Sleeping Fiction
Photo by Kay T. Holt
In science fiction, sleep is a pastime. For the sake of continuity, characters are put into suspended animation so the reader can travel with them across vast expanses with neither suffering catastrophic ennui. Sure, sleep facilitates other things, too – vivid dreamers communicate with aliens and sleep-deprived characters make every kind of mischief sooner or later – but SF is really big on sleeping beauties.
Which is a shame, when you think about it. Sleep itself is in many ways still a frontier. We have some interesting ideas about sleep and learning, problem-solving, fat, food, puberty, immunity, blood pressure, loneliness… Name anything to do with the body, and it appears to be affected by sleep in one way or many, yet SF largely neglects to explore sleep past its nearest and most familiar boundaries.
Returning to the idea of character continuity; even that tired old plot device has been only superficially explored. What if the brain activity while we sleep is the process by which we maintain our personal continuity from day to day? How might suspending that activity for the duration of long spaceflights disrupt our capacities or even our identities? Or, if sleep-state brain activity is somehow maintained during suspended animation, wouldn’t the brain develop physiological changes over time? If so, how would they present in terms of behavior?
There are an abundance of dimensions of sleep still open for speculation. In fact, as soon as I finish this post, I’m going to navigate a few of them with my eyes closed. But what about the reader? What interesting treatments of sleep have you found in SF? And what other interesting biological phenomena would you like to see better explored in fiction?
“@SciInMyFi: New Blog Post: Sleeping Fiction: http://t.co/F2hYO7nd” #fb
On occasion brain uploading proponents have told me that the brain shuts down when you sleep so continuity doesn’t matter. I usually reply “then explain dreams.”
I find the evidence that sleep may be involved in – or even necessary for – the learnings process really fascinating. A pretty common SF trope, that I think even goes back to Brave New World, is that you can quickly learn by being fed information while sleeping. I wonder what would happen with complete sleep deprivation – if you were taking sleep replacement pills, say. Would you have trouble learning new information or new tasks in that case?
Sleeping Fiction: if we could take a sleep-replacement pill, would we still learn? http://t.co/3a6iQdaZ via @sharethis
in regards to sleep and the learning process, whether you can learn while asleep might still be under unproven, there is plenty of evidence to the fact that ones mental and physical state helps govern memory.. specifically that things learned in one state of conciousness are more easily remembered when in that sate, and less easily remembered in others. so if you learn something while tired, your more likely to remember it when you are tired than you are if you aren’t. so even if you can learn things in your sleep, odds are that it would be less helpful than if you learned the same thing while awake, since that information would be tied to the brain state of sleep.
of course, the scifi trope used to be hypnotic learning, where the character would be put into a hypnotic trance and then shown learning programs, with idea that the character would then be able to assimilate massive amounts of information rapidly, and it would be incorporated into their non-hypnotised state. given the fact that hypnotic trances can be used to create false memories in some circumstances, this idea might not be as crazy it sounds nowadays.