Join Project Somnolence at the Dream Machine for a Slumber School of discussion, reading, writing, drawing, listening, and dreaming!
Project Somnolence: Slumber School will take place from 6pm-10pm on Friday 27th September at The Dream Machine, 257 London Road, Glasgow, G40 1PE.
Modelled as a night class for noctural listening, musing and writing, this is a free event designed to provide immersive encounters with somnolence through light, sound, creative and critical discussion. The event features a reading group, listening exercise, and opportunities for ambient working. Open to everyone and anyone, we will talk about the personal, political, and environmental issue of sleep in an informal and welcoming space.
The evening will include a structure, but attendees are welcome to drop in and out as they please.
Dr Maria Sledmere, of the Department of Humanities, said: "Slumber School is a night-class for nocturnal listening, music and writing. We invite you to encounter ideas of somnolence – sleepiness – through light, sound, creative and critical discussion. Expect a dream clinic, open writing workshop, deep listening and book group. Hosted by Project Somnolence, a portable lab for engaging arts-based perspectives on sleep research, it's the culmination of months of practice and public engagement supported by a HaSS research fund along with funding from Dear Green Bothy. More info at projectsomnolence.com."
The provisional schedule includes:
- 6pm - Doors
- 6:30pm - Dream clinic
- 7pm - Break
- 7.15pm - Reading group: Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). Please read the book or this abstract in advance
- 8.15pm - Break
- 8.30pm - Deep listening exercise
- 9.15pm - Creative time: writing/drawing/reading/scoring
- 10pm - Informal discussion/hangout
What to bring?
We also recommend you bring a notebook, pen or whatever drawing and writing tools you prefer.
A digital extract from the book we are discussing will be provided via email to everyone who signs up via Eventbrite. For optimum results, we recommend buying and reading the whole thing beforehand.
Why Slumber School?
Night classes are a really great way to learn something new outside of the working day. The energy of the evening, especially in September (as a transitional moment between summer and autumn), presents an alternative way of attending to your creative and critical mind.
We are inspired by the capacious notion of 'study' put forward by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013).
We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It's talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal - being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory - there are various modes of activity. The point of calling it "study" is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.
In everyday life, we are often talking about sleep and dreaming. The point of Slumber School is to focus some time and space on these issues and make connections between how you think about sleep and dreams in relation to wider questions of society, politics, inequality, ecology and more.
Registration is now open here.
