Sleep, Dreams, & the End of Capitalism: Theory & Writing Workshop [7-weeks, $275 Suggested]
Instructor: Andrews | Wednesdays May 11-June 22 | 8:00-10:00 PM ET
“Our century is excellent at the production of nightmares and terrible at the interpretation of dreams,” writes Anne Boyer in The Undying. In fact, neoliberal capitalism is invested in maximum, 24/7 productivity, making it difficult to find the time to sleep at all, and often making daily life a waking nightmare. So, from modafinil and melatonin to light therapy and sleep trackers, the 21st century has developed an entire industry around medicalizing sleep. In a world where capitalism requires us to buy back our own capacity to rest, can sleeping and dreaming be forces of resistance or even revolution? In this class, we’ll study wide-ranging texts in psychology, Marxist theory, sociology, philosophy, literature and the arts to understand how sleep and dreams have been captured by economic forces and what role they can play in resisting the neoliberal demand for flexible, precarious, and endless work. And we’ll track our own sleep habits, work habits, and dreams as we create our own experiential and theoretical writing about the role of sleep and dreams in relation to labor and capitalism.
Over the course of five weeks, we’ll ask, for example, how capitalism mobilizes race and gender categories, coding rest as laziness and dreams as irrational. Or, why Freud’s idea of the unconscious as a resource for manufacturing dreams like a little factory emerged at the height of industrialization and how his influence shapes ideas about dreams today. Can we return to dreams the status of prophesy and communion with other worlds? We’ll follow along with Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 and Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry as they imagine the resistant force of sleep and rest. And we’ll ask if, as Mark Fisher says, dreamwork can help us do the impossible: imagine the end of capitalism. Along the way we’ll investigate, too, what art and artists have to say about the matter, from the surrealists to Ursula Le Guin to contemporary film and TV. We’ll also do in-class process-writing and creative writing to add to our individual and collective dream journals. In the last two weeks, we’ll workshop portfolios or short auto-theory texts on the topic. Writing is optional but encouraged! You can attend workshops even if you do not share writing.
There is some overlap in readings with the previous course, Dreams: Ideology, Interpretation, Imagination. Please be aware if you took the previous class and are interested in this one.
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We depend on a mix of direct student donations and supplemental donations to make all classes pay-what-you-can. Please pick the pricing tier that corresponds with your needs and that you are able to pay now. If you would like to pay in installments, make your first payment now and make a note on your check-out form. If you would like to donate more later in the term, you can always come back and use the “Make a One Time Donation” button! To use a full scholarship, just pick the $3 tier to cover site/processor fees.
If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, we will work with you to reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.