The image-recognition neural networks of Google produce “dreams”, some beautiful, some scary, of hypnotic landscapes, buildings and bridges. Artificial intelligence may mirror both consciousness and unconsciousness. Those people who say they don’t dream, as though it is a badge of honour, are aliens, for even machines are beginning to dream. The older I get, the more certain I am of this. Whether we believe the function of dreams is to merely process information or to tell us something about a hidden part of ourselves, dreaming matters. But to view sleep as a time to be monitored or as time lost is troubling. Depression may manifest itself as not getting out of bed, but also never being able to sleep. There are times in one’s life when not sleeping is a sign of being fully alive: love, lust, drugs, dancing, talking. The focus on sleep – the lack of it, its enhancement, the recording of it – misses much of the deeper importance of sleep and, indeed, wakefulness. “How will she ever get up for work in the mornings?” she said. Why do this? When I had my first child and was at college, I put her to bed late so she woke up late. If you are exhausted, with a crying baby, you may have resorted to the dreaded sleep training in which the child is meant to learn to sleep without being comforted. Making sleep somehow performative is the opposite of restfulness, and yet this is exactly what we are doing. Some ideology about what matters is making us unable to rest. Something is up here – and it’s not just us at four in the morning.
An intelligent society would not be giving us these contradictory messages that one has to switch off from all forms of technology/blue screens etc to get a good sleep and then use that same technology to track us and also, of course, collect our data. An intelligent alarm clock would not wake you at all. Still, the thing is to be woken at precisely the right time in your sleep cycle by an “intelligent” alarm clock. Theresa May looks like she could do with a lie in. Remember, Donald Trump sleeps for four hours a night, as did Margaret Thatcher. I ditched my Fitbit because it became too clingy and demanding, so why would I want this? But I guess Apple knows more than me, as in the US alone there are up to 70 million adults thought to have sleep or wakefulness disorders.
A Fitbit for the unconscious, one might say, that can potentially be used with an Apple Watch. This is why Apple has just bought Beddit, a sleep tracker. Virtue-signalling about sleep, about the time you are not productive, tracking it, and maximising its potential is big business.
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