Sleep Because

Editorial by Chart Collective
For some of us the holidays ended so long ago we're ready for another one. Others may have been siesta-ing only last week. But this isn’t the time to go to sleep because we have the eighth instalment of the Longer Light Series, a filmic meditation on sleeping by Connor Tomas O Brien.

In the summer, we don’t sleep because we're tired.
We sleep because the distinction between the world and our bodies becomes hazy and hard to define.

The film, Sleep Because, starts with that familiar, heavy-lidded moment before sleep when closing your eyes offers avoidance, respite and withdrawal. O'Brien’s film operates in that liminal space between deep sleep and wakefulness. Somnolence. Here, but not here. Palms twitch reminding us of animals dreaming, and the experience of summer comes from its ephemera - light, water, air - all hazy and unfocused, refusing to anchor us to anywhere in particular. We are adrift in the state captured so aptly by author Paul Bowles in his book, The Sheltering Sky:

He awoke, opened his eyes. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire ... In utter comfort, utter relaxation he lay absolutely still for a while, and then sank into one of the light momentary sleeps that occur after a long, profound one.

For O'Brien the necessity of sleep is both a weakness and a strength. The rhythm created by alarms and light bulbs is an untruth that we tell ourselves, but one we then throw away during the heat of summer when our bodies succumb to a pleasurable state of sensory stupor.

Organic light that fades in and out,
Two dozen hours of shifting light making a day. At the centre of the piece is not sleep, but time. The equal and opposing fear of having too much or too little.

We might create days that last for decades,
Or decades that last for days,
Tying our sleep to the demands of our devices.
This is why we need to notice the way light falls...close our eyes when the day is warm.

It's okay to give in. Hide Read more

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In the summer, we don’t sleep because we’re tired.
We sleep because the distinction between the world and our bodies becomes hazy and hard to define.

In countries where things move slow, the word for summer sleep is honest: siesta.
But in countries where we can’t slow down, we resort to euphemisms for our beautiful laziness.
In Australia, power naps, or in Japan, inemuri: sleeping while present.

We are slaves to our circadian signals.
We can fight our internal rhythms or acquiesce.

In the summer, we’re attuned to natural light,
To gradients as daylight gives way to darkness.
And darkness gives way to daylight.

This is how things should work, and have worked:
No switches, no lightbulbs,
But organic light that fades in and out,
Two dozen hours of shifting light making a day.

When we create the apocalypse
It will be our sleep that suffers, first.
Our rhythms will fall out of time,
So far out that we can’t get back to where we were.

We might create days that last for decades,
Or decades that last for days,
Tying our sleep to the demands of our devices.

This is why we need to notice the way light falls,
Give in to “solar somnolence”, close our eyes when the day is warm.

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MORE FROM THE LONGER LIGHT SERIES:

The Longer Light Series explores the idea that our personal rituals – from the mundane to the grand – tether us to special places and particular times. It investigates how our rituals are contingent on the places where we perform them, on the rhythm of the seasons, on the weather of any given day, on what we see and smell around us.

The 12 distinct works of the series detail, document or respond to some sort of ritual (as each contributor interprets that word) enacted during a week of summer days and nights. The works will be published in weekly instalments so that, in concert, they plot the arc of an Australian summer.

The Longer Light Series is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.