Sleep in Childhood

Medical Hypotheses, 1996

It is commonly assumed that sleep is secondary to the waking state. We consider that in evolution relational life, as represented by the waking state, was superimposed on vegetative life. Waking is periodic, and vegetation is manifest in the intervals. This vegetative phase takes the form of sleep. The model, which overturns the traditional view, offers new suggestions about the psychological and cultural conception of sleep, sleep and the brain, dreaming, mind and memory.

PsycEXTRA Dataset

Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night Set sail in a wooden shoe Sailed on a river of crystal light Into a sea of dew ....

This conference was presented at the 3rd congress of the International Pediatric Sleep Association (IPSA) held in December 2014 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He develops a more comprehensive and original presentation of the sleep of infants and children in the Fine Arts.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood

This article explores sleep among kindergarten infants and toddlers. Although the collective order of sleep in kindergarten makes it a relational issue, the search here is for relations that extend beyond human actors and beyond the idea of the pram as a sleep container used by a sleeping subject. Here, sleep is seen as entangled with bodies and prams; it has a rhythm and a tempo, as well as the power to challenge the capitalist call for productivity. The article addresses sleep in terms of spatial configurations and contextualises it within a web of political relations rather than as a leftover of life. Informed by Foucault’s notions of heterotopia, the article characterises sleep as a world within a world, drawing attention to relational principles and material-discursive spaces that are characterised as ‘different’, on the understanding that sleep is not an intermission from life or relationships. Moving beyond the conceptualisation of sleep as a health and medical issue, it is r...

In early 2010 a diverse group of scientists and performance artists came together in Wellington, New Zealand, for a week of dialogue and collaboration on the topic of “Waking”. Following on from the successful production in 2008 of “Sleep/Wake”, by performance designer Sam Trubridge and chronobiologist Professor Philippa Gander, the Waking Incubator was designed to investigate the transition from sleeping to waking, from the multiple perspectives of dance, music, photography, film, sleep science, chronobiology and science communication. A diverse range of installations, performances and presentations were displayed in an Open Laboratory at the end of the week. The aim of the Open Laboratory was to engage the public in dialogue and to develop new ways of communicating sleep science. Although “The Two Cultures” still remain largely parallel today, the Waking Incubator began to blur the edges of what constitutes art and science. The artists transformed the science of sleep through thei...

Sleep: Multi-Professional Perspectives, 2012

What is this secession from conscious life that we call sleep, this oblivious third of our lives? We usually think little of it, but it is always hovering around as a pending transaction or impending obligation. It visits us, or we it, with fuzzy regularity largely beyond our control. Yet we must submit to it somehow or perish. For if, as Prospero imagines, 'our little life / Is rounded with a sleep' (The Tempest,, life also must be relentlessly intersected by little deaths, by the incessant, cyclic return of slumber.

New Literaria- An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities , 2020

Sleep as a subject of investigation might be recent, but the concept has never been alien. The association of sleep with death, and night is a Greek mythos that is also observed in the work of Shakespeare as "death's counterfeit" (Macbeth); Coleridge's account of "the pain of sleep", in the art work of Fuseli's Nightmare portraying the vulnerable and painful night. The recurrent image and account of sleep and its associated 'comatose objects' or paraphernalia, the in-between states of dreams, anxiety, fear have also created popular imaginations of how sleep is perceived. Despite the myriad forms of thoughts on sleep, it is constantly rendered to the domain of the dormant, nature, inactive, a time of quiescence which is oppositional to action, and performance of waking life. This paper delves into the performance of sleep and its associated nexus through performance art pieces, and artists, whose body is central to the way sleep is performed. The paper intends to highlight the importance of body even in states that have been construed as passive and inaction. The aim is to weave together the bodily activity of sleeping within the nexus of socio-cultural fabric. An intrinsic part of sleep is how it opens up avenue of peeking into gendered bodies through a lens that is intertwined with the social, cultural and political. The specific instance of sit-in protest against NRC (The National Register of Citizens) and CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) in Park Circus, Kolkata is used to argue the argument of gendered and marginalized bodies occupying space and time that otherwise cannot be claimed. Sleep offers a lens to look at the performative acts of resistance that these bodies continue to posit.

American Anthropologist, 2008

The seemingly preferred outlet for scholarship on children and childhood in archaeology is in the form of edited volumes. The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica is the fifth edited volume in a decade that gathers together works on childhood and archaeology, and it is the second to do so with a particular regional emphasis. It is the first volume to focus on children in Mesoamerica. As the most recent published scholarship on childhood in archaeology, the volume offers a breadth of methodological approaches and thoughtful theoretical discussions that significantly move the archaeology of childhood forward in its development as an area of inquiry.

Issue 35, Winter 2010, 2010

Sleep is the very antithesis of performance. As an absence of responsive action and external awareness it contradicts the paradigms of the theatrical condition. The sleeping body is unaware of the demands that a self-conscious body responds to, and remains sentient only in the sense that its faculties and consciousness are turned completely inward. On the stage however, an enhanced self-consciousness has made it possible for performers to extend the roles and social games that we play in the everyday, to such an extent that they can pretend to be someone that they are not for our entertainment, or perform for the sake of performance itself. Alone on stage the theatre actor replays learned actions, attitudes, and emotions in an attempt to entertain or communicate profound insights and experiences. By comparison, the sleeping body on stage contradicts these arrangements: resisting the contract that exists between the bodies, of audience and actor, wherein one watches and the other responds by performing.