicates the curves of her body in the landscape creating a harmonious composition. Venus holds her right arm under the head and uses her left hand to cover the genitals. She’s lying outside, but her body is not covered by anything. The state of sleep in this painting serves as an opportunity for the viewer to stare at the naked female body, without the feeling of being observed back. In The Sleepers Calle shifts the focus from an idealized, isolated figure to an intimate, collective moment. Rather than presenting a singular figure, solely for the viewer’s gaze, she investigates a quiet nature of sleep—a state where personal barriers fall away.

In 1995 Tilda Swinton spent seven days motionless in a glass vitrine in the Serpentine Gallery in London. She came there every day and slept for eight hours. As Miranda Whall writes ‘She lay still for viewers of the gallery to witness her, stare at her, examine her, laugh at her, wonder, question, dismiss, and leave’ (Hall, 2017). ¹⁶ She was laying on a white mattress and white pillow, wearing sneakers, long pants, and a shirt. Swinton created an environment to explore the relationship between the artist, who becomes an artwork, and the spectator. The artist seems unconscious, which allows viewers to come much closer than they would normally. What purpose does the glass wall serve? Does Swinton not trust the visitors and feels the need to separate and protect herself? Does the glass act as a symbolic barrier between performance and reality, emphasizing the artificiality of the spectacle? The installation invited viewers to confront their own complicity in voyeurism—was their presence passive, or did their gaze turn the sleeping artist into an object of entertainment?

⊕ Fig. 8. The Maybe. By Tilda Swinton, 1995.

In the early 2000s, the reality TV series Big Brother gained a lot of attention and became one of the world’s most-watched shows. ¹⁷ It was groundbreaking, never before viewers could watch regular people living their lives on television under constant surveillance. It gave people a close look into all aspects of participant’s reality and everyday activities, which we usually do alone. What surprised the producers, was the popularity of recording when participants were asleep. As Tilda Swinton in The Maybe separated herself by glass vitrine, people watched the lives of others through a glass screen 24/7. Now, we witness people oversharing intimate details and parts of their lives for engagement online every single day. It became so normalized, that we’re no longer surprised when people find new, strange ways to make money by selling their privacy through social media. During COVID-19 many influencers started streaming themselves while sleeping. It was supposed to make viewers feel less alone and isolated, as well as help them with insomnia. When streamers realized how much engagement it created, some of them decided to let viewers disturb and control their sleep. One of the most popular Twitch streamers, Cosplayer Amouranth, set up a bell, that rang whenever new 20 people subscribed to her channel. ¹⁸

⊕ Fig. 9. Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa.

It postponed the alarm an hour, allowing her to sleep longer. She also revealed that more people watch her when she sleeps, than when she’s awake, and that number of viewers increase significantly when it’s close to her waking time. Some streamers go way further, giving people multiple options to disrupt them. For example, StanleyMov allows his viewers who pay $95, to give him an electric shock through a bracelet he wears, $12 to make his lights flicker or $24 to blind him with a very bright light. ¹⁹ Here, the interaction between performer and audience has evolved into something more transactional, where participation is not just encouraged but monetized, blurring the line between engagement and exploitation. The body, once a site of rest, is now a performative subject to control—raising broader concerns about surveillance and the commodification of personal space.

In 2006, during The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus, Chu Yun put a bed in the middle of the gallery space. During the exhibition, a rotating group of paid volunteers slept in the bed after ingesting sleeping aids. The participants consisted of women aged 18 to 40 who became living sculptures for a few hours. Yun with her work This is XX reflects upon the representation of the female body in art and the motif of the sleeper. Participants are only able to sleep due to pills, suggesting that they are not in a state of relaxation and rest, but vulnerability and withdrawal. Just like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, whose unconscious states were imposed upon them by external forces—a cursed spindle and a poisoned apple—the women in This is XX become passive subjects due to sleeping aids. The stillness of the sleepers recalls a long tradition of idealized, immobile women in visual culture—from classical reclining nudes to contemporary advertising. Unlike Swinton, who made a deliberate decision to sleep as an artistic statement, Yun’s piece emphasizes the absence of choice.

⊕ Fig. 10. This is XX. By Chu Yun, 2006.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, when we fall asleep our muscles become paralyzed and the responsivity of our senses lowers. We no longer observe, actively listen to our environment, or are annoyed by the feel of the itchy duvet. Our alertness decreases, and it might seem we become disconnected from reality, but evolution wouldn’t allow it. We need to keep vigilance on guard in case of fire or sudden intruders. From all the stimuli, sounds and smells were proven to be the most successful in entering our dreamscapes. Robert Rich, an ambient musician and composer used this knowledge when initiating ‘sleep concerts’. As a college freshman, he was trying to define his music direction and was interested in how music can be used as a ritual device and community-building tool. The idea of a sleep concert allowed him to gather people in the same space for long periods of time and play sound pieces lasting multiple hours. By doing so he also gave participants permission to not concentrate on the music and doze off. ²⁰

⊕ Fig. 11. Concert at Copenhagen Film Festival. By Robert Rich, 2015. Photo by Yann H. Andersen.

In 2021 I attended an event, inspired by Rich’s concerts, in Het Hem called Slow Wave Phase – Sleep In. ²¹ I went there with two other friends and we spent the night in a large, exhibition hall, lit only by red lights. We had singular beds that we pushed together to create our slumber island. Our sleep was accompanied by loud, electronic ambient music played by rotating DJs. We were surrounded by strangers who created their own bed clusters. The night was communal but intimate, the music was present in my sleep and continued when I woke up, the whole night felt like a fever dream. After this event, I became interested in how our surroundings can influence the way we perceive our consciousness. For instance, it’s a common experience that an alarm in the morning, instead of waking us up, accompanies our last dream of the night.

⊕ Fig. 12. Sleep In: Slow Wave Phase. 2022. Het Hem. Photo by Michalina Wojtkiewicz.

This fascination with how external stimuli shape our perception of consciousness extends beyond personal experiences and into broader cultural trends. The rise of technology-driven approaches to sleep optimization reflects a growing collective interest in manipulating and enhancing our nighttime state. What was once an organic and unmonitored experience is now increasingly measured, tracked, and even altered by digital tools. It’s visible especially on a popular social media platform TikTok, which might be the best place to study tendencies and interests among the youngest generations. Recently we observed a rise in content associated with sleepmaxxing trend. ²² The creators focus on optimizing sleep by implementing various activities, products, and devices into their bedtime routines. From popular Oura rings, lavender eye pads, and red light masks, to sleep tracker apps and weighted blankets. Trends on TikTok are often characterized by strong saturation and excess of products, time, and effort involved. They tend to influence people to overconsume and obsess over otherwise mundane everyday activities. The technology involved in sleepmaxxing trend consists of smartwatches, rings, and apps that are promised to examine and track what happens with your body at night.

⊕ Fig. 13. TikTokkers “sleepmaxxing” routines.

The smartwatch can tell you when you are in your REM phase, evaluate the overall quality of your sleep, and track disturbances. Where is the boundary between safe health tracking and unwanted invasion? When observing those rapid technological developments we might wonder how they will evolve in the future. In 2021 marketing department of Coors saw an opportunity in this tightening bond between technology and sleep. They weren’t allowed to play their beer advertisement during the Super Bowl game, so they decided to experiment with implementing it into people’s dreams. ²³ The company created a campaign in collaboration with Deirdre Barrett, dream psychologist, and visual artist David Lawson. Coors encouraged people to watch a vivid animated video before bed and listen to a ten-hour soundscape throughout the night. The video consisted of 3D imaginary landscapes, watery creatures, and quick glimpses of Coors beer cans. It worked due to the collaborative approach of participants, eager to experiment with their own subconsciousness. The campaign is seen by experts as a ‘targeted dream incubation’, that could lead to a troubling future of weaponized and commercialized sleep. We might want to ask ourselves: Will sleep-tracking devices be able to soon infiltrate our dreams, using our decreased vigilance and extended trust in technology? As sleep concerts influence the way we dream, sounds targeted to advertise products can too. Your smartwatch detects when you’re in the deepest slumber and at the same time, in the most vulnerable state. Who knows if in the future smartwatches won’t incubate an advertisement into your sleep?

⊕ Fig. 14. The Big Commercial of Your Dreams. Coors, 2021. Opening Scene.

I wrote this thesis to explore a feeling I experienced while napping on a train one day. When I woke up abruptly, I felt exposed, as if I had revealed something intimate about myself to the outside world. It’s likely no one even noticed me, but the strange sensation of losing touch with reality while surrounded by strangers stayed with me. I decided to conduct this research from the perspective of an observer while investigating the figure of the sleeper.

Sleep is an inherent part of our lives. It has been surrounded by mysteries and speculations for ages, as till recently we didn’t have a scientific explanation for why we sleep. These uncertainties have contributed to the creation of a mystical figure of the sleeper, symbolizing ideas of the unknown, death, transcendence, and the unconscious. Sleep has long been both unsettling, due to its resemblance to death, and fascinating, as the dreaming mind can drift beyond the boundaries of the waking world, touching what was often perceived as the divine. This ambiguity provided room for artistic expression and storytelling, allowing people to project their narratives onto the sleeper.

Further, to sleep means to be vulnerable. The body relaxes, awareness fades, and the sleeper surrenders to an environment they can no longer control. This vulnerability and the mystery surrounding sleep have shaped the way it has been depicted in visual culture. The sleeper in classical art has been often used as an object—idealized, eroticized, and exposed.

As technology advances, the vulnerable state of sleep is increasingly tracked, optimized, and measured. When these tools enter our private spaces and daily routines, the line between convenience and surveillance grows increasingly thin, giving room to potential exploitation.

Through this research, I hoped to understand not only how sleep is represented but also how it reflects broader societal shifts—our relationship with technology, the boundaries of privacy, and the commercialization of even our most intimate moments.